The Voice, and our wilderness

In a tweet linking to a photo of a press release, the whimper went out last week that the Village Voice will end its print run after 61 years. Can’t give it away anymore; it’s no longer worth the paper it’s printed on. In the release, owner Peter Barbey — an heir to a Pennsylvania apparel fortune who’s laid off and otherwise lost much of the paper’s remaining talent and who is in the midst of hostile contract negotiations with the last 49 staffers standing — proclaimed that “the Village Voice brand” will still prosper as “a beacon for progress and a literal voice for thousands of people” who otherwise wouldn’t be heard. ¡Viva la brands! Just after he bought the paper in late 2015, I sat down with Barbey for a job interview as he visited the city to shop for a home here. He said he wanted the brand to return to its progressive roots and also be read by the right people he’d see at the right parties, like George Soros’ son.

He came off as the sort of character the Voice and The New York Observer — the once essential chronicler of money and power Jared Kushner purchased in 2006 to make his own name in this town and now “lives” on as just The Observer, an online media organ of our corrupt first family — existed to skewer. That’s a tradition that Gawker, sued to death a year to the day before Barbey’s announcement, tried to pick up and extend online.

You can’t make this stuff up: The Village Voice is now based in a dingy sublet on Maiden Lane, just off of the Wall Street 2/3 stop. That’s a couple miles south of the $26-million, 4,000-square-foot condo (with a balcony, two terraces and a media room with wet bar) Barbey settled on as his first home in our city — in the Greenwich Village building that went up where St. Vincent’s Hospital was torn down.

Barbey isn’t why the Voice is dying, of course. It turns out that culture is downstream of dollars. Politics, too.

“It’s an NYC media tradition nearly as rich as the personal essay on leaving New York: Announce the Voice has betrayed you; memorialize her finer days; and declare her, as did the deserter before you, dead in grit and relevance,” Simone Wilson wrote in a fine essay at Patch.com, a network of hyper-local sites previously owned by AOL that’s another of the many unsuccessful attempts to find a business model for local journalism.

People never lined up on Tuesday nights for a hot-off-the-presses Voice to read Norman Mailer or Jack Newfield or Stanley Crouch or Cynthia Cotts; they wanted to find an apartment or a job or what to do that night.

After Craigslist killed print classifieds, it was, ironically enough, the owners of Backpage — who dominated the lucrative online sex-ads market after Craigslist dropped it — who ended up owning the Voice, which brought me on as the paper’s City Hall columnist in 2011 and fired me about five months later when my wife was 36 weeks pregnant. The Backpage gang eventually tired of wasting their pimp profits on news, and spun off the Voice into a separate, money-losing newspaper company, which then found a greater fool in Barbey.

I’d previously had a cup of coffee in 2005 as editor-in-chief of New York Press, the alt-weekly that back in 1996 forced the Voice to go free as the competition between the two pushed both to produce some great journalism before the Press folded after 23 years in 2011.

Now the alt-weeklies are done for, and the news market is in tatters.

I don’t care what flag reporters like Tom Robbins or the late Wayne Barrett run under so much as I care they can make a living doing impactful work that reaches readers. Barrett — whose former interns include many of the country’s best journalists — found a home writing Op-Eds for The News after the Voice fired him, and two of my old Voice colleagues, Graham Rayman and Victoria Bekiempis, do terrific reporting on cops and courts here. Others do great work around the city and the world.

It’s fitting that the Voice is ending its print run in the midst of New York City’s most boring election of my lifetime. Having escaped the prosecutors, Mayor de Blasio — who talks a big game about fighting the power, so long as that power isn’t tied to a real-estate developer or wired labor union or other big donor — doesn’t give a damn about the press. The Voice’s Jon Campbell has been carrying on the paper’s best tradition by showing the receipts on City Hall’s secrecy and contempt for public-record laws. I hope he keeps on that beat online for the brand, or finds a new home for it.

Meantime, the bad guys are winning. Money’s talking, and there aren’t enough outlets employing reporters to talk back to it.