The reason was the back pages which were loaded with hooker ads. Once the whores could infest dating sites and and hook-up sites and crawl all over blogs and stink up forums, SCREW was through. Al Goldstein made a spectacular belly-flop into bankruptcy.
Back in the day, SCREW staffers would routinely find themselves in the same elevator with bottom-feeding and bottom-selling skanks and trannies and loonies, all getting off on the 4th floor to pay CASH for their ads. Well, that was SCREW.
For a while, tottering on the brink but not QUITE stooping too low, the Village Voice and New York Press got some hooker ads and, being sluts, gave their newspapers away. This didn't last long. While Al Goldstein struggled as a greeter at a second-rate smelly deli downtown, and got an apartment courtesy of being a veteran and then from the charity of Penn (the talking half of Penn and Teller), the masterminds at the Village Voice and New York Press found themselves in bad shape, too, and so did their smarmy and smug columnists who began to live La Dolce Fuckoff, because their writing wasn't going to get them work anywhere else.
AM NEW YORK and METRO, which had people hawking the free papers at subway entrances (the mouths of the dry-sewer) began to tremble. While they kept boasting of massive circulation, the truth was, in January of 2020, that they had to cling to each other to stay afloat.
Yes, and you can't make these names up, Schneps Media executive Cliff Luster was given the daunting task of leading the two rival newspapers into one giant rival to the struggling Daily Snooze and the New York (Left at the) Post. A guy named Pozarycki was allowed to stay on and go from amNewYork’s editor-in-chief to the head of the NEW AM METRO NEW YORK.
So what's happened. Yes, So What.
2020 has been a terrible year, so why expect that a merger of two newspapers would be good news? It hasn't turned out that way.
Sometimes, although the kiosks are usually empty, you can snag a copy of the paper. It's got a crossword puzzle. It's got the usual grim headlines about Covid-19. It's got a few readable items from the news services (rather than local writers). A wire service piece let New Yorkers know that John Cleese was going to let them pay $20 to stream a concert for tonight (August 2nd). Not exactly local news, but good news.
Not so good news is that the paper has almost NO ads. The ones it has, it shouldn't have. That includes the creepy "WANNA HAVE FUN" phone chant ad (dial a few numbers and the word PANTIES). Worse, are all the ads from "healers" and "psychics." Nothing tells you how low your readership is, than ads instructing gullibles to hurry and get help to "remove all kind of Black Magic, Witchcraft, Evil Spirits, Curse..." and learn how "one call one visit will change your life" thanks to some bearded character who will "stop divorce" and "reuinte lovers" and deal with "court cases."
Yes, this is a NEW YORK CITY newspaper, not something you find under somebody's birdcage in Jamaica or Haiti.
How CHEAP is an ad in the paper? ALL they can get are con artists and lunatics? They can't even get a Papaya joint or Gristedes or a massage parlor in Queens to take out an ad? ALL they can get are a bunch of sad "psychics" selling to the dumbest of the dumb? Maybe the people who pay for ads on behalf of Cohen Optical or Sephora or Morton Williams see this junk and figure, "Oh, this paper must really have a circulation that's tiny, and the readers have a tiny IQ to match. They're not customers we want!"
When I was editing RAVE, the most important person on the staff, aside from ME, was the ad manager. We needed and got those full-page ads from vodka companies, car companies, and from Panasonic and others. We had inventive gimmicks, too, like "infomercials." An advertiser sponsored the joke page, or the "bright new comic" page or a page on upcoming comedy films and stand-up concerts on cable TV. It's pretty sad that in today's climate, it's hard to find some business majors who can help out the English majors, and keep a publication afloat.
It saddens me to see what's going on with this sorry Schneps situation, and they must be aware of how tawdry it looks to have such scuzzy people buying ads and making their ad page look so foul. They've had some good writers and editors working for them, especially AM New York in the early days, and watching what is going on is like walking through the terminal ward at a bad city hospital.
A while back, the GAEBLER website published a list of brices for a column inch in some of the "also running" newspapers in town. $22.00 for the Brooklyin News, $50 for the Black Star News, $59.00 for the African-American Observer, $60 for El Diario...while the Daily News was demanding $435 and the New York Post $711 and the Nw York Times $1,196. The struggling New York Sun (long since out of business) was begging to get $57. AM New York, pre-merger, wanted $329. At this point, it's pretty clear that if the ONLY people who want to take out ads are running storefront hook shops, little stink apartments full of candles, or doing low-rent business in some slum location, then the paper is going to be printed in red ink soon enough.
It's damn depressing. The world of journalism...newspapers, magazines...and the world of books have taken a beating. There's competition from plagiaristic websites, from pirate blogs, from torrents that routinely give away everything in PDF and ePub and MOBI format, and of course we have such grand sources of entertainment and Fake News as TWITTER and Facebook with their idiot memes and the morons who believe them.
You get what you pay for, and if you don't pay for that free newspaper in the kiosk, and you don't pay for the "news" from the website that puts "for entertainment purposes only" in small letters on the page, you get what you deserve.
Under Wilhelm De Blasio (what WAS his original German last name), "quality of life" is so bad, you don't even need to sniff METRO NEW YORK to find a phony psychic. They chain up their A-frame signs to lampposts and bike racks and bus shelters and anything else, while 311 phone operators say "Uh, what's the problem? What law is being broken?" Fill in an online form and you'll get a response two weeks later from the police or Sanitation saying "we didn't see anything."
Do you suppose any of these clowns who advertise their services ACTUALLY can accomplish anything? To judge from the headlines about rape, murder, looting and mayhem in the DAILY NEWS and NEW YORK POST, it seems the EVIL SPIRITS are winning.
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