The Voice Goes Virtual

News that the Village Voice is abandoning print to become an online-only publication truly marks the end of an era. Its owners say the move is meant to revitalize the Voice — whose fortunes, ironically, have been devastated by the Internet more than anything else as it lost millions in classified-ad revenues.

The move also reflects generational change: Voice readers apparently want an ever-changing product, and they want it online.

It’s a far cry from 1955, when editor Dan Wolf, psychologist Ed Fancher and author Norman Mailer founded the paper in a second-story Greenwich Village walkup for all of $10,000.

They cultivated new, up-and-coming editorial voices, with a heavy emphasis on politics, social culture and the arts. And the many upheavals among the staff often mirrored societal and cultural turmoil.

But it won a devoted following and became a journalistic force in this town, with writers and reporters like Mary Perot Nichols, Nat Hentoff, Wayne Barrett, John Wilcock, Lucian Truscott, Jack Newfield and Jane Jacobs; critics like Andrew Sarris, Robert Christgau and Ellen Willis; cartoonists Jules Feiffer, Stan Mack and Mark Alan Stamaty and photographer Fred McDarrah.

They chronicled a part of New York (and the nation at large) not often seen in the more mainstream dailies. And for much of its early life, the Voice remained well ahead of the cultural curve.

Yet its influence waned over the years as new publications emerged and much of its longtime staff was fired.

We’ve never much agreed with its editorial line, but the Village Voice has been an indelible part of New York for 62 years; the end of its print edition is a real, tangible loss. We hope its owners are right that this is a step to new glories.