Rotten Tomatoes readers, prick up your ears: Film critic Nathan Lee has been let go from the Village Voice, the latest tinder to an already-alarming brush fire of layoffs that has been increasingly afflicting the critical community.
The news broke Monday courtesy of The Reeler‘s Stu VanAirsdale, who only a week ago inaugurated his new post at the Defamer industry blog by announcing the buyouts of movies editor Pat Wiedenkeller and critics Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour at Newsday. That axing, dubbed the “St. Patrick’s Day Massacre” by VanAirsdale, came as only the latest in an accumulating series of firings by major publications in the last year that include the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Contra Costa Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Rocky Mountain News, and others.
Lee’s departure after only a year-and-a-half on the job as a staff critic (he previously wrote for the New York Sun and New York Times) makes him, as VanAirsdale points out, the fourth Gotham critic to be lost in the past month. (The New York Daily News’ Jack Mathews retired at the end of February but was not replaced.)
In an email farewell, Lee announced the news thusly, and not without some signature flair (via The Reeler):
In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for “economic reasons.” My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in My Blueberry Nights.
And so I am, as they say, “looking for work,” though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist.
While this trend in layoffs has been conspicuous of late — and was especially so in the year 2007 — it is seemingly reaching a critical mass, if you will. What is to be done to stem this disheartening critic-cutting mania? Sound off below.
