![]() “Written by and for cinephiles, the paper’s film section has filled the void left by the timidity and the complacency of mainstream movie reviewing,” Lim wrote in his introduction. In 2005, when Dennis Lim was the film editor at the Voice, he put together a collection of film reviews, The Village Voice Film Guide: 50 Years of Movies from Classics to Cult Hits. The key to the Voice’s success, according to Leslie Savan in the Nation, was that it “specialized in (at least) three types of stories that you’d rarely find elsewhere: unique personal accounts, like Karen Durbin’s ‘On Being a Woman Alone’ investigative reporting that the mainstream media would not touch, either because it might offend advertisers or the powers that be and original, boundary-busting music, art, and culture criticism.” In a fascinating history of the cultural influences on the paper’s founders and the Voice’s impact, in turn, on what would become the New Journalism, Louis Menand notes in a 2009 piece for the New Yorker that, by 1967, “it was the best-selling weekly newspaper in the United States, with a single-day circulation higher than the circulations of ninety-five percent of American big-city dailies.” It had struggled for several years, though, before hitting pay dirt. Last fall, he discontinued the print edition, assuring his staff and readers that the Voice would thrive “as a brand with its digital platform.” Then came the sucky day.įounded in 1955 by Ed Fancher, Norman Mailer, and Dan Wolf-and some would argue that Jerry Tallmer, a theater critic who created the Obies, the Off-Broadway awards, and British journalist John Wilcock were the fourth and fifth founders-the Voice was one of the first alternative newsweeklies in the country and, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, unquestionably the most influential. Barbey, described by the New York Times as “an heir to a Pennsylvania retail fortune,” bought the Voice in October 2015 after it’d been changing hands for decades. Half the staff was laid off immediately, and the other half will be kept on indefinitely to “wind things down” and create an online archive of sixty-three years’ worth of the journalism, criticism, and cartooning that won the paper three Pulitzer Prizes and countless other awards and accolades. “Today is kind of a sucky day,” owner Peter Barbey told his employees in a conference call, according to Alexandria Neason of the Columbia Journalism Review. Many saw it coming and had been dreading the all but inevitable for the past few years now, but Friday’s announcement that the Village Voice would cease editorial production still comes as a shock. Last week, for the first time since 2018, I had a story of mine appear in the Village Voice.Detail from the cover of the November 20–26, 2013, issue, featuring a profile of Spike Lee I wrote about the 2021 NYC mayoral race, which will hold its Democratic primary on June 22nd, and I’ll be contributing to the Voice regularly, writing specifically on this very important municipal contest. Many people probably missed the news in December that the Voice, which its owner shut down in 2018, was sold to another owner who intends to bring it all the way back. I’ve been told a quartlerly print issue is coming, with the first one due sometime at the end of March. Print is good! I am always wary about news like this because this industry is so precarious and too dependent on the whims of rich individuals. Growing up in NYC, the Voice for me was my platonic ideal of a newspaper. ![]() It did the investigative journalism that mattered. ![]() Its coverage of arts and culture-books, galleries, plays, cinema-was unrivaled. It was a proudly left newspaper that, at the same time, was unafraid of heterodox voices, that could feature Nat Hentoff and Stanley Crouch and Colson Whitehead and Vivian Gornick and so many other fascinating writers.Īfter I quit the New York Observer in 2016, I went to write for the Voice, among other publications. It was, without question, the most fun I’ve had as a journalist and writer. I contributed investigative political pieces, commentary, and book reviews, thrilled to see my byline in a publication of such renown. I hope Village Voice 2.0 can bring back what it is New York has missed so much. The website is again posting original stories. It’s a bit of good news at a time that is still, for many, so dark. None of this, by the way, will change my approach to this Substack, Political Currents.
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