In December, nine-year Voice editor Forst — whose salary was reported by the Bay Guardian to be a robust $325,000 — also resigned. In late January, publisher Miszner was gone as well, replaced by then–Miami New Times publisher Michael Cohen. On February 1, Lacey met with anxious Voice staffers to lay out his vision for the paper. A Bay Guardian account described Lacey as critical of the news section “because it was full of commentary and criticism of the Bush administration.”

Lacey says, “I’m opposed to having four or five writers an issue saying ‘Hey, me too. I don’t like [Bush] either.”’ Readers “are not going to put up with 5000 words of political axe-grinding.” Not all of this was well received.

The 72-year-old Schanberg says he resigned after “it was clear to me at that writers’ meeting that [Lacey] did not want a press column.... He said he didn’t want any stories that referred to other people’s work.” Schanberg described the mood in the room as “frightened,” adding that Lacey’s “language was adversarial and pugnacious.... He played the bully. I respond terribly to bullies.”

Lacey says that the 80-year-old Hentoff resigned at the meeting, and that although he reconsidered, he is “pretty upset.”

Hentoff says Lacey expressed annoyance at one of his columns and “he was talking about reporting that was stenography. So all I said at the meeting was I guess we have different concepts of reporting.”

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“I’m a reporter for Chrissake,” adds Hentoff, a widely admired civil-liberties writer who in many ways embodies the voice of the Voice. “I didn’t resign. I’m waiting to see if he’s going to do anything about what I do.”

According to a Voice source, there were about 30 staffers at the meeting, and reactions to Lacey’s remarks ran the gamut from fear to exhilaration. Asked about more staff turnover, Lacey says, “any time you have a change of ownership, there’s going to be a natural amount of fallout.” He is looking for a new editor “who has a news background,” is “familiar with magazine-style journalism” and “understands New York.” Voice acting editor Doug Simmons has already expressed his interest in the job.

With the Voice on the cusp of a transformation, the question is whether it will change for the better. The New Times track record suggests a stronger emphasis on reporting and storytelling — and less on politics.

Rory O’Connor, a blogger, a journalist, and president of the international media-production company Globalvision Inc., says, “the proof of the pudding is in the reporting.” While he lauds individual Voice writers, he describes the paper as “sort of moribund, a little bit stuck in the past.... It just came from a place where the name, the brand had really lost cachet.... The buzz wasn’t there.”

Another interested observer is Russ Smith, a Baltimore-based writer and founder of the New York Press. In an e-mail, Smith predicts that the New Times executives will “be aggressive in getting rid of what they consider dead wood and not let bruised feelings influence them. It’ll be a different paper, probably a better one, and probably good for competitors as well, since the niche market will be more clearly defined.”

The Press Empties
When Smith sold the Press to Avalon Equity Partners in 2002, the post-9/11 trauma of living with his wife and two sons only a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center was a key factor. Ironically, it was another issue related to Islamic radicalism — the inflamed global reaction to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons — that suddenly depopulated the Press newsroom last Tuesday.

According to Marchman, the paper’s editorial staff made a decision to build an issue around the publication of the cartoons and accompanying commentary. “It was the heart of the issue,” he says. “Everyone thought the cartoons should run, but we had a lot of different angles.”

Marchman says that on late Tuesday afternoon, Avalon’s managing partner David Unger called editor-in-chief Siegel to put the kibosh on the cartoons. “At that point, we stopped cooperating with the publication of the issue,” he says. “It was a pretty easy decision for everyone who left.”

In a statement, Press general manager Peter Polimino said, “we felt the images were not critical for the editorial content to have merit, would not hinder our readers from making an informed decision, and only served to further fan the flame of a volatile situation.”

The staff walkout that resulted was not entirely out of character. In contrast with the Voice, a middle-aged bastion of relative stability, the smaller Press (circulation circa 100,000) is a teenaged publication with an unstable past and an unruly reputation.