By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Kate Coe on FishbowlLA, December 2006
In late December 2006, OC Weekly film writer Greg Stacy was informed — days before Christmas — that he was being let go as part of the Village Voice chain’s plan to stop using freelancers altogether. Stacy had been covering film at the paper for 11 years. He wrote a final Special Screenings column noting the morbid pleasure he had taken across the years in imagining what his eventual farewell column might look like. The original FishbowlLA framing, by Kate Coe, captured the early-signal moment of what would later become the broader alt-weekly freelance-contraction cycle.
Then
The Village Voice chain’s 2006 freelance-cut decision had been part of the post-2005 Voice Media Group consolidation. The chain had been acquired through the New Times-Village Voice merger of 2005, and the subsequent consolidation pressures had been producing systematic freelance-budget cuts across the merged operation’s papers. The December 2006 cuts at OC Weekly were one of the early visible examples of how the consolidation was reshaping the broader alt-weekly editorial economy.
Greg Stacy had been one of OC Weekly’s most-bylined film writers for more than a decade. His Special Screenings column had been a recurring weekly fixture; the column had built up a substantial readership through its mix of repertory-cinema coverage, festival reporting, and the occasional autobiographical interlude. The eleven-year run that ended in December 2006 was the kind of long-tenure freelance arc that the post-2005 VMG consolidation was systematically ending.
Stacy’s exit column itself — quoted at length in the original FishbowlLA piece — was characteristically wry and self-aware. The “morbid like that, hung up on goodbyes” framing captured the personal-essayist register that had defined much of his earlier work. The piece’s final paragraphs ended up being widely circulated in the alt-weekly community as an emblematic farewell.
Kate Coe’s FishbowlLA framing was sympathetic. The piece treated the cut as a documented warning sign of the broader VMG-era contraction cycle that was beginning to reshape American alt-weekly editorial economics.
Now
Greg Stacy continued in freelance writing across the years following the OC Weekly cut. His broader career has spanned multiple subsequent outlets and publishing projects. The 11-year OC Weekly tenure has continued to be one of the most-cited examples of the long-arc-freelancer-in-the-alt-press model that the post-2005 consolidation systematically dismantled.
OC Weekly itself continued operating after the 2006 freelance cut, but the cumulative contraction cycle the cut had previewed continued through subsequent years. The November 2019 shutdown (covered in the Gustavo Arellano piece) ended the paper’s operation entirely. The Voice Media Group successor entities have continued to navigate the broader contraction that the 2006 cut foreshadowed.
The broader American alt-weekly freelance ecosystem has substantially contracted across the entire interval since 2006. The post-2005 VMG-era cuts were one early signal of what would become a substantially larger pattern: cuts at the LA Weekly under post-2017 ownership, the dissolution of the OC Weekly in 2019, the Village Voice’s 2017 print shutdown and subsequent reduced revival. The kind of freelance-supported alt-weekly arts coverage that Stacy’s 11-year OC Weekly run had embodied has become structurally rare in the contemporary American press landscape.
Kate Coe — the FBLA contributor who wrote the original December 2006 piece — continued in LA-area journalism for years after the original piece. She remained one of the recurring FBLA-era contributors before transitioning to other outlets.
The 2006 piece reads now as one of the documented early-stage moments of the post-2005 American alt-weekly contraction cycle. Greg Stacy’s December 2006 farewell — captured at the time as a single freelance cut at a single paper — has aged into being a representative case of what would become a structural transformation of the entire alt-weekly editorial-economic model.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.