The Village Voice is getting staples and going full-color in May. Also "navigation tabs added down the outside of every page to mark each section and the newspaper will get more convenient in size." Which means it's shrinking! Anyone know how small? Anyone care? [VV]

Mike Lacey, the pugnacious chief of Village Voice Media and overlord of alt-weeklies across America, is known to be a man not afraid to speak his mind. In fact, he's the self-proclaimed "asshole in charge." So attendees at a Phoenix Society of Professional Journalists awards dinner last Friday might have expected Lacey to say something interesting when he accepted an award on behalf of one of his papers [East Valley Tribune]. But they were less than amused when (the white man) Lacey referred to his deceased friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning [UPDATE: also white] journalist Tom Fitzpatrick, as "my nigger."

I suppose that was kind of the Village Voice at least to allow Deborah Jowitt to celebrate her fortieth anniversary as dance critic. Because the storied New York alt weekly, now owned by cost-cutting conglomerate, New Times, has laid her off. We were forwarded this email: "Motherfucking assholes just fired three more people — one a dance critic who's been here since 1968." The Village Voice says she's been asked to continue writing but, because of "budgetary constraints", as a freelancer. (Nathan Lee, the film critic, also lost his staff job.) That's fair enough: alt weeklies everywhere have been decimated by the exodus of classified advertising to the web; dance is increasingly irrelevant, culturally; and Jowitt had a good run. But the Village Voice's owners should slash costs once, and thoroughly, rather than allow the newspaper to suffer this debilitating torture of a thousand cuts.