John Dicker, author of The United States of Wal-Mart, gave SLOG a nice mention on the Huffington Post yesterday. Discussing the sale of VVM to NT, Dicker said…

What’s more troubling about this new union is that the Phoenix-based New Times crew will impose its editorial template on the newly acquired papers. The template? Well, it’s like this; Cut your freelance staff. Keep the writers in-house, except for the film reviews, which are syndicated chainwide. And most significantly: Shrink The Editorial Content… In short, with New Times there’s less there there. Not to mention that unlike the Village Voice and its sister papers, New Times doesn’t host blogs or create interplay between its web and print versions. Aside from the letters section, there’s no forum for readers to dialogue.

This is no small point since readers, especially the almighty youth market, continue to regard newspapers like herpes on a stick. The ones who don’t expect their pubs to be web based and interactive.

For a good example of how a weekly can meld its print and web versions go here: The Slog: http://www.thestranger.com/blog/

Full Disclosure: I was in Denver last week on my book tour, and in addition to dropping by New Times’ corporate HQ for a tour, I had a drink with Mr. Dicker and some of the folks who put together Colorado Spring’s Toilet Paper, the best new alt-weekly in the country.