Village Voice Media

40°43′42″N 73°59′28″W / 40.7283°N 73.9911°W / 40.7283; -73.9911

Village Voice Media or VVM is a newspaper company. It began in 1970 as a weekly alternative newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona. The company, founded by Michael Lacey (editor) and Jim Larkin (publisher), was then known as New Times Inc. (NTI) and the publication was named New Times. The company was later renamed New Times Media.

By 2001, the company (NTI) had grown to 13 newspapers in major cities across the United States. Most of these publications were acquired via purchase from the current owner/publishers.

In 2006, with the acquisition of The Village Voice, the company took the name Village Voice Media Holdings. The company is often referred to in this article as NTI/VVM after that date.

Alternative newspapers trace their beginnings to 1955 and the founding of The Village Voice in New York City. Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer together chipped in $10,000 to start the paper. It soon became a unique focal point for a variety of viewpoints and intellectual positions in New York City and beyond.

However, in the late 1960s a new type of journalistic enterprise began to emerge in the United States and elsewhere: the underground newspaper. Fueled by the growth of the anti-war movement, radical politics, the Civil Rights Movement and the counterculture of the 1960s, these publications appeared in virtually every city and large town (especially college towns) in the United States. At one point Newsweek estimated there were more than 500 underground papers with a combined distribution of between 2 million and 4.5 million copies. Among the most prominent were the Berkeley Barb, Los Angeles Free Press ("Freep"), The Rag (Austin) and the Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta).

The Village Voice and Paul Krassner's The Realist— an amalgam of Mad-magazine-style satire and alternative journalism first published in New York City in 1958—are often cited as the main sources of inspiration for underground newspapers. But there were differences. Although the Voice and The Realist had a distinctly liberal bias, they also gave favorable treatment to multiple opinions and put an emphasis on quality writing. Radicalism and activism were not their focus. This was not the case for the underground press. Activism and social and political change was its raison d'être. Journalism and editorial quality took a back seat. That fact, combined with a lack of sound business practices (most were organized as collectives), the end of the Vietnam War, and harassment by the U.S. government, predestined a rather short life for them. By the early 1970s, the majority had ceased publication. A few, grounded in a different publishing philosophy that followed many of the examples set by the Voice and The Realist, survived and formed the beginning of a new alternative press. These included the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Boston Phoenix and The Georgia Straight (Vancouver).

Another of these survivors was Phoenix New Times in Phoenix.