Village Voice Media is a privately held corporation headquartered in Phoenix.[1]
The company owns the Village Voice, America's oldest (founded in 1955) and largest alternative weekly newspaper, as well as LA Weekly, OC Weekly in Orange County, California, Seattle Weekly, City Pages in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Dallas Observer, Westword in Denver, New Times Broward-Palm Beach, Houston Press, Miami New Times, Phoenix New Times, SF Weekly in San Francisco, Riverfront Times in St. Louis, and backpage.com, an online classified advertising website.
The company was previously named New Times Media. On October 24, 2005, New Times Media announced a deal to acquire Village Voice Media, creating a chain of 17 free weekly newspapers around the country with a combined circulation of 1.8 million and controlling a quarter of the weekly circulation of alternative weekly newspapers in North America. After the deal's completion, New Times used the Village Voice Media name.
In 2002, the previous Village Voice Media entered into a noncompetition agreement with New Times Media, another national publisher of alternative weeklies, whereby the two companies agreed to stop publishing New Times LA (a product of New Times Media) and Cleveland Free Times (a product of Village Voice Media), so that the companies would not publish two, competing newspapers in any single city. This agreement and phasing out of the two newspapers, led to an antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. The investigation resulted in a settlement, requiring the companies to sell off assets and the old newspapers' titles to any potential competitors.[2]
In October 2007, Michael Lacey, the executive editor, and Jim Larkin, chief executive, of Village Voice Media, were arrested in Phoenix on charges that a Village Voice Media publication, the Phoenix New Times, had published secret grand jury information. A state special prosecutor is investigating the newspaper's long-running feud with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, including the publishing of Arpaio's home address, a crime under Arizona law. The special prosecutor's subpoena included a demand for the names of the readers of the New Times's website. It was the information about the subpoena which was deemed by prosecutors to be secret grand jury information.[3]
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Village Voice Media was sued in September 2010 by a 15-year-old sex trafficking victim (identified in court papers as "M.A") for allegedly aiding and abetting forced prostitution and the exploitation of children and child pornography by failing to investigate the prostitution ads on Backpage.com,[4] which is owned by Village Voice Media.[5] A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in August 2011.[6]
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