A note to
Phoenix New Times Music Editor Martin Cizmar and Clubs Editor Benjamin Leatherman: if you're going to cover a show with comped tickets, it's generally considered poor form to show up late and miss the opener. Even if traffic is terrible and somehow you end up getting to your seat late (despite the fact that your paper's offices are a mile or so from the venue), mentioning your shared tardiness in your clever point/counterpoint review is less a comment on the relative value of MGMT as show opener than it is on your ability to do your job. [
Phoenix New Times]
The
LA Weekly has let classical critic
Alan Rich go because of decisions made "by the corporate people in Phoenix," where
Weekly owner Village Voice Media is headquartered. Just out of curiosity, how many full-time classical critics does VVM have left at this point? (For a point of comparison, Rich's ouster means that the entire city of Los Angeles has one.) [
LA Observed]
Add another music festival to the pile of multi-band shows coming to an open-air space near you this summer: This year's installment of the sweaty
Village Voice-sponsored Siren Music Festival will take over Coney Island on Saturday, July 19—the same weekend as both the Pitchfork Music Festival and the jammy
Mile High Festival. I guess when you're throwing a free festival, you don't have to worry about sagging ticket sales, but that seems like some odd counterprogramming to me. [
Brooklyn Vegan]
Village Voice Media has reportedly eliminated its national Executive Music Editor position, but the company is keeping the guy who had that job, VVM lifer John Nova Lomax, around; he'll return to his old gig as music editor of the
Houston Press, which means that Chris Gray, who held the
Press' music-editor position until about an hour after he filed his final post-SXSW story, is out. Nice of the VVM folks to get
their pound of barbecued flesh out of Gray right before they gave him his walking papers—never say that they don't know how to keep it classy! [
The Skyline]
If you've ever wondered what hell is like, picture a farm way outside of Phoenix filled with frat boys waiting for NOFX to play. So maybe the Phoenix New Times' willingness to send eight (!) bloggers out to the self-proclaimed "Arizona Treasure" Schnepf Farms for our local alt-rock station's daylong festival is worthy of some admiration, if only because of the collective stamina involved. Then again, the team coverage may not have been in the name of craft: Village Voice Media's Internet strategy these days seems to be "find as many ways to get women who are as naked as possible into click-inducing slideshows," and the resulting coverage of Edgefest was more than willing to oblige. Anything for Digg-based traffic, right dudes? [Phoenix New Times]
We haven't run a new segment of our search for the worst in Village Voice Media music writing recently—not because there hasn't been material, but because forcing myself to read some of the same writers turning out the same crap got tiresome after awhile. However, that doesn't mean there isn't exciting VVM-related news going on.
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As previously reported on Idolator, you might have noticed that the quality of writing in the music section of your local Village Voice-owned alt-weekly has dipped slightly in the last few years. In partial tribute to the memories of adequate-or-better writing gone by, and partially to make for easy material on a Friday, we again turn the spotlight on everyone's favorite national alternative media chain. Niki D'Andrea, music editor of the Phoenix New Times, today's your lucky day!
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That map to your right is an illustration of the reach enjoyed by mega-weekly chain 
Idolator
