Title: The Rise and Fall of Alt Weeklies, and Journalism in an AI World

[00:00:00] Tricia Romano: The Village Voice is no more. After more than four decades in print, the city paper is shutting down.

[00:00:07] Michael Lowenger: A weekly connection to Twin Cities culture, now just a 41-year chapter in its journalistic history. Whatever happened to the off beat, irreverent Alt weeklies that used to populate newsstands across the country? From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Michael Lowenger. On this week's show, an ode to the Village Voice.

[00:00:28] Tricia Romano: The Voice was to guide delight from people who cared about what they were covering with such intensity that there were fistbites and drawls inside the paper. That's gone.

[00:00:40] Michael Lowenger: Plus, how to earn big bucks by reanimating defunct news sites and filling them with AI sludge.

[00:00:48] Kate Nibs: There's a lot of posts that are about dream interpretation. It's just clearly written by an AI. Kind of the worst thing you've ever read in your life.

[00:00:55] Michael Lowenger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week, I'm Michael Lowenger. At the beginning of the summer, a small but revered paper in St. Louis, Missouri closed up shop.

[00:01:13] Speaker A: The end of an era. That is how some are describing the not-so-secret sale of the Riverfront Times to a secret buyer. People close to the paper now fear it is gone for good.

[00:01:24] Speaker B: The staff got word yesterday morning that they were all losing their jobs.

[00:01:28] Michael Lowenger: The Riverfront Times was once a staple in the thriving genre of news known as alternative weeklies. Alt weeklies, the type of offbeat, fearless publication that, once upon a time, you could pick up on a street corner, in a bar, or a cafe in cities across the country. Over the course of roughly 60 years, they transformed journalism. Today, they're nearly extinct.

[00:01:54] Speaker A: This week is your last chance to grab this current issue of the Baltimore City paper.

[00:02:00] Tricia Romano: The Village Voice is no more. The Pulitzer Prize-winning paper was known for its coverage of politics, music, theater and the gay community. [00:02:08] Michael Lowenger: A weekly connection to Twin Cities culture, now just a 41-year chapter in its journalistic history.

[00:02:16] Tricia Romano: Tomorrow's edition of the San Francisco Bay Guardian is going to be the last.

[00:02:20] Michael Lowenger: The Boston Phoenix, Urban Tulsa, Philadelphia City Paper, San Francisco Bay Guardian and Knoxville Mercury have also closed shop. They aren't totally gone. The Association of Alternative News Media lists 107 members, but those that survive must contend with constant mergers, buyouts, and financial precarity. The legacy of Alt weeklies, however, lives on in a generation of outstanding writers. Including, but in no way limited to, Wayne Barrett, Joe Klein, Katherine Boo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Carr, Susan Orlean, Jonathan Gold, Coulson Whitehead, Ann Powers, Anil Dash, and on and on.

They went after local politicians, championed weirdo artists, and challenged the status quo, including the conventions of journalism and writing. For much of this hour, we'll celebrate and examine the guts and glory of a bygone media era, beginning with a look back at where it all began in Greenwich Village. In 1955, Norman Mailer took money he'd earned from his bestseller, The Naked and the Dead, and together with Dan Wolf, a psychologist, and publisher, Ed Fancher, founded the Village Voice.

[00:03:39] Tricia Romano: They wanted to create a paper that reflected the Greenwich village that they knew and loved, beatnik culture, and jazz, and writers like James Baldwin.

[00:03:50] Michael Lowenger: Tricia Romano worked at the Voice in the '90S and the 2000's. She's the author of an oral history that came out earlier this year titled the Freaks Came Out to Write. The definitive history of the Village Voice, the radical paper that changed American culture. When I spoke to Romano earlier this year, she explained that at the outset, editor Dan Wolf had a preference for hiring amateurs. As he put it, "It was a philosophical position. We wanted to jam the gears of creeping automatism."

[00:04:23] Tricia Romano: Journalism at that time was very much who, what, where, why, when, than it is writing lyrically in any way. So he and Norman Mailer also leaned towards writers writing. They knew that if you loved something and you were passionate about a subject, you were going to bring that passion to The voice in a way that an objective newspaper reporter really wasn't even allowed to.

[00:04:51] Michael Lowenger: Give me a couple examples of people who fit in at the Village Voice helped define its style, but probably wouldn't have gotten hired at one of its competitors.

[00:05:01] Tricia Romano: You've got Jules Feiffer, who was the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist who wrote these satirical, very adult comics about relationships between men and women, called Sick, Sick, Sick. He got paid nothing for many years. Then Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian refugee who was an avant-garde filmmaker and director and hosted loft parties and showed y Warhol films.

He walked in one day, he says, how come you don't have any columns on cinema? They said, I don't know, why don't you do it? So he started doing that. Then you had Richard Goldstein that comes along later. He is the first rock critic by many people's calculations and he is actually one of the few people who actually did go to journalism school, which he tried to hide.

[00:05:57] Michael Lowenger: Because it seemed like a square.

[00:05:59] Tricia Romano: Yeah. Well he was the weirdo at his journalism school. He had long hair, and he tells a joke how to mess with the instructors he would put a sugar cube on his desk.

[00:06:09] Michael Lowenger: Because they would think it was acid.

[00:06:12] Tricia Romano: Yes. [chuckles] He was embedded in the early rock scene and [unintelligible 00:06:20] in the velvet underground and all those people. He quickly became very well known for this because that music was just starting to explode.

[00:06:30] Michael Lowenger: From December 1962 to March 1963, seven major daily newspapers in New York went on strike.

[00:06:42] Presenter: No news is bad news to 8 million New Yorkers when strikes closed down their daily papers.

[00:06:44] Michael Lowenger: The Voice didn't. Since it was available on newsstands, it stood out to New Yorkers outside of Greenwich Village for the first time, leading to a spike in its circulation from about 28,000 to 35,000.

[00:06:59] Tricia Romano: That audience discovers, "Oh, they're covering stuff that I go to or I'd like to go to, and I don't read about it anywhere else." So we suddenly got more advertising and a greater audience from that. It just grew from there.

[00:07:15] Michael Lowenger: The paper was, roughly speaking, divided into the front of the book, which was the news coverage, and the back of the book, which was more arts and culture. One of the early news reporters is this amazing woman, Mary Perot Nichols, who started at the paper in 1958. Her origin story at the paper, it turns out, is not that unusual. She kind of just like, walked in through the front door, right?

[00:07:39] Tricia Romano: Yeah, that's what a lot of people did, they just would walk into the office. They would just come in and be like, "Hey, do you know about this thing?" Or, "Why aren't you covering this or that?" She was a mother who lived nearby and her and a group of other mothers would hang out in Washington Square park, one of them being Jane Jacobs.

This is the time when Robert Moses had this vision for the city that was much more car-centric and would have bulldozed the lower part of Manhattan as we know it now. She began going into the voice and saying, why aren't you covering this? After a few tries they said, why don't you do it? She had literally no reporting skills and had never done that before but she apparently loved the research and she loved the hunt.

[00:08:28] Michael Lowenger: Robert Moses, of course, was an incredibly powerful urban planner in New York City for decades. What happened to his attempt to turn the beloved Washington Square park into just another thoroughfare?

[00:08:38] Tricia Romano: Well, a lot of what Mary did was advocate against it every week in the Village Voice. Getting the neighbors involved, getting especially a lot of the women who were using that park every day with their kids to block it. Eventually, politically, she was able to convince a lot of the mafia store owners also. She would put it to them like, "Look, all those people that pay tribute to you," meaning all the people they got money from, "They're not going to be there anymore." Like none of those stores will be there, that restaurant won't be there so you're going to lose money.

[00:09:14] Michael Lowenger: The offices of the Village Voice were right next to the Stone Wall Inn. Voice reporters were there in 1969 and covered when the bar was raided in an event that sparked the modern-day gay rights movement. How did the voice cover the Stonewall uprising? Why were they targeted by the gay rights movement in the so-called zaps?

[00:09:36] Tricia Romano: So back in the day, gay bars were not allowed. Also, I should say most of the gay bars, if not all of them, were owned by the mafia. It was sort of this game that the police and the mafia would play, which was they'd go raid the gay bar and the mafia would pay off the police and then the bar would reopen. In this case, they were raided and the patrons were fed up, and they started getting kind of roughly handled by the police outside.

Howard Smith went inside. He was kind of like a nightlife reporter on the scene in the '60s and '70s. He was inside with the police, and Lucian Truscott, who wrote from the outside. They were both straight white men. The way they covered it was both with more seriousness and length than you would see in any other publication. There were two probably 1,200-word-something articles inside the paper, whereas any other paper, I think, maybe ran a little squib and no one was there. Tthey used words that we would find offensive today.

[00:10:46] Michael Lowenger: The headline was forces of, and then the F slur. It's offensive today, but it was offensive then too. Gay readers of the news coverage were not happy with it.

[00:10:57] Tricia Romano: They were not happy with that and they were also not happy with the fact that The voice wouldn't take ads that said the word gay. They were zapped. Zapped meaning protested. The voice's offices were pretty transparent, the windows, I think, were showing to the street. They just sort of disrupted the meetings and such long enough that Dan Wolf, the editor in chief was like, "Okay, I guess we got to deal with this." That was a learning lesson for the Voice and it happened much sooner than it did for other media.

[00:11:31] Michael Lowenger: One of the internal agitators at the Voice who was quite critical of the homophobic language that was used in its coverage of Stonewall was Richard Goldstein, who you've already mentioned. He was arguably the paper and America's first real rock critic. He was a gay man who helped shape the music writing of the paper. In addition to Goldstein, there was Robert Kriskow, who joined in the late 1960s as a rock critic and columnist and he went on to be the paper's longtime music editor.

He jokingly referred to himself as the "Dean of American rock critics," which would be this kind of nickname that would follow him around for the rest of his career. These guys hung out around the village, including the iconic bar and venue CBGB, where they hung out with Lou Reed and Patti Smith and saw early shows of Blondie and the Ramones.

[music]

[00:12:33] Tricia Romano: When Richard comes along, he's around the same time or just before Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, rock and roll was considered kids music or teens music. It wasn't taken seriously. Richard and then Robert Christelle and later James Wolcott, they believed that it should be treated with the same seriousness as the opera or literature. They applied those type of critiques to a genre that was just growing, rock music.

Chris Gal, especially when he took over the music section, he really had a vision for what the section could be. By that time, Rolling Stone is much bigger and it's flourishing so now there starts to be a lot more people writing about music in a serious way. So he starts recruiting people and he creates this bold section, and James Wolcott, who's now a very well known writer who worked at Vanity Fair and is also writing for Airmetal, he was like 20 or something, just working on the circulation desk or the front desk, but he was going out every night. That's what you do in New York when you're in your early 20s.

CBGB was not very far away from the Voice's office. it was where you went to see local bands, great new music. Those bands just happened to be legendary, or they would become legendary in part because the voice was shining a light on them. They weren't the only one, but they were certainly the local outlet to do that. it was like Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, Ramones, all that stuff happening every night. James Walcott just started writing about CBGB and that was in part because Robert Kriskow gave him a chance to.

[00:14:31] Michael Lowenger: Robert Chris Gao would later become known for his consumer guides, where he gave new albums a letter grade, like A, B, or C or whatever. As one of the men you quote in the book describes it, Chris Gao was hated by bands because he was so honest and he was so brutal. His album grades were so influential that artists over the years have responded to his criticism. There's a famous live performance of Walk on the Wild side by Lou Reed from 1978, he's kind of vamping while playing the song and he says this about Robert Crisco.

[00:15:07] Lou Reed: Imagine working for a fucking year and you got a B plus on the ass with Village Voice [inaudible 00:15:12]--

[00:15:14] Tricia Romano: I've never heard of the whole thing. That's amazing. The thing about Bob, which is different than a lot of music writers, is that he did not want to be friends or friendly with the bands because his gruff exterior belies a very soft interior. If he liked somebody as a person and then hated the record or had to be critical of it, he felt bad. He found it easier to be just completely apart from the band.

[music]

[00:15:47] Michael Lowenger: Coming up, multiple ownership changes herald the beginning of the end for the Village Voice. This is On the Media. This is On the Media, I'm Michael Loringer. We left off our story about the history of the Village Voice at the end of its early heyday of the '50s and '60s. In 1977, after passing through several different owners, the Voice was acquired, to the great chagrin of its writers, by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The staff ended up unionizing and scoring some surprisingly progressive wins. Here's Trisha Romano.

[00:16:29] Tricia Romano: The voice was part of a package, it was New York magazine and the Village Voice. Rupert Murdoch didn't really want the Village Voice, he wanted New York magazine. Come to find out, New York magazine is actually not the moneymaker, the Voice is. When he took over, the New York magazine staff was fired and the Voice staff freaked out.

When they formed this union, it was a major step up into that point. Dan Wolfe, the original owners, they did not believe in unions. They were like, "Well, we're all family here. You could just come in and then talk to me if you have problems." The thing is, when Dan and Ed Bancher, the publisher, sold it the first time to Carter burden, they made money. They made a couple million, I think like 3 million. The staff was furious because they were being paid peanuts.

In some cases, Feiffer, he was paid nothing for years and years and years. They felt like they should have some of the spoils and that created an animosity, I think, towards owners. When Rupert Murdoch comes in, they're ready. After a few years, Jeff Weinstein's at a meeting, union meeting, and they're talking about healthcare. We had a thing where if you had a live-in partner, they could be on your healthcare.

[00:18:02] Michael Lowenger: Somebody that you're dating but who you're not married to.

[00:18:04] Tricia Romano: Yes, they could get on your health care program. Jeff Weinstein was like, "Well, why wouldn't it count gay people?" That was a big thing in their negotiations, to get spousal benefits for unmarried couples and extend that to gay couples, and they got it. Murdoch was like, "Can we not trumpet this?" The lawyer was like, "Oh, no, but they are going to trumpet this. They're going to trumpet it specifically."

[00:18:32] Michael Lowenger: This was really fascinating to me because even before the union negotiations, Rupert Murdoch at the same time that he's kind of squawking at the editors for covering gay life as a normal part of New York life, he ultimately approves this really progressive, influential provision in the union contract that allows gay couples at the paper to share health insurance. You suggest in the book that this might have actually played an important role in the ultimate same sex marriage movement.

[00:19:07] Tricia Romano: Yea. As far as they know, they're definitely the first newspaper that did it and possibly the first organization at all that did it. There were certain guidelines, and it had to be notarized that you were a couple living together. It wasn't just like you could get your friend on it. That's the foundation, to some degree, of the ultimate gay marriage law that was passed and upheld by the Supreme Court.

[00:19:37] Michael Lowenger: You mentioned that Rupert Murdoch saw that the Village Voice was more of a moneymaker than New York magazine. How did the paper make real money?

[00:19:47] Tricia Romano: Well, for many, many years, apartment ads, the classified ads in the back of the paper were basically a form of printing money. That was a source of income for decades for the Voice. For a long time, people lined up at Astor Place on Tuesday night waiting in line to get the first edition of the paper so they could get a jump on apartment ads.

[00:20:11] Michael Lowenger: Yes. There was this quote from Jackie Rudin in your book who worked in advertising who said--

[00:20:17] Jackie Rudin: "People found their lives through the Village Voice, whether it was a partner or a job or an apartment."

[00:20:26] Michael Lowenger: Blondie and Bruce Springsteen in the E Street band found their drummers through classified ads in the Village Voice.

[00:20:30] Tricia Romano: The Max Weinberg story is really great because he was a very well trained, jazzy drummer.

[00:20:39] Michael Lowenger: Who was auditioning to be Bruce Springsteen's drummer.

[00:20:41] Tricia Romano: Yes. Everybody got a half hour in the audition. He got there and he ended up doing like 3 hours. He didn't know that it was unusual, he thought everybody was getting that kind of audition. At some point Bruce says, "Where are you from," and Max Weinberg is like, "Jersey." He's like, "That's good." [chuckles]

[00:21:03] Michael Lowenger: He didn't know that that was the best thing he could have said.

[00:21:06] Tricia Romano: The best thing he could have said. Max Weinberg was like, the Village Voice changed my life. Also, I think Kiss found one of their bandmates in the Voice. There's more than that, I barely scratched the surface. That's where you would post. There's no Craigslist, there's no Facebook marketplace, no Twitter. There's nothing like that. That's where you would post your help wanted ads, and musicians did the same thing as some office looking for a secretary.

[00:21:37] Michael Lowenger: Your book outlines this kind of rift at the paper between the mostly white male reporters who covered the news for the front of the book, the so-called white boys, as they were known, and the feminist and gay writers who mostly covered arts and culture in the back of the book. You write about this really interesting episode in 1986 when Robert Friedman, the editor of the paper, made the call to put performance artist Karen Finley on the cover of the paper. What was so provocative about this cover story, and what conflict did it spurt?

[00:22:13] Tricia Romano: The article was written by Cynthia Carr, who went by C. Carr, and she had had a column about performance art for several years. She came to Richard Goldstein and her editor, Karen Durbin and said, there's this performance artist I really want to cover, she's pretty controversial, I think you should come see her. The thing that she was known for was using food as a reference point.

She would often be naked or partially naked or wear like little prom dresses and she would crush the food on her body while she sort of had this incantation, kind of possessing the male voice. It's one of those things you really have to see to understand. Cynthia Carr writes this story and they decide to put it on the cover. She was just posing with her dog, it's a pretty cover shot, but you have to realize back then papers are finite and space is finite so what gets on the cover is a big thing. It's a big deal.

At the time, Pete Hamill, who's one of the famous columnists in New York journalism, worked at Daily News, and he was like a star. He sort of led this charge against this piece because he saw it as unworthy of being on the cover because it wasn't real journalism in his eyes. It diminished the hard news that all the guys in the front of the book did. He never even saw the work, but he wrote like a full page denouncing the story and the work and the idea of the art that she was doing.

[00:24:00] Michael Lowenger: It was really, obscenity seemed like kind of deliberate in this performance. Do you want to describe what she was doing with the yams?

[00:24:07] Tricia Romano: She was using canned yams, and she would kind of push them on her body while she was talking. It was sexually explicit and meant to be provocative. It was a commentary on the male gaze and objectification of women, et cetera. It's just the kind of thing that those guys, it just is going to go over their heads. They led this charge. It was him, Nat Henthoff, Barrett Neufield.

[00:24:37] Michael Lowenger: These are like some of the heavy-hitter investigative reporters.

[00:24:40] Tricia Romano: Wayne Barrett, who wrote about Trump. Jack Neufield's, who did the worst judges and worst landlords series. Nat Henthoff, the infamous First Amendment writer who later came out against abortion. All these guys were like titans at the paper by this time, and they go marching in and saying, how can you put this filth on the front? Not really understanding that their city was very different from a city that Cynthia Carr was in, but they were both in the same city.

The voice was a reflection of that, of Manhattan, of Brooklyn, of the moment that New York was in. So the front of the book left graffiti in the office, in the bathroom. They left cans of VMS everywhere on Jackson, around the cubicles. They had a softball team, and there was a softball tournament, and when the Voice won, the trophy had a can of yams on it. It was a whole thing.

[00:25:43] Michael Lowenger: What was the point? To mock the paper for running the cover story?

[00:25:46] Tricia Romano: Yes. It was childish. The more upset the back of the book got, the more the front of the book would push it, and vice versa. It's interesting to note that the front of the book wasn't as big. Literally, space wise, as the back of the book. The back of the book was all the listings and the film reviews and the music and the theater and art and dance, all of it. It just didn't make the cover as often. Cynthia Carr was like, "If it hadn't made the cover, I don't even know if they would have realized it was in the paper." Because it was on the cover they were furious.

[00:26:21] Michael Lowenger: You're describing this tension at the paper. Reading the book it felt to me like there was this sort of constant hum of struggle, where on one hand you have the Village Voice as this very radical, very progressive paper, and yet we keep seeing moments where it's kind of failing to live up to its own values. On one hand, the paper is celebrating great Black music, and on the other hand, there were very few people of color writing for the paper in its first couple decades.

The paper was among the first to write about abortion. It had this great stable of feminist writers like Ellen Willis, Laurie Stone, Karen Durbin, and Mark. Yet internally, they face derision from their own colleagues. The paper had these pioneering gay writers, even as the Village Voice is publishing homophobic slurs in its coverage of the Stonewall uprising.

[00:27:15] Tricia Romano: It was a constant learning process for the people on the paper and the people reading it. The fact that they didn't really have any Black writers until Stanley Crouch shows up is crazy. I think it was 1976 or something.

[00:27:35] Michael Lowenger: Basically 20 years in.

[00:27:37] Tricia Romano: Yeah. They wrote about black causes. Wayne Barrett, the reporter that covered Trump and Giuliani, and Jack Neufields, who wrote about worst landlords and the worst judges, and Nat Handoff, who got his start writing about jazz. They were all very much about civil rights and were a big part of that movement, but they were blind to the fact that there were really no Black people at the paper. No one seemed to figure that out.

Schneiderman, David Schneiderman who was an Op Ed editor at the New York Times in the '70s comes on board, and he's the editor in chief, and he says, what, this is the progressive Village Voice and there are no Black people on staff. Then they also got investigated by a government agency for this so they had to take action. The thing is, right around that time is when hip hop is sort of born. Robert Krisgal is given a name by one of the first Black editors at the paper, Telani Davis, in the name of Greg Tate. Greg Tate is this unbelievable cultural critic. Hip hop helped usher in a whole bunch of Black writers into the paper.

Carol Cooper, Barry Michael Cooper. Not related. They're covering hip hop. Later, Barry Michael Cooper becomes more of an investigative reporter and covers the crack epidemic and does the story that is New Jack City that becomes the movie. They also have writers like Nelson George and Lisa Jones, who writes a cultural column about race. Lisa Kennedy, who is the film editor, she joins the paper in the '80S.

By the mid '80s, it becomes a focal point for Black writing. Hilton Als joins the paper, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning critic now at the New Yorker. It just opens the doors to these voices. Once a group of people come in, they have friends and they know people who are writers, and they get introduced and it just grows. For decades, there was nothing, and it still was a very "white paper" even towards its end.

[00:30:02] Michael Lowenger: I'm going to jump way ahead to the 2000s when we're starting to see cracks in the Village Voice, its business model. Anil Dash, now a famous technologist and writer, joined the Village Voice in 2001. This is when Craigslist, the classified ads website was first becoming a thing, and then 9/11 happens. How did the Internet and 9/11 converge to ruin the Village Voice's whole business model?

[00:30:32] Tricia Romano: Anil gets to the Voice in the summer of 2001, and it happens to be the summer that Craigslist is about to hard launch in New York. He came from San Francisco and he knew what was coming. he's telling them, you guys, we're about to get disrupted in a major way. People ignored this.

[00:30:52] Speaker A: Like the second work day, my third day there, Craigslist launched in New York. I'm just talking to somebody and I'm like, "Hey, what are we doing about Craigslist?" It was like, "Who's Craig? What are you talking about?" I couldn't articulate why it mattered so much. I couldn't tell people the whole world was about to change. I felt like Chicken Little. I kept running around being like, "The Internet is coming." It was just that, because it sounds crazy, right? You sound like a crazy person.

[00:31:19] Tricia Romano: Then 9/11 happens, and Google News wasn't a thing yet, but people wanted immediate information at that point. That's when people started pushing out news a lot faster online. The combination of those two things starts to render print not necessarily useless, but slow. When 9/11 happens, there's a little bit of a recession, and so apartment ads stop being placed with the same level and the same numbers that they were before. Then you have Craigslist saying, hey, you don't need to mail in or call anyone or fax your listing to some number, you can just post it directly online and it's free. A lot of people just shifted to that and the apartment ads never recovered after that.

[00:32:19] Michael Lowenger: In 2005, Village Voice Media, which at this point was owned by a Financial Management Group, along with six other Alt weeklies, merged with the New Times, a newspaper chain. They became the biggest company of Alt weeklies, with 17 papers. The New Times had long coveted the Village Voice, but once it bought Village Voice Media, it started picking it apart limb by limb.

[00:32:45] Tricia Romano: It was sort of like they just wanted the logo and the name, but that logo and name only has value because of what was there when you bought it. This collection of voices that made it the Village Voice. Those voices changed, some people came and went, but there's a core sensibility that they just didn't get.

[00:33:09] Michael Lowenger: In 2017, the print paper for the Voice was shut down, and a year later it seemed like the digital version was dead too. Until 2020, when it was revived by a new crop of ownership. I think we can confidently say that the Village Voice of old is gone. What's the latest iteration like?

[00:33:32] Tricia Romano: It's a zombie. The voice, to my knowledge, only has one employee, and that's RC Baker, who is essentially the editor and they run some freelance pieces. It's just sort of there, but it's not present in the city the way it should be.

[music]

[00:34:01] Tricia Romano: The voice was a guide to a specific kind of life in New York City at specific times. That collection of knowledge from people who cared about what they were covering with such intensity that there were fistfights and brawls inside the paper, that's gone.

[00:34:13] Michael Lowenger: Trisha Romano is the author of the Freaks Came Out to Write. Trisha, thank you very much.

[00:34:19] Tricia Romano: Thank you for having me.

[00:34:22] Michael Lowenger: This interview first aired in March. Coming up, if you can't beat em, should you join them? This is On the Media. This is On the Media, I'm Michael Owinger. The journey of the Village Voice, from iconic publication to a website with a single employee is sadly not unique in the Alt weekly world. Writing in Wired last month, tech journalist Kate Nibbs described a new low for some of the erstwhile greats. The Voice, LA Weekly, and Detroit's Riverfront Times, she wrote, were all hosting listicles promoting OnlyFans. That's the subscription based app that allows people to sell their pornographic content.

When the OTM fact checkers went to verify some of the links in her story, they discovered that the sites appeared to have scrubbed references to Onlyfans from their homepages, perhaps as a reaction to nibs reporting. The links are still there, you just need to know where to find them. Her story also highlighted another worrying trend on these zombie sites, the presence of AI generated text.

According to an AI detection startup called Reality Defender, a bunch of these OnlyFans articles have a high probability of AI text, like a Riverfront Times story titled 19 best free asian Only fans featuring Only fans asian free in 2024. Kate Nibs has been on the AI sludge beat for a while. We spoke to her back in February about another investigation she had a conducted into this new industry. Our conversation begins with an anecdote the story of a late great blog called the Hairpin, a site with writing by and for women that underwent an unsettling transformation.

[00:36:25] Kate Nibs: When you went to the Hairpin, you were getting something you couldn't get anywhere else.

[00:36:28] Michael Lowenger: Kate Nibs.

[00:36:29] Kate Nibs: It was part of the Alt network, the collection of blogs that had a very writer friendly sensibility. Gia Tolentino was an editor, Jasmine Hughes was an editor, and Helen Peterson. It just had a murderer's row of really talented, distinctive voices. It never had a mass audience, but the people who read it loved it. I've heard it compared to like the Velvet Underground.

[00:36:52] Michael Lowenger: Not that many people bought their album, but every one of them started their own band kind of thing.

[00:36:57] Kate Nibs: Yes, yes. Not that many people might have read it, but everyone who did became a blogger.

[00:37:02] Michael Lowenger: I love that.

[00:37:02] Kate Nibs: This website was so special to me and so many other people.

[00:37:07] Michael Lowenger: What happened to it?

[00:37:08] Kate Nibs: It just didn't succeed as a business, and they decided to fold it.

[00:37:12] Michael Lowenger: The story of digital media.

[00:37:13] Kate Nibs: Yeah, the sad story.

[00:37:15] Michael Lowenger: A couple weeks ago, Kate heard through the grapevine that the site was mysteriously back online.

[00:37:22] Kate Nibs: Someone from the Hairpin world alerted me to the fact that it had been revived in this wholly bizarre way. It was just like generic content mill nonsense. There's a lot of posts that are about dream interpretation. It's just clearly written by an AI. Kind of the worst thing you've ever read in your life.

[00:37:41] Michael Lowenger: Typically, I feel like these people who run these content mills aren't that eager to talk to the press or just want to go about their business without too much scrutiny. How did you figure out who now owns the Hairpin?

[00:37:54] Kate Nibs: I could tell you a lie about doing some sort of sophisticated forensic digging and make myself sound really good, but I'll just tell you the truth. Which is I emailed the email on the website, and the owner wrote me back and just was very eager to talk about his projects.

[00:38:09] Vuyo: You asked me about Hairpin. What?

[00:38:13] Michael Lowenger: This is the man who responded to her email, a Serbian entrepreneur named Nibosha Vunovich.

[00:38:19] Vuyo: But you can call me Vuyo because I'm Vuyinovich, my second name. So Vuyo is okay.

[00:38:24] Michael Lowenger: Kate nibs connected me with Vuyo after she profiled him for Wired this past week. An article titled Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin.

[00:38:33] Kate Nibs: He actually told me that he was very surprised that I was asking about the Hairpin because it wasn't one of his top websites.

[00:38:40] Vuyo: The Hairpin is not topm 20, maybe in my top 100 websites.

[00:38:46] Kate Nibs: He said he had over 2000, although he did not provide me with a master list, so take that with a grain of salt. I checked that he owned at least a few dozen.

[00:38:56] Vuyo: I have much bigger websites than this one, so it's not too special for me.

[00:39:00] Michael Lowenger: What are some other websites that you own that you're proud of?

[00:39:04] Vuyo: I'm not proud, especially proud of anything, I must tell you, because--

[00:39:10] Michael Lowenger: Why not? This is your life's work. Why are you not proud?

[00:39:13] Vuyo: No, it's not. I can be proud of my kid, I can be proud of my songs that I write.

[00:39:21] Kate Nibs: He's also a pretty actually popular DJ in Serbia.

[Music:Vuyo's song]

[00:39:34] Vuyo: I'm singing that part of the song. That song was the most popular song in Serbia more than two years. Also, it was a hit in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was hit in Croatia.

[00:39:49] Michael Lowenger: You're a celebrity in Serbia?

[00:39:51] Vuyo: Small celebrity.

[00:39:54] Michael Lowenger: This is actually how Vuyo got into the content mill game. In 2005, when he was still trying to make a name for himself as a DJ, he noticed that his personal site where he posted his music was getting more and more traffic.

[00:40:09] Vuyo: I get idea, "Okay, I will write about, I don't know, house music." I am purchasing housemusic.com, for example.

[00:40:17] Michael Lowenger: He quickly learned that starting a new site from scratch, churning out blog posts that advertisers like, is a ton of work. Getting people to stumble upon your site is hard too. If you Google House music, you'll probably see bigger older music sites first.

[00:40:34] Vuyo: One day I starting to buying already established websites. Just imagine you're buying website of, I don't know, closed restaurant and that restaurant have backlinks from New York, from BBC, from, I don't know, Yellow Pages, from Forbes.

[00:40:53] Michael Lowenger: I if the restaurant was written about and linked to on sites that Google considers to be high quality, then it's more likely to show up on the first page of Google results.

[00:41:03] Vuyo: Of course, it's not so simple, but there is a bigger chance for websites like that to rank easier than another domain without backlinks.

[00:41:12] Michael Lowenger: So this became a big part of his business and it appears to be legal. Every day he says he hangs out on auction sites like GoDaddy looking for dead sites that he can scoop up.

[00:41:23] Vuyo: So I'm buying established website 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 per days, every day.

[00:41:28] Michael Lowenger: Which is how he ended up with an eclectic assortment of sites, including photolog.com, an early Spanish language competitor of Facebook, and Pope2U.net, a former official site of Pope Benedict XVI, and of course, the Hairpin.

[00:41:44] Kate Nibs: The most popular site in his stable is another women's media site, actually it's called the Frisky. It was launched in the 2010s as well. At one point it was like one of the most popular women's interest websites in the US. It was kind of like a Cosmo style, there was a lot of sex content and dating advice. It went out of business in 2016 and the domain was up for grabs at some point and he grabbed it.

[00:42:14] Vuyo: It was so popular. I think more than 10 people work every day on that website. Real humans, we write about everything, especially about celebrities. Meghan Markle, she was pregnant, and that was the huge story. Today, maybe the Frisky earning $100,000 per year. I don't know.

[00:42:37] Michael Lowenger: We were not able to verify his earnings from the Frisky.

[00:42:41] Kate Nibs: So he's making a lot of money off sex toy companies that still want to do sponsored posts or advertisements. I was looking at the Frisky search traffic and all of the top keywords are breast related. When people are searching for things on the Internet related to bra sizes, it tends to send you to the Frisky. I think that helps keep the engine running.

[00:43:07] Michael Lowenger: in the past year or so, Vuyo's engine got a big new upgrade. Generative AI.

[00:43:13] Kate Nibs: Yeah, it just supercharged this weird spammy corner of the SEO industry. Instead of taking 4 hours to write 12 blog posts, all of a sudden you can do that in 40 seconds. They primarily use ChatGPT. They just put in prompts and spit out articles. He does say that they fact check them. I don't know how thorough the fact check is, but there's some sort of quality control going on to avoid putting something super offensive on the internet that would end up alienating potential advertisers.

[00:43:47] Vuyo: We don't publish anything about politics. We write about health, we write about fitness.

[00:43:54] Kate Nibs: It's not something that's super sustainable. He's already losing traffic on a lot of the big properties, including the Frisky, because people figure out that it's AI generated.

[00:44:03] Michael Lowenger: The Frisky, the Pope website, it's a little silly, but there is a slightly darker side to this, which is that he is using the same business model on dead news websites.

[00:44:15] Kate Nibs: Yes. Honestly, the most shocking thing that he owned to me was the English language website for Apple Daily. Which is a very culturally significant pro democracy newspaper that was based out of Hong Kong that was shut down in quite a dramatic fashion a few years ago.

[00:44:36] Michael Lowenger: The newspaper has had financial trouble since its assets were frozen after the arrests of of course, its founder, Jimmy Leibniz, the billionaire media tycoon.

[00:44:45] Kate Nibs: He was a very, very outspoken critic of the Chinese government. He's a frequent visitor to Washington and has been labeled by Beijing as a traitor. Jimmy Lai is currently under arrest, as are several of his top editors.

[00:45:01] Reporter: Charged with, "conspiracy to collude with foreign forces." His crime was running a media outlet that wouldn't tow the party line.

[00:45:10] Kate Nibs: Apple Daily was very important to the pro democracy movement.

[00:45:14] Michael Lowenger: I'm looking at it now. It's just appledaily.com, right?

[00:45:17] Kate Nibs: Yeah, appledaily.com.

[00:45:18] Michael Lowenger: Funny, cool username ideas, a guide to creating memorable online handles. Then we got unlocking LeBron's recovery secrets under the heading world, I guess this is like world news. Eight tips to take your healing seriously. Then under actors, the actors heading, we see 45 plus happy birthday wishes for teacher.

[00:45:42] Kate Nibs: [chuckles] Just totally, they're not even trying to hide the fact that it's AI generated. This is an important media outlet. It's really unsettling to see a news outlet emptied out and replaced by like the complete opposite of what it stood for.

[00:45:59] Michael Lowenger: Can I ask you about Apple Daily?

[00:46:01] Vuyo: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:02] Michael Lowenger: Because I do think some of our listeners would be really disappointed to learn that this important website was shut down and is now posting AI content.

[00:46:15] Vuyo: I understand, but there is a lot. I live in Serbia. I live in ex-Yugoslavia. There is a lot of things here--

[00:46:27] Michael Lowenger: Vuyo's English isn't super clear here but he went on to talk about growing up in Bosnia during the war, which he says destroyed his childhood. He referenced a hospital near his home that NATO bombed in the '90s. Injustices that feel bigger to him than putting AI clickbait on a dead news website that the Chinese government shut down in Hong Kong.

[00:46:50] Vuyo: I'm not part of that story. There is a lot of bad things in this world, a lot of things is not right. If I buy some domain, legal, and create anything what I want, is it bad thing? Does it change anything if I put on that website best in the world? Is it change anything in the world? No, it's not. So I think you understand what I want to tell you.

[00:47:16] Michael Lowenger: I do understand, and I don't think that you're responsible for the website going away. AI is helping accelerate the death of journalism, do you think about that at all?

[00:47:24] Vuyo: I'm afraid AI can be used for bad things. I'm not a fan. What is opposite of fan? Hate? Hater. [chuckles]

[00:47:33] Michael Lowenger: You hate AI.

[00:47:34] Vuyo: Maybe I hate AI. Especially if I can see people losing jobs because of AI. You are journalists, you're afraid about your business. Because this striking journalism, for sure, striking all writers, or content creators. I writing songs today so yes I also I'm afraid it will make better music and play better music than me as a DJ. I understand but--

[00:48:02] Michael Lowenger: But, of course, he talked about how useful and popular ChatGPT is. He cited a projection that I've seen quoted widely in the press that by 2025, 90% of online content could be generated by AI. Vuyo, you are helping create an internet where there is less and less human on the internet. Is that an internet that you want to be on?

[00:48:27] Vuyo: No. Yes, I agree with you, but I hate also using cars with oil or petrol and destroying our planet.

[00:48:37] Kate Nibs: He said, I like horses. I drive a car because we live in a society where you have to drive a car.

[00:48:43] Vuyo: Probably you don't also like destroying our planet and you are still using car too.

[00:48:48] Kate Nibs: That's how he feels about AI. This is the way things are going so I'm going to go in the direction that the world is already moving.

[00:48:56] Michael Lowenger: Can't beat them, join them. That's what I'm hearing you say.

[00:48:58] Vuyo: Something like that. That is good one. That's it.

[00:49:01] Kate Nibs: He's not sitting there being like, "I'm going to destroy a beloved independent women's media blog. I'm going to create this perverse desecration of this important pro democracy Hong Kong news outlet." He is simply taking advantage of an opportunity that has been presented on the internet that has a very low barrier of entry, and that's it. He just wants to make money and I think that's how a lot of the people who are making the internet worse operate.

[00:49:35] Michael Lowenger: Kate, thank you very much.

[00:49:36] Kate Nibs: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:49:38] Michael Lowenger: Kate Nibs is a senior writer for Wired. We first aired this story in February.

[music]

[00:49:50] Michael Lowenger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wong, and Katerina Barton. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer, and Eloise Blondio is our senior producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week. I'm Michael Lowenger.

[00:50:32] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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