A counterculture institution — if that isn’t too much of a dichotomy to digest — may be on its way out. The Village Voice, New York’s iconoclastic weekly alternative newspaper, may fold its tent soon.
The writing is on the wall says former Voice writer Rosie Gray at BuzzFeed:
Alt-weeklies are always dying. But the news Friday that four editorial staffers were laid off or had their hours cut to part-time at The Village Voice — two features writers, a news blogger and a listings editor — makes the sad fact of that paper’s eventual demise, evident for years, seems more immediate. The paper now has one news blogger, two features writers, a music editor, a few people working on listings and one critic, aided by a couple contributors, writing about food.
The layoffs at the Voice weren’t the only ones: papers across the Village Voice Media company, which owns more or less every notable alternative weekly nowadays, experienced layoffs, I’ve learned, including those in Minneapolis, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and Broward-Palm Beach. The Voice itself is planning to move out of its iconic East Village office space in the near future, as I and other staff members found out last year. There have been many ends of an era for a paper that always prided itself at being on the vanguard, but this one seems permanent and final: “I can’t imagine how much leaner they can get,” said a friend of mine who was recently let go from the Dallas Observer.
At the Voice, people found out the hard way. They tried to log onto their accounts and couldn’t. This happened to blogger Victoria Bekiempis and to reporter Steven Thrasher, who still hadn’t spoken with his boss when I called him at 5:30 Friday evening; he learned the extent of the news through texts and tweets, he said. It was a harsh way to go, but fit what the Voice has become.
I was never much of a rebel. Attending an all-boys Catholic high school, it was near impossible to affect the style and mannerisms of the counterculture. I wore my hair short, a clip-on tie, Sears dress pants that rode high, and imitation wing tips for shoes. But that didn’t matter to me or the half dozen friends I hung out with who went to demonstrations against the war, smoked dope with hippie chicks, and most of all, immersed ourselves in the music of revolution.
We might not have looked like a vanguard of the counterculture, but there was one outward manifestation of our rebellion that signaled our belonging: we gathered once a week and pored over the latest issue of The Village Voice.
The politics didn’t interest us much. Our anti-war “activism” was based on the proposition that pretty girls attended the demonstrations and what better way to meet them and get to know them in the biblical sense than standing next to a comely lass screaming anti-war slogans and “Right On!” after some particular inanity coming from a speaker.
Ahh, the “Village Voice”…
Page 1-25: 17 different articles about how women are made into sex objects by the evil capitalist system.
Page 25-48: “massage parlor” and “escort” ads.
Back in the day, they had the most entertaining dirty ads in the business.
– to (fill in the city) Weekly. Hypocrites. Hurray for the days of consortin’ with the low hippie chicks, however.
The Village Voice: guidance for those who nonconform in lockstep.
Exactly: “Hey Dad, I wanna be *different*…you know, just like everyone else!”
VV used to have a civil liberties columnist (name has slipped my mind at the moment) who was consistent — when the Right did something good on CL, he’d acknowledge it, and when the Left did something bad on CL, he’d condemn it.
Aside from that, the Left has always condemned the US for being “fascist” while at the same time they want at least a fascist state, if not worse
rbj, are you thinking Nat Hentoff?
I too grew up on the Voice. Then went on to write for Rolling Stone in the Seventies.
(But that, as some Elizabethan said, was in another country. And beside the wench is dead.)
Worth noting ia that most renowned Voice columnist when I was a kid was Nat Hentoff, who certainly hasn’t been a liberal or leftist for years. Change (not the Obama kind) is good.
Hentoff is who I was thinking of. Has he really moved right, or has the left moved radical?
Stranger still: Hentoff was a man of principle, to be applied equally to friend and foe. ….Another anachronism lost to time?
Stranger still, he was a man of principle, applied equally to friend and foe. This, too, now seems a relic of another age, especially on the left.
Hentoff still has a link from Drudgereport. He’s actually on the right-wing wnd.com site, but he’s mostly writing from an ACLU type of perspective (afraid for our losses in 1st and 4th Amendment rights, as much under Obama as Bush). Apart from his opposition to abortion, I think he’s still mostly on the left.
As a wannabe sax player in the 60′s I also grew up as an avid reader of the Voice; Hentoff, Feiffer, The Stonewall riots, etc. It was a good read back then but gradually lost it’s edge-or maybe it was just me that changed.
LA Weekly seems very healthy, if an inch-thick wad of advertising every week is any indication. They even manage an interesting article about once a month, besides club ads and massage parlors.
It’s “pored” over, not poured, unless it was syrup.
The Voice was born partially in the wake of the demise of PM, the far left newspaper David Axelrod’s mom worked for in New York back in the 1940s. And the reason why the left in New York wanted an alternative ‘advocacy’ paper was that the remaining liberal papers in the city — including the Post and the Times — just weren’t hyperbolic enough for that crowd.
The double ironies look at present day media in New York, is that while the left knows and vilifies the fact that Rupert Murdoch bought the Post in 1976 and turned it into the city’s conservative paper, they forget that Murdoch bought the Voice the following year and didn’t do anything to its ideology, which should have blown up their talking points about Rupert being the right-wing eviscerator of press freedom and progressive thought worldwide, but the left doesn’t surrender its most cherished narratives easily. The other irony is that while the Post has moved right, the Times under Pinch for the past 20-plus years has moved head-first into the type of liberal advocacy journalism Punch and his dad tried to avoid for the most part in the 1955-88 period.
Aside from the decline of big city newspapers in general, now that The Paper of Record is throwing out the same sort of hyperbolic, partisan accusatory news articles as the Voice did, while championing alternative lifestyles and arts that mix their politics with entertainment, what’s the point of the Voice other than those back page sex ads?
I think the last time I bought a Village Voice was at a small PX at Tank Hill, Fort Jackson back in ’79. (It was forthwith unceremoniously confiscated, never to be seen again, by my drill sergeant before I could even rumple its pages.)
Wasn’t Karen Silkwood en route to the Voice when she mysteriously died in a car that went off the road on an Oklahoma highway?