Friday, January 26, 2007

Report from Minneapolis

Here’s the latest on the Village Voice shuffle by Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Deborah Caulfield Rybak:

City Pages, the Twin Cities' largest alternative newspaper, is a weekly, but change at the top of its masthead took only days.

Editor Steve Perry left his office early last week for a meeting with an executive from Village Voice Media, the company created by last year's merger between Phoenix-based New Times and the Village Voice chain. After that, the last time staff saw him last week was removing some items from his Minneapolis office.

Late Monday afternoon, Perry announced his resignation next month after 13 years (over two terms) as editor. By noon Tuesday, Village Voice Media had announced his successor, Kevin Hoffman, now managing editor at its Cleveland Scene weekly newspaper.

The whirlwind turn of events has left the staff of the award-winning weekly shellshocked. Yet change is the new norm in the Twin Cities, which recently has seen media properties and staff flipped and discarded like a Texas Hold 'Em marathon.

[skipping a few graphs]

Andy Van De Voorde of Village Voice Media called Hoffman "a writer and editor with experience in hard news" who would help City Pages do more investigative reporting and narrative writing -- two New Times hallmarks.

The New Times/Village Voice merger created a chain of 17 alternative weeklies. City Pages, with a weekly circulation of 117,000, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, is one of its larger properties.

New editor Hoffman first visited the Twin Cities last weekend and said he was "impressed with the nature and the people." Hoffman, 30, who joined the Cleveland paper as a writer in 2002 and was promoted to managing editor in 2005, said he was drawn to the City Pages job because he and his wife, an attorney, were looking for a place to live that wasn't too far from her family in Michigan.

Click on the headline to read more

No comments: