For months now, rumors have circulated that Village Voice Media, the company that owns the Seattle Weekly, is up for sale. I first got a vague tip that VVM was on the auction block about six months ago. More recently, I heard — in a kind of fourth-hand way — that New Times, the largest alt-weekly chain, was negotiating with VVM’s owners to buy the chain. Apparently, I’m not the only one hearing this stuff. The Guardian newspaper has mentioned the possibility of an impending sale, and the Weekly ran a short follow-up to that. Now, in the current issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a New Times competitor, Tim Redmond lays out the rumors in much greater detail. The key passage in Redmond’s article:

"Some say that the only reason [the merger] hasn't happened already is that [VVM CEO Davd] Schneiderman, Lacey and Larkin [who run New Times] have a history of personal animosity. 'There's so much ego in the deal,' one source told us. 'So many dicks wagging around that it's hard to come to any kind of settlement.'
But in the end, one industry insider with a long history in the alt-weekly business told us, 'It's pretty much inevitable.'"

If the sale does go down, my sense is that the future of Seattle Weekly is less than secure. The paper has long been considered the financial laggard of the VVM chain, and New Times, which will have to take on a lot of debt to buy up its competitor, might not consider it worth the hassle to keep the Weekly going. Even if they do, the prospect of a New Times takeover is really bad news for the current editorial employees at the Weekly. New Times has a very different model for their papers than VVM: they combine long-form journalism with libertarian politics and frat-boy edginess. VVM, which still adheres to an increasingly dated model that emerged in the 1980s, builds their papers around an unholy marriage of BoBo consumerism and pedantic counterculturally-tinged lefty politics. In other words, the two chains are light years apart stylistically. If I wrote for the Weekly right now -- and man, I am glad that I don't -- I would be seriously think about getting my resume out on the street sooner rather than later.