AOL and Huffington Post aside, who else is asking people to contribute just for the joy, nay the honor, of being featured in their publication?

Somewhat unexpectedly, the Village Voice.

Politico cartoonist Matt Wuerker wrote to Jim Romenesko:

The Village Voice devotes an entire issue to the irony of cartooning being hugely popular while cartoonists have a hard time making ends meet. Then it turns out they didn’t pay for the cartoons they used in the issue. Instead they got the cartoonists to contribute them for “exposure.” Sums up the new media economy perfectly. It’s so ironic it would make a funny cartoon.

Voice editor Tony Ortega seems to indicate that the Voice deserves some credit for, uh, not covering this up, we guess:

[W]e asked some artists to donate their work. We then felt we couldn’t do that without disclosing publicly [they weren't paid].

Sure, it’s marginally better for the Voice to be open about the fact that it didn’t pay contributors, but Huffington Post likewise never hid the fact that many of its bloggers are unpaid. So we don’t quite see the difference. We’re all for transparency, but it’s unrelated to actually being paid for your work.

The Daily has been having a bit of a difficult run lately. It began charging Monday amidst rumors that it only had 5000 subscribers, and has weathered several deflections lately, including as recently as yesterday, when Lauren Bans left to be an associate editor at GQ.

So it’s due for some good news!

The Cutline reports that The Daily has poached  Zach Baron from The Village Voice, where he works as a writer and editor. Baron will be joining The Daily’s features desk, where he will report to culture editor and New Yorker pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones.

Cue joke about Baron helping The Daily find the richest dog in South Dakota or whatever.

“I wish him well,” said Tony Ortega, editor-in-chief of The Voice. We do, too!

The New York Times takes a hard look at Wayne Barrett, and the result is mostly what you’d expect: Barrett is a fantastic investigative reporter, but also a grumpy old man.

In the piece, the pleasingly gruff Barrett offers up some gems. He notes that he never got an explanation for being forced out at The Village Voice, says he’s never had much use for editors, and on that subject, says, “Tony Ortega is the hardest working editor and the most skillful editor of copy that I’ve ever had. But I’ve never liked him very much.”

Barrett also shows some sympathy to the mayors of the city’s past – who were often skewered in his columns – by telling the Times that his biggest regret is not writing more about the positive things Ed Koch did.

But before you think he’s mellowed out, there’s this:

Read more

The article “For-Profit Blues,” by Rob Sgobbo, a Columbia University Journalism student, was pulled from The Village Voice because Sgobbo created characters. Sgobbo fabricated “Matt Fraser” and “Tamicka Bourges” who were quoted in the story, leaving Tony Ortega, the paper’s Editor-in-Chief, no choice but to pull the piece. Ortega explained that the Voice first realized something was wrong when Berkley College claimed that a spokesperson, who was quoted by Sgobbo, never spoke to the writer.

A rough start to the weekend for Sgobbo. Maybe he can get over it by rededicating himself to his writing, or you know, just saying that he did.

After nearly 40 years of service, The Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett is leaving his post as the weekly newspaper’s leading political reporter.  Barrett published his farewell post on The Village Voice’s website and, according to a tweet by The New York Times’s Jeremy Peters, he was fired by the Voice.  Fellow political columnist Tom Robbins has reportedly quit in protest of Barrett’s firing, however he will remain with the paper until the end of the month.

Barrett, who has served under 14 different editors at the Voice, offered a long goodbye in his final column and waxed poetically on the tenets of journalism:

There is also no other job where you get paid to tell the truth. Other professionals do sometimes tell the truth, but it’s ancillary to what they do, not the purpose of their job. I was asked years ago to address the elementary school that my son attended and tell them what a reporter did and I went to the auditorium in a trenchcoat with the collar up and a notebook in a my pocket, baring it to announce that “we are detectives for the people.”

UPDATE: Village Voice editor-in-chief Tony Ortega denies that Tom Robbins resigned from the paper in protest of Barrett’s firing:

For [Times reporter Jeremy] Peters to say that Robbins quit in protest without even calling me and asking me about it is really irresponsible. I really enjoyed working with both of these guys. There are no hard feelings between either of us.

It’s been four months since the Village Voice unceremoniously ousted David Blum and hired a “half-Mexican kid from L.A.” Yesterday we spoke with Village Voice editor Tony Ortega, the paper’s fifth in 15 months, about his first 100 or so days in office. His State of the Alt-Weekly Union:

How do you feel about the current state of alt-weeklies nationwide?
While the dailies are struggling, the mood at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies convention in Portland, Oregon, last month seemed to be cautiously optimistic. The dailies, after all, are being told by consultants to go free, increase local coverage, and write with some attitude — all things we’re already doing. But like everyone else, we’re doing what we can to make better use of the Web, and our sales folks are looking for creative solutions to some of our traditional markets drying up. (Goodbye, record stores — an alt-weekly mainstay — for example.) That’s why stories like the recent one in The Nation about our company are so silly. It may be tempting for some to keep flogging New Times/Village Voice Media for supposedly betraying the alt-weekly progressive agenda, when what’s really going on is that we’ve chosen a focus on local, investigative reporting over writing political essays and endorsing candidates for a simple reason: survival in the age of the Internet, which is already saturated with political opinion.

Tony Ortega, who replaced the ousted (scorned?) David Blum as editor of the Village Voice earlier this month, has made his first significant hire:

—–Original Message—–
From: Ortega, Tony
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 2:33 PM

Folks,

I am pleased to announce that Brian Parks is the new Arts and Culture Editor of the Voice.

Brian has a long and illustrious history at this newspaper. In a previous 13-year tenure as a copy editor, copy chief and senior editor, he wrote for and edited various parts of the Voice. From 1998 to 2003, he edited the theater pages and presided over the Obie awards.

Recently, he has provided backup editing for various parts of the newspaper and has proved to be an invaluable member of our staff.
Brian assumes arts editing duties Monday.

Please join me in congratulating him on his new role.

Tony

FBNY’s Village Voice Coverage:

It’s official: Tony Ortega, a self-decribed “half-Mexican kid from LA,” has been named Village Voice editor.

From the release:

Ortega and his wife Fatima, who is from Jakarta, Indonesia, are looking forward to reacquainting themselves with New York, where Ortega remembers — with no small amount of nostalgia — his days as an LA punk attending shows at CBGB and the Peppermint Lounge. Ortega no longer has a mohawk and is looking forward to leading the Village Voice.

FishbowlNY’s Coverage:

Via Media Mob, the Village Voice has named 43-year-old New Times vet Tony Ortega as its new editor. He was previously editor of New Times Broward-Palm Beach.

Ortega replaces David Blum, who was fired on Friday and briefly replaced by interim editor Bill Jensen.

BACKGROUND: