Statement by the owner Peter Barbey:
This is a sad day for The Village Voice and for millions of readers. The Voice has been a key element of New York City journalism and is read around the world. As the first modern alternative newspaper, it literally defined a new genre of publishing. As the Voice evolved over the years, its writers, editors, reporters, reviewers, contributors, photographers, artists and staff were united by the idea that the they spoke for and fought hard for those that believed in a better New York City and a better world. The Voice has connected multiple generations to local and national news, music, art, theater, film, politics and activism, and showed us that it’s idealism could be a way of life.
In recent years, the Voice has been subject to the increasingly harsh economic realities facing those creating journalism and written media. 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.
The Village Voice was created to give speed to a cultural and social revolution, and its legacy and the voices that created that legacy are still relevant today. Perhaps more than ever. Its archives are an indispensable chronicle of history and social progress. Although the Voice will not continue publishing, we are dedicated to ensuring that its legacy will endure to inspire more generations of readers and writers to give even more speed to those same goals.
We have begun working to ensure that the enormous print archive of The Village Voice is made digitally accessible. I began my involvement with the Voice intending to ensure its future. 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.
http://gothamist.com/2018/08/31/village ... y_dead.php
The Village Voice RIP
The Village Voice RIP
John Francis
-
jbuck919
- Military Band Specialist
- Posts: 26856
- Joined: Wed Jan 28, 2004 10:15 pm
- Location: Stony Creek, New York
Re: The Village Voice RIP
People wrote for the Voice without any pay just for the privilege. A journalistic disaster if ever there was one. 
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Johann Sebastian Bach
-
Ricordanza
- Posts: 2499
- Joined: Sun Jun 26, 2005 4:58 am
- Location: Southern New Jersey, USA
Re: The Village Voice RIP
This is sad. When I lived in NYC and went to CCNY, I was a regular reader of the Voice.
Re: The Village Voice RIP
The Voice's classical music reviewer was Leighton Kerner, from 1957, joining its staff in 1961, until he retired in 1998 at age 72. I saw him and his wife everywhere; much if not all of his compensation was free press tickets to New York concerts and operas, which he paid for with his reviews pro and con. In a tribute at Kerner's death in 2006, Alex Ross wrote: "No critic I know was more assiduous in attending concerts, or more delighted by the sheer variety of music on offer around New York. His experience was vast, his outlook ever-youthful. Someone once jokingly asked him who his favorite Spice Girl was; he answered, 'Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.'"
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/week18/
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/week18/
John Francis
Re: The Village Voice RIP
Last Rites for the Village Voice, a Bohemian Who Stayed On Too Long
By Tricia Romano
Sept. 5, 2018
The death last week of The Village Voice, the storied alt-weekly, was in some ways to be expected. When its latest owner, Peter D. Barbey, who bought it in 2015 to restore it to its early glory, stopped print publication almost a year ago, it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before its online presence ceased as well. The Voice didn’t appear to have a strong sense of identity anymore, in part because the New York that it covered — downtown, the underground, bohemia and its ephemera — didn’t exist anymore, neither in a physical sense nor as a state of mind.
SoHo, once the stomping ground of artists and punk rockers, is a high-end shopping mall. CBGB, which The Voice covered religiously when Blondie and Television were at their apex, has been turned into a John Varvatos store and lives on as a T-shirt. The East Village is … I don’t know what it is anymore. At least Spike Lee is still in Brooklyn.
The death of The Voice isn’t just about the end of a newspaper. To some of us at least, it’s about the end of New York as a cultural and political center, as the place that the world turned to for art, for music, for leadership in new and uncomfortable ideas, often perceived by the mainstream to be dangerous or weird. Fred McDarrah, the paper’s photographer for the much of its first three decades, and who remained a part of the paper until his death in 2007, liked to affectionately call it “the commie, hippie, pinko rag.”
The Voice was started in 1955 by Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf and Norman Mailer as an alternative to The Villager, a weekly that covered mainly Greenwich Village. Over time, it established the alternative-weekly template: a mix of opinionated, first-person screeds; advocacy journalism; rock criticism; experimental writing; and political comic art. It introduced the short, thumb-size review, and it allowed writers like Jill Johnston, who didn’t use punctuation, to run wild. Later, The Voice Literary Supplement provided early exposure to coming stars like Jonathan Lethem, Alice Sebold and Colson Whitehead. Its art critics — including Peter Schjeldahl, John Perreault and Roberta Smith — had front-row seats to Warhol, Basquiat, Koons and Haring, and themselves became towering figures in the art world.
To read The Voice was to read the progenitor of Craigslist and blogging, and of America’s underground cultural and political landscape in the second half of the last century and into this one. It was America’s story, but it was also New York’s: Donald Trump, the Obies and Off Broadway theater, rap and hip-hop, break dancing, civil rights, gay rights, Andy Warhol, post-punk, new wave, the Worst Landlords list, weird sports writing, outsider art, foodie culture, performance art, jazz, techno, the mob, Rudy Giuliani — all of it was covered by The Voice.
When I interned there for Frank Owen, who covered the underbelly of New York night life, in 1997, I didn’t understand I was working with living legends at 36 Cooper Square, like the investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who did the first in-depth exposé on Mr. Trump’s businesses in the ’70s, and Nat Hentoff, the civil-libertarian columnist, both of whom died last year.
The paper was populated with eccentric geniuses and people who had changed journalism, including people who had worked on the first stories about the Stonewall Riots and the gay rights movement, and a number of cultural writers and icons. There was J. Hoberman, the film critic who had inherited the section from Andrew Sarris and Jonas Mekas, the two critics who helped put auteur theory and indie and experimental film on the map; there was Greg Tate and Nelson George, two of the pre-eminent voices on black music and hip-hop culture; and Richard Goldstein, the executive editor, who had been with the paper for more than 25 years and had been credited with the invention of rock criticism. And then there was Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed dean of rock critics, who had perfected the capsule review through his Consumer Guides, which gave records shrewd grades. The place was filled with characters, and I loved every one of them, even as I was terrified of them.
I spent eight years at The Voice. After I interned, I started as a fact checker and became a columnist, writing “Fly Life” and “Club Crawl,” two weekly columns about New York night life. It was a dream job — I had an amount of creative freedom and a filing schedule (weekly) that now seems extravagant and luxurious.
But with every passing year, the New York I knew and loved was changing, and eventually, like many others, I left. The city had ceased to be affordable — and more important, interesting. The night life I had come there to partake in became sanitized by bottle service and Wall Street money. There are now pockets of creativity in parts of the city, mainly in Brooklyn, but even that borough has become more and more gentrified.
Before the internet, and before the commercialization of New York, many of The Voice’s writers and editors would talk about how they subscribed to the paper in their faraway towns: Lucian K. Truscott IV would get it at West Point, where he was a cadet, before becoming one of the paper’s staff writers. Doug Simmons would get it at the newsstand in Omaha, when he was in high school, long before becoming its music editor and rising to be its managing editor, then, briefly, its acting executive editor.
The Voice — and New York — was a beacon for misfits, and I was one of them. The internet flattened “alternative culture” — first Napster, and now Spotify, allowed obscure music to bypass the critics; Netflix and Amazon made experimental film accessible without your needing to read about it in a Hoberman review. The Voice was once a lodestar to freaks and geeks everywhere. Now the lodestar is both nowhere and everywhere.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opin ... voice.html
By Tricia Romano
Sept. 5, 2018
The death last week of The Village Voice, the storied alt-weekly, was in some ways to be expected. When its latest owner, Peter D. Barbey, who bought it in 2015 to restore it to its early glory, stopped print publication almost a year ago, it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before its online presence ceased as well. The Voice didn’t appear to have a strong sense of identity anymore, in part because the New York that it covered — downtown, the underground, bohemia and its ephemera — didn’t exist anymore, neither in a physical sense nor as a state of mind.
SoHo, once the stomping ground of artists and punk rockers, is a high-end shopping mall. CBGB, which The Voice covered religiously when Blondie and Television were at their apex, has been turned into a John Varvatos store and lives on as a T-shirt. The East Village is … I don’t know what it is anymore. At least Spike Lee is still in Brooklyn.
The death of The Voice isn’t just about the end of a newspaper. To some of us at least, it’s about the end of New York as a cultural and political center, as the place that the world turned to for art, for music, for leadership in new and uncomfortable ideas, often perceived by the mainstream to be dangerous or weird. Fred McDarrah, the paper’s photographer for the much of its first three decades, and who remained a part of the paper until his death in 2007, liked to affectionately call it “the commie, hippie, pinko rag.”
The Voice was started in 1955 by Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf and Norman Mailer as an alternative to The Villager, a weekly that covered mainly Greenwich Village. Over time, it established the alternative-weekly template: a mix of opinionated, first-person screeds; advocacy journalism; rock criticism; experimental writing; and political comic art. It introduced the short, thumb-size review, and it allowed writers like Jill Johnston, who didn’t use punctuation, to run wild. Later, The Voice Literary Supplement provided early exposure to coming stars like Jonathan Lethem, Alice Sebold and Colson Whitehead. Its art critics — including Peter Schjeldahl, John Perreault and Roberta Smith — had front-row seats to Warhol, Basquiat, Koons and Haring, and themselves became towering figures in the art world.
To read The Voice was to read the progenitor of Craigslist and blogging, and of America’s underground cultural and political landscape in the second half of the last century and into this one. It was America’s story, but it was also New York’s: Donald Trump, the Obies and Off Broadway theater, rap and hip-hop, break dancing, civil rights, gay rights, Andy Warhol, post-punk, new wave, the Worst Landlords list, weird sports writing, outsider art, foodie culture, performance art, jazz, techno, the mob, Rudy Giuliani — all of it was covered by The Voice.
When I interned there for Frank Owen, who covered the underbelly of New York night life, in 1997, I didn’t understand I was working with living legends at 36 Cooper Square, like the investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who did the first in-depth exposé on Mr. Trump’s businesses in the ’70s, and Nat Hentoff, the civil-libertarian columnist, both of whom died last year.
The paper was populated with eccentric geniuses and people who had changed journalism, including people who had worked on the first stories about the Stonewall Riots and the gay rights movement, and a number of cultural writers and icons. There was J. Hoberman, the film critic who had inherited the section from Andrew Sarris and Jonas Mekas, the two critics who helped put auteur theory and indie and experimental film on the map; there was Greg Tate and Nelson George, two of the pre-eminent voices on black music and hip-hop culture; and Richard Goldstein, the executive editor, who had been with the paper for more than 25 years and had been credited with the invention of rock criticism. And then there was Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed dean of rock critics, who had perfected the capsule review through his Consumer Guides, which gave records shrewd grades. The place was filled with characters, and I loved every one of them, even as I was terrified of them.
I spent eight years at The Voice. After I interned, I started as a fact checker and became a columnist, writing “Fly Life” and “Club Crawl,” two weekly columns about New York night life. It was a dream job — I had an amount of creative freedom and a filing schedule (weekly) that now seems extravagant and luxurious.
But with every passing year, the New York I knew and loved was changing, and eventually, like many others, I left. The city had ceased to be affordable — and more important, interesting. The night life I had come there to partake in became sanitized by bottle service and Wall Street money. There are now pockets of creativity in parts of the city, mainly in Brooklyn, but even that borough has become more and more gentrified.
Before the internet, and before the commercialization of New York, many of The Voice’s writers and editors would talk about how they subscribed to the paper in their faraway towns: Lucian K. Truscott IV would get it at West Point, where he was a cadet, before becoming one of the paper’s staff writers. Doug Simmons would get it at the newsstand in Omaha, when he was in high school, long before becoming its music editor and rising to be its managing editor, then, briefly, its acting executive editor.
The Voice — and New York — was a beacon for misfits, and I was one of them. The internet flattened “alternative culture” — first Napster, and now Spotify, allowed obscure music to bypass the critics; Netflix and Amazon made experimental film accessible without your needing to read about it in a Hoberman review. The Voice was once a lodestar to freaks and geeks everywhere. Now the lodestar is both nowhere and everywhere.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opin ... voice.html
John Francis
-
lennygoran
- Posts: 19347
- Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2007 9:28 pm
- Location: new york city
Re: The Village Voice RIP
Romano better be careful using lodestar-she writes for the Times and could wind up being investigated as the Anonymous author! Regards, Len
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