The Village Voice’s indelible marks
The eulogies began tumbling in moments after the news broke on Tuesday that the Village Voice would be suspending its print edition and going all-digital. End of an Era, they said, in one or another 140-character way.
My Facebook feed filled with encomiums by fellow former Voice writers: the thrill of getting a story onto the cover; the office squabbles that spilled into and out of the pages; the roster of great reporters, critics, editors, photographers and designers who cranked out astonishing work week after week; the muckraking that took down crooked pols and venal landlords, the arts writing that lit up pop and experimental culture, and the movement coverage that kept pace with and held accountable whatever resistance was roiling.
And most of all, the freedom, the ferment, the fractiousness we enjoyed at the country’s first altweekly (founded in 1955), which proudly described itself as a “writer’s paper.”
Is this finally the moment for the Voice’s obit? Folks have been declaring its death for decades, proclaiming, “I used to read the Voice, which was so much better back in the day” — whatever day it was when they were still idealistic and engaged and eager to know about (if not attend) some five-hour late-night performances in a 20-seat storefront.
Sure, as the late long-time Voice writer and editor Ross Wetzsteon used to say, there never were any pure glory days — “We published a lot of garbage back then” — but, too, a lot of vital news, deep features, trenchant analysis, and passionate prose that skated giddily along the line between bats--- and brilliance.
In announcing the print edition’s demise, owner Peter D. Barbey contended that the shift to online-only would revitalize the Voice, reaching a younger audience more directly and more frequently than once a week.
And why not? It’s obvious enough that first-rate, hard-hitting journalism can happen on the web. (I leave it to business experts to determine whether the 1.3 million unique hits the Voice website had in July can sustain a crack staff.)
So I come not to bury the Voice but to praise it. Along with ground-breaking journalism, it produced a contentious, countercultural conscience, an ethos. It was genuinely an alternative paper, finding the stories, sources, subjects, and artists that weren’t being covered fairly, fully, sharply, or at all, in the mainstream. Cindy Carr on Karen Finley, Greg Tate on Michael Jackson, Wayne Barrett on Donald Trump: These are only three of innumerable examples of how writers gave nuance and complexity to figures the public only thought it knew.
The Village to which the paper gave Voice was literal only in the sense that it was founded and headquartered below 14th St. Its coverage ranged to Saigon (Frances Fitzgerald, reporting in the 1960s), Managua (Marc Cooper in the ’80s) and Jerusalem (the Voice sent me several times from the late ’80s to early ’00s.) You could go inside-baseball on City Council primary races or pop album sales; you could probe the churches, locker rooms, and auditoriums of Operation Rescue, the New York Liberty or queer theory conferences. Readers shaped their sense of the city, and themselves, by leafing through the Voice’s thick pages, its ink griming their fingers as surely as its attitude infused their senses.
Proudly and influentially, the Voice has a union — UAW Local 2110 — which pioneered same-sex partner benefits and the inclusion of freelancers. Numbering no more than 15 members now, down from its heyday in the late ’80s of 300, it’s fighting now to preserve job security and severance protections.
One can't blame the Voice for the evisceration of “downtown” both geographically and spiritually. The paper’s red distribution boxes will be washed off the landscape by the same socio-economic tides that took Tower Records and St. Vincent’s Hospital and the shops on Bleecker that once occupied all those now-empty storefronts. At least the Voice is not following the Boston Phoenix, Philadelphia City Paper, Baltimore City Paper and too many others to a pulpy grave.
The Voice has never lacked in talent and passion, even in its leanest times, and we sure could use a solid progressive New York paper these days, no matter the delivery system. Here's hoping that in this case, “Stop the presses” signals a risk worth taking.