The editors, along with city hall bureau man Azi Paybarah, have resigned in response to ownership’s 11th-hour decision to pull the now infamous Danish cartoons, as we didn’t feel we could in good conscience produce an issue about the cartoons and the violent reaction to them without running the images themselves, as doing so would mean capitulating to threats of further violence. As such, we take no responsibility for the contents of the volume you hold.
—Harry Siegel, Tim Marchman and Jonathan Leaf
COHEN—VISIONARY
Jim Knipfel’s attack on Michael Cohen, the new publisher of the Village Voice, unfairly denigrates a misunderstood visionary strategist (“Welcome back!” Feb. 1).
Knipfel portrays Cohen as a man who sacrificed the soul of Philadelphia’s Welcomat for the sake of commercial advantage. Nothing could be farther from the truth. During his tenure in Philadelphia, Cohen sacrificed the Welcomat’s soul while simultaneously eliminating its commercial advantage as well.
Prior to Cohen’s arrival in 1992, the Welcomat was not merely a unique, revolutionary experiment in pushing the boundaries of free speech; it was also the first profitable alternative newspaper in Philadelphia’s history. Its willingness to speak truth to power generated a loyal audience that translated into ad linage and revenues three or four times the size of its closest competitor, the Philadelphia City Paper. Yet the Welcomat’s then-publisher/owner, Susan Seiderman, declined to squash or buy out the struggling City Paper, reasoning that the City Paper’s continued presence deterred the national alternative weekly chains from invading Philadelphia and eating our lunch.
Cohen, upon his arrival, opted for a bold new strategy. No city, he declared, could economically support more than one alternative newspaper. Therefore he resolved to drive out the rival City Paper by co-opting it. In due course (as Knipfel relates), the Welcomat was transformed into a generic youth-oriented alternative weekly indistinguishable from the City Paper; even the Welcomat’s retro name was changed to the more generic Philadelphia Weekly. As a result, the two papers’ identities became hopelessly confused in the minds of readers and advertisers, and before long the City Paper had pulled almost even with the re-christened Philadelphia Weekly.
As a further consequence, Philadelphia—a city that never had a profitable alternative paper before the 1980s—today boasts two flourishing alternative weeklies. Indeed, this sort of civic blessing is a hallmark of Cohen’s modus operandi: Wherever he hangs his hat, no matter how briefly, his presence invigorates the cause of robust local media competition, especially among his competitors.
—Dan Rottenberg, Philadelphia
Rottenberg was editor of the Welcomat from 1981 to 1993. We’ll stand him for drinks anytime.
BALDY FUCKWAD, DEFENDED
Jim Knipfel’s bitter attack on new Village Voice publisher Michael Cohen was little more than self-serving revisionist history. Cohen quadrupled the editorial staff and budget at the Philadelphia paper where he was publisher, transforming what had been a vanity paper run by sycophants into a vital alternative newspaper with heart and soul that’s launched many writing careers.
—Tim Whitaker, Editor, Philadelphia Weekly
Nice job with the whole full disclosure thing, jackass. Let us help——Fuckwad hired Whitaker shortly after firing Knipfel and co. from the Welcomat as part of the “rebranding” of that paper as the Philadelphia Weekly—which was and is, remarkably, even more generic than the hep name would make it sound. And trust us: It ain’t how big the budget, but how you use it. See: The Voice. Also, we’re curious about calling the previous bunch “sycophants.” Just who does Whitaker claim they were sucking up to? —The Eds.
THE SMUT QUEEN WEIGHS IN
OK. Reading Knip’s piece brought back all the vitriol I felt for Baldy and made it hard to think… All I can come up with is: “Shithead side-steps karma.” How the fuck does he do that???!!!
I am so pissed.
(Actually just spoke with [name of Voice employee redacted to protect the innocent.—The Eds.] Working at the Voice was something she had dreamed about since a teenager. I feel so bad for her.)
As Zappa had it, “You have to come to terms with stupidity, and make it work for you.”
—Toni, Adult Coordinator (Smut Queen), City Weekly
BUH BYE!
I just read the Baldy Fuckwad story...awesome! The story was e-mailed to me by a friend who also shares a history with this schmuck, having worked at the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale papers that he mismanaged for way too long.
The happiest day of my life was when we all heard that he had decided to take an indefinite “sabbatical” to Japan. I was never sure about the accuracy of the locale, but who cared...the Witch was gone!
Next thing you know...he’s back. That was the worst day of my life. Like the guy hadn’t fucked things up enough the first time around so let’s hire him back and see how much worse it can be. Brilliant!
Anyway I heard last week from someone else that he was NYC-bound…again. BUH BYE!
—Name withheld, Miami
HORSESHOEHEAD
Having worked for Baldy in Miami (at first we called him horseshoehead, although later we simply referred to him as Satan) the employees of the Voice and the citizens of the entire Northeast have my deepest sympathies. That loud roar you hear is the entire state of Florida cheering in his wake.
I can’t think of any man who deserves to be hit in the balls more than Satan, I just wish I’d been the one to do it.
—Name withheld, Florida
in which We are Exposed
I don’t understand a good deal of your rambling Koyen mud-slinging [“Mayor Mike Koyenizes Gotham,” Harry Siegel, Jan. 25], but I do get a great visual of you in a ratty green bathrobe with six days worth of bristly beard and crumbs around your mouth slouching in your swively chair and mooning and moaning over old issues of New York Press, imagining yourself basking in those good old days. I wonder if they were so good because you weren’t there.
What exactly happened to effect this change from the good old days to the sad now? If I recall it went something like this: Koyen wrote or let-be-written some crap about that old popey mummy slowly dying and then he was told to go to his room without dinner and he was like, “What? Dude, I haven’t lived with the ‘rents for years. Later.” Then New York Press got crummier and boringer and smaller and smaller. So small that last week I was on the subway platform and picked one up thinking it was a Metro.
Is this what you were trying to say: Rope-a-Pope.
—Gena Bestoso, via e-mail
