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New Times to Purchase LA Weekly

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Times Staff Writer

Three years after packing up and leaving town, New Times announced Monday that it was returning to Los Angeles, buying former rival LA Weekly as part of a deal that would create the nation’s largest chain of alternative newspapers.

New Times said it was buying Village Voice Media Inc., which also owns New York’s celebrated Village Voice, OC Weekly and sister papers in three other markets. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

New Times owns 11 weekly publications, among them SF Weekly in San Francisco and tabloids in Houston, Miami and Dallas. Two top executives of Phoenix-based New Times would run the combined companies, which would be called Village Voice Media and have annual revenue of about $180 million.

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In Los Angeles, the deal would have the added subplot of having New Times run its onetime rival, LA Weekly.

For veterans of the defunct local branch of New Times, the news Monday was a source of glee.

“It’s kind of surreal in a way,” said Rick Barrs, now editor in chief of the Phoenix New Times and previously an editor and writer at the failed Los Angeles franchise. “It was always kind of a fantasy of mine that we would end up back in charge in L.A.”

New Times Chief Executive Jim Larkin would run the combined companies, and New Times Executive Editor Michael Lacey would oversee the editorial operations of the new company. David Schneiderman, CEO of Village Voice, would oversee online operations.

Schneiderman said unifying the two media companies would create obvious business advantages and enhance the Village Voice’s efforts to parlay its cultural cachet into a national and online brand.

Despite the past rivalry between the two alternative newspaper companies, Schneiderman said they were similar: “They are both independent, rather ferocious while poking their finger in the eye of people with power or people who think they have power.”

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Laurie Ochoa, editor in chief of LA Weekly, said: “We’re going to try to keep an open mind until we can see what will happen.... There are definitely a range of reactions and emotions” about the sale.

The LA Weekly staff spent Monday working toward today’s deadlines for a special issue on the arts scene, Ochoa said.

The sale still requires Justice Department approval, and executives familiar with the deal said they expected intense scrutiny that could stretch out for six months.

New Times and Village Voice Media have run afoul of antitrust issues before. In 2003, they settled Justice Department charges of collusive behavior after agreeing to sell competing papers to each other in Los Angeles and Cleveland. In 2002, New Times closed its 6-year-old Los Angeles publication after failing to usurp LA Weekly.

As part of that settlement, the publishers agreed to sell the assets of their shuttered papers to new owners and each agreed to pay $305,000 in civil penalties.

New Times has for months been rumored to be acquiring Village Voice Media, which is named for its venerable flagship paper. The Greenwich Village publication was co-founded by Norman Mailer in 1955 and remains a signature name in political and cultural coverage from the political left.

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In some alternative-press outlets, among them the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the New Times deal has been jeered as compromising the Voice’s history.

In addition, the creation of a bigger company with newspapers in several large cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Miami, could mean tougher competition for smaller publications seeking national advertising.

“I think there’s a sense of resignation,” said Brian Hieggelke, publisher of alternative weekly Newcity in Chicago. “In many cases it will be a negative” financial effect on other papers.

If the Justice Department signs off, the combined companies will claim circulation of about 1.8 million, nearly a quarter of the industry’s total circulation of 7.6 million, according to statistics compiled by the Assn. of Alternative Weeklies, a trade group.

New Times shareholders would own 62% of the new company; Village Voice shareholders, 38%.

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Times wire services were used in compiling this report.

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