Tag: Voice-Tribune

Media and Marketing

What happens to the CJ in the increasingly likely event Gannett adds the Los Angeles Times and 40-plus other titles?

By Jim Hopkins
Boulevard Publisher

To paraphrase a famous misquote, what’s good for Gannett is good for its Courier-Journal subsidiary here in Louisville. That was the gist of Gannett’s argument in favor of its $815 million offer last spring for Tribune Publishing — now called Tronc, the parent company of The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, seven other big dailies, and 160 smaller weekly and monthly niche titles and their more than 7,000 employees.

CJ August 29 2016
Today’s front page.

“As one company,” Gannett said April 25 in disclosing its surprise offer, “Gannett and Tribune would have the financial stability to continue maintaining journalistic excellence, independence, high standards and integrity for years to come.”

The immediate path to that goal would be the $50 million Gannett predicted the two companies would save if they consolidated overlapping functions, which means eliminating jobs in areas like finance, marketing and production, and through greater purchasing power for things like newsprint and technology.

Today, with the Tronc deal looking more likely than ever — a published report last week said the two companies are now just haggling over a considerably sweetened final price — it makes sense to turn to the possible impact on the CJ.

The Louisville paper is a much smaller operation than it was 10 years ago, before the newspaper industry cratered during the financial collapse. It’s no longer Kentucky’s dominant statewide paper, and its influence even in Louisville has diminished as other news outlets have started from scratch (Insider Louisville) or bulked up (WDRB and, just last month, LEO Weekly’s parent).

Gannett logoBut the CJ is still a local player. And it’s also Continue reading “What happens to the CJ in the increasingly likely event Gannett adds the Los Angeles Times and 40-plus other titles?” →

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Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be horses that are underdressed for black-tie events

Champagne smallerBig smiles, big personalities and big business networking — yes, it’s everyone’s favorite feature in The Voice-Tribune: party photos! Boulevard picks through the pics, choosing our favorite coverage.

Imagine the following:

One morning in your bathroom, brushing your teeth as you ready for work, you suddenly stop, mid-brush, and ask yourself: “I wonder where I could get a tuxedo for a horse?”

This might seem like an implausible scenario, even if you own a horse. And yet someone at the Kentucky Humane Society faced this very real question before last weekend’s annual Tuxes & Tails Benefit Gala fundraiser, where the theme was Hollywoof and the Cats’ Meow. “The highlight of this event,” the society-newsweekly Voice-Tribune reports this week, “is always the special furry guests who mingle with the crowd during cocktail hour.”

And yet Boulevard thinks the highlight was, in fact, a mini-horse named Abner, who posed with guests outside — in his tuxedo. It’s our party pic of the week. (View the photo gallery.)

Given his stature (height, not social), we wonder: Was he named after Li’l Abner Yokum, the main character of the long-running comic strip about a fictional clan of hillbillies living in dirt-poor Dogpatch, Ky.?

Lil Abner 200
Li’l Abner and Salomey.

We don’t know.

But we do know, thanks to the Internet, that we can buy a horse tuxedo for Continue reading “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be horses that are underdressed for black-tie events” →

Media and Marketing

Stop the presses, and start sending your party invitations to the Voice-Tribune’s new editor

Lifestyle Media’s deal to buy The Voice-Tribune and a clutch of other Blue Equity Publishing shiny sheets last week included a new editor, too. Tonya Abeln, who until last month was editorial chief of the now-defunct society news competitor NFocus, appears in this week’s issue in a new post: editor in chief.

Tonya Abeln
Abeln

In a letter to readers yesterday, she promises the new owners will hew to the 70-year-old Voice-Tribune’s tried-and-true strategy of party photos, party photos, and more party photos. Plus, Abeln vows to continue employing “the same captivating columnists.”

This is huge for Boulevard’s society news department because we really, truly love that boldest of boldface names: Partyline columnist Carla Sue Broecker, who after two decades on the soirée beat surely knows where all the bodies are buried in Anchorage, Glenview and Prospect.

Abeln, it turns out, has had her nose pressed against the VT’s leaded-glass windows a long time. “I have always looked to The Voice-Tribune as the standard of excellence to which I hoped to live up [to],” she says.

Carla Sue Broecker
Broecker

Confidential to Tonya: Please arrange for a more suitable photo of Carla Sue tout de suite; the one online, at least, is starting to look like an early Jackson Pollock.

The Boulevard 400™

We took a page from Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor‘s social diary to create our own roster of Louisville movers, shakers, and money-makers. Everyone gets a score: the number of times their name appears in boldface here on Boulevard. Our “400” list already includes Carla Sue, Tonya, and 167 others. Are you on it?

Media and Marketing

LEO Weekly’s parent buys Voice-Tribune, other Blue Equity pubs

Terms of the deal, announced this afternoon, weren’t disclosed by seller Blue Equity Publishing or the buyer, Lifestyle Media, which publishes LEO Weekly, according to The Courier-Journal.

The sale includes The Voice-Tribune, a weekly dating to 1949 that focuses on society and party news; The Voice of Louisville magazine, and Modern Louisville, a newer title that targets the LGBT market.

Blue Equity Publishing has been a subsidiary of private-equity firm Blue Equity LLC since 2007.

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There will always be a South

“When Beulah May Hammond entertained the Daughters of the American Revolution, she used to have the 10-foot interior doors taken off the hinges and put on sawhorses covered with her finest linens for luncheon tables!”

— Voice-Tribune correspondent Carla Sue Broecker in her “Partyline” social column in today’s issue. She’s describing an enormous Victorian house with 12-foot ceilings in Bardstown. Kentucky was a border state during the Civil War. Otherwise, Hammond’s luncheons might have been for the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

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Mysteries of Louisville’s society party scene: Are those giant scissors in your pocket, or are you just happy to see us?

Champagne smallerBig smiles, big personalities and big business networking — yes, it’s everyone’s favorite feature in The Voice-Tribune: party photos! Boulevard picks through the pics, choosing our favorite coverage.

The cosmos presents so many mysteries: How did those Easter Island statues wind up there? What is dark matter? How does the Voice-Tribune choose which parties to cover?

We ask after noticing this week’s 10 parties include The Vein Treatment & Aesthetic Center’s annual summer open house on June 29. “The well-attended event,” we learn, “featured exciting prize drawings as well as discounted pricing on an assorted array of Vein Treatment & Aesthetic Center products. Various reps were also there to answer any questions attendees may have, and all enjoyed plenty of wine and light hors d’oeuvres.”

With all due respect, as people say when they actually mean the opposite, Boulevard wonders whether that event really qualifies as the crème de la crème of Louisville’s social scene. Yet, props to the 16-year-old clinic for silk-purse marketing its vericose and spider vein treatments.

The center, according to its website, “coddles patients with a smorgasbord of cosmetic services in a cozy skin-clarifying facility. During your microdermabrasion, a skin savant will gently sweep perished skin cells under the closest rug, then set an antioxidant-rich ultrasonic infusion to the task of moisturizing arid flesh and rejuvenating the body’s roughened husk.”

To be sure, we’re a wee taken aback by the juxtaposition of “smorgasbord,” “perished skin cells,” and the “light hors d’oeuvres” served at the clinic’s open house. But that’s why we’re not in public relations.

Now, to our party pics pick!

Hands down, it was the June 30 celebration at home furnishings store Dwellings for its new location at 139 Breckenridge Lane. Of Tim Valentino‘s 32 pics, guests Palmer Cole and Tyler Freeman in photo No. 19 were the week’s best.

No grand opening would be complete without a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and Dwellings and the St. Mathews Chamber of Commerce didn’t disappoint — leading to our last mystery of the cosmos:

Big scissorsWhere do all the chambers get those giant ceremonial scissors to cut ribbons? Turns out, there’s an actual company, Golden Openings of Urbandale, Iowa, that sells them — along with golden shovels for groundbreakings, plus all the other accoutrements of commercial ceremonies. Their biggest working scissors are 40 inches long and sell for $199.

Golden Openings even sells a 17-page book for $19 that “guides you through the ribbon cutting from start to finish. This book provides a detailed description of the items you’ll need to consider to have a first class ribbon cutting!”