VOICE SILENCED
‘Business realities’ kill pioneering weekly
RIP, The Village Voice.
The venerable news weekly co-founded by Norman Mailer that led the way in the establishment of alternative papers across the country shut down Friday after nearly 63 years.
“Today is kind of a sucky day,” owner Peter Barbey told the staff in a Friday phone call, according to audio obtained by Gothamist. “Due to, basically, business realities, we’re going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.”
Barbey told the shocked staffers that about half of them — 15 to 20 people — will keep their jobs to “wind things down” and help archive the publication’s material online.
The other staffers were fired effective immediately.
“I bought the Village Voice to save it,” added Barbey, who purchased the paper and website in 2015 and is an heir to a billionaire family owns a big hunk of one of the world’s largest apparel firms.
“This isn’t exactly how I thought it was going to end up. I’m still trying to save the Village Voice,” said Barbey, who remains CEO of the Reading Eagle in Pennsylvania.
The Voice’s recent struggles were well-known.
The left-leaning publication ended its print edition last August. It said goodbye years earlier to such legendary bylines as Wayne Barrett and Nat Hentoff. Barrett was fired in a round of layoffs in 2011, and died last year. Hentoff wrote his last Voice column in 2009, and also died in 2017. Iconic gossip columnist Michael Musto left in 2013.
“It’s been a slow train coming, but it’s still a big blow,” said Tom Robbins, a renowned investigative reporter who spent 14 years at the Voice. “The Voice let you write what you believed, and that’s a precious thing.”
“We didn’t just report the news. We tried to dig into it,” added Robbins. “We tried to stick it to the SOBs, and we tried to name names.”
News of the Voice’s demise triggered an avalanche of anguished voices on social media.
“It’s hard to even imagine New York without the Village Voice,” tweeted Sam Adams, an editor at Slate.
New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis noted that she cut her teeth working for the Voice.
“This is a tragedy, and it hurts my heart,” Dargis tweeted. “This is where I started my professional writing life and where I met brilliant writers — and many friends — too numerous to mention.”
In a statement, Barbey said the Voice fell victim to the stiff headwinds menacing print media.
“In recent years, the Voice has been subject to the increasingly harsh economic realities facing those creating journalism and written media,” he added. “Like many others in publishing, we were continually optimistic that relief was around the next corner. Where stability for our business is, we do not know yet. The only thing that is clear now is that we have not reached that destination.”
Barbey vowed to preserve the Voice’s print archive in a way that makes it digitally accessible.
“I began my involvement with the Voice intending to ensure its future,” he said. “While this is not the outcome I’d hoped for and worked towards, a fully digitized Voice archive will offer coming generations a chance to experience for themselves what is clearly one of this city’s and this country’s social and cultural treasures.”