from zoilus.com
Last week, Gawker music blog Idolator broke a strange story: Apparently a rejected introduction to the Village Voice's venerable Pazz & Jop poll was leaked to the blog, and a strange and angry little rant it was, filled with venomous invective against uppity music blogs, their high-traffic parent companies, and that scourge of all media, NPR. It sort of burned your eyeballs to read it, frankly &mdah; here's a sample:
"Although many of the stories referred to Pazz and Jop as a venerable and cherished institution, most of these media outlets had little or nothing to say about the poll in year's [sic]past, usually not reporting on it at all. They were only interested in our cultural treasure when someone tried to piss on it and they could add their own stream-of-conscience to the golden shower. NPR — an entity living off the teat of government subsidies and Ray Kroc's widow's transfat-drenched death money — decided there was a national story in a guy with a website doing a music poll just like the Village Voice"
Etc. etc. etc. But who wrote it? And who sent it? And more to the point, why? That is to say, it was ostensibly written by Bill Jensen, Village Voice Media (and Village Voice parent company) director of Web and digital operations and former editor of the Boston Phoenix . At first, Idolator was skeptical that anyone at an established media organization — much less corporate HQ — would write such a crazy, unhinged rant , but subsequent tips to the website suggested that it was, in fact, written by Jensen, had been submitted to Village Voice editor in chief David Blum and music editor Rob Harvilla, who elected not to publish it. We subsequently checked with Blum, who confirmed that the piece had been a legitimate submission: "I was submitted the piece for consideration and rejected it."
Under normal circumstances, that would have been that — except that someone decided to forward the screed to Idolator, weirdly the very same blog that had dared to start their own upstart poll, complained of so bitterly in the piece. Wow, that's embarrassing, especially after the Village Voice rejected the piece. Who would do such a thing?
Maybe...Bill Jensen? Idolator sussed out author info from the originally-emailed document indicating that the document came out of Denver; other sources have surmised that it was leaked from corporate HQ in Phoenix. Even without the leak, it's incredible to think that such an angry, defensive piece would have been sumbitted to the Village Voice, considering the tumult of the past year and the high-profile firing of Pazz & Jop founder Robert Christgau; it's also a surprising peek behind the curtain of top-down practices of Village Voice Media, submitting the piece as an introduction to the Village Voice in the first place, still a recent member of the New Times family, on a Village Voice feature that has evolved into a near-institution. And if Jensen — not some attention-hungry junior staffer, a top figure at Village Voice Media HQ — secretly sent it out for pickup after being turned down by the editors overseeing the package, it smacks of the kind of overweening, intrusive oversight that opponents of the Village Voice-New Times merger were so afraid of.
Anyhow, it's weird.
*Disclosure: I wrote a story for the Village Voice last November under the supervision of David Blum, but at no time did any draft contain the phrase "golden shower."
