Deep Dive
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Hey, it's Michael Owenshire. You're listening to the On The Media Midweek Podcast. The big show this week is all about the rise and fall of the alt-weekly, the type of offbeat, fearless publication that, once upon a time, you could pick up on a street corner in cities across the country.
I interviewed Trisha Romano, the author of a new oral history titled The Freaks Came Out to Write, the definitive history of the village voice, the radical paper that changed American culture. Our conversation about this legendary New York publication was wide-ranging and too long for the radio and too profane for the radio. So we're bringing you a longer, uncensored version here. Don't listen to this one with kids.
Trisha, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. The book begins with the very scrappy origins of The Village Voice in 1955. It was founded by editor Dan Wolf, a psychologist, and publisher Ed Fancher, and the
the writer Norman Mailer, who used money from his 1948 debut novel The Naked and the Dead to get the paper off the ground. Jerry Tallmer and John Wilcock were two early key editors and writers. What kind of paper did they set out to create? They wanted to create a paper that reflected the Greenwich Village that they knew and loved.
beatnik culture and jazz and writers like James Baldwin, they didn't see anything that reflected that in the media landscape at all. They wanted to put out something they wanted to read.
Also, they were very anti-Tammany Hall, which was the Democratic political machine in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. And they did not like the guy that represented that area, Carmine DiSapio. And they wanted to push forward a different kind of government, different kind of representation. That was like the two reasons they really started it.
In the first page of your book, you feature this quote from editor Dan Wolfe.
The Village Voice was originally conceived as a living, breathing attempt to demolish the notion that one needs to be a professional to accomplish something in a field as purportedly technical as journalism. It was a philosophical position. We wanted to jam the gears of creeping automatism. So tell me a little bit about Wolfe's preference for hiring amateurs. How did it influence the style and the content of the paper at the beginning? He was more interested in
people who could write. So he was more interested in literature versus reporting. And journalism at that time was very much who, what, where, why, when. Your reporting skills were more valued than your writing skills.
If you've ever gone to journalism school or done very straight news reporting, it's almost like constructing a puzzle piece rather than it is writing lyrically in any way. So he and Norman Mailer also leaned towards writers writing. And they knew that if you loved something and you were passionate about a subject, you were going to bring that passion to the voice.
in a way that an objective newspaper reporter really wasn't even allowed to. Give me a couple examples of people who fit in at The Village Voice, helped define its style, but probably wouldn't have gotten hired at one of its competitors. You've got Jules Feiffer, who was the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist who wrote
these satirical, very adult comics about relationships between men and women called Sick, Sick, Sick. And he literally says that no one would publish anything he was working on. And they told him they really liked it, but that he needed to go get famous first before they would publish him. But The Voice was like, oh, we love these. These are great. And so they started running them every week and they ran them for free. He got paid nothing for many years.
He was somebody that a lot of people picked up the paper for from the beginning. And then Jonas Mikas, the Lithuanian refugee who was an avant-garde filmmaker and director and hosted loft parties and showed Andy Warhol films. He walked in one day and says, how come you don't have any columns on cinema? They said, I don't know. Why don't you do it?
So he started doing that. And then, you know, you had Richard Goldstein that comes along later, and he is the first rock critic by many people's calculations. And he is actually one of the few people who actually did go to journalism school, which he tried to hide. Yeah.
Because it seemed like a square? Yeah. Well, you know, he was the weirdo at his journalism school. He had long hair and he tells a joke how to mess with the instructors. He would put a sugar cube on his desk. Because they would think it was acid. Yes.
He was embedded in the early rock scene and hanging out with Warhol and the Velvet Underground and all those people. And he wrote about what he was passionate about, music that he was passionate about. And he used first person, he used reporting techniques.
He quickly became very well known for this because that music was just starting to explode. From December 1962 to March 1963, seven major daily newspapers in New York went on strike. No news is bad news to eight million New Yorkers when strikes closed down their daily papers.
Manhattanites who pride themselves on being the best informed people on earth get little information on what's going on in the next block, let alone in the rest of the world.
The Voice didn't. And since it was available on newsstands, it kind of like stood out to New Yorkers outside of Greenwich Village for the first time, leading to a spike in its circulation from about 28,000 to 35,000. People don't understand, right? Like in a day right now when, say, a bunch of papers go on strike, there's all kinds of news outlets we can turn to to find out what's going on. But when...
The vast majority of the written publications are not producing anything. And all you've got is this little weird thing downtown. Because of its original MO, it was for The Village magazine.
And you suddenly have a much larger audience. And that audience discovers, oh, they're covering stuff that I go to or I'd like to go to and I don't read about it anywhere else. And so we suddenly got more advertising and a greater audience from that.
It just grew from there. The paper was, roughly speaking, divided into the front of the book, which was the news coverage, and the back of the book, which was more arts and culture. One of the early news reporters is this amazing woman, Mary Perot Nichols, who started at the paper in 1958. Right.
Her origin story at the paper, it turns out, is not that unusual. She kind of just like walked in through the front door, right? Yeah. That's what a lot of people did. They just would walk into the office. They would just come in and be like, hey, do you know about this thing? Or why aren't you covering this or that? And she was a mother who lived nearby and...
Her and a group of other mothers would hang out in Washington Square Park, one of them being Jane Jacobs. This is the time when Robert Moses was trying to
either build highways through that area or cars all the way through the park. I mean, he just had this vision for the city that was much more car-centric and would have bulldozed the lower part of Manhattan as we know it now. And she began going into The Voice and saying, why aren't you covering this?
After a few tries, they said, why don't you do it? And she had literally no reporting skills and had never done that before. But...
She apparently loved the research and she loved the hunt. Robert Moses, of course, was an incredibly powerful urban planner in New York City for decades. What happened to his attempt to turn the beloved Washington Square Park into just another thoroughfare? Well, a lot of what Mary did was advocate against it every week in the Village Voice and getting the neighbors involved, getting especially a lot of the women who were using that park every day with their kids, changing
block it. And eventually, politically, she was able to convince a lot of the mafia to
store owners also who would have been affected to block it as well. And so he backed off. That's wild. You don't think of like a newspaper reporter as calling up a mob boss in your neighborhood and saying you should be against this local policy. Yeah. She would put it to them like, look, you know, all those people that pay tribute to you, meaning all the people that he got money from or they got money from,
They're not going to be there anymore. Like, none of those stores will be there. That restaurant won't be there. So you're going to lose money. After her years working as a writer at the Village Voice, she went on to work with the Parks Commission under Mayor John Lindsay, which is how she got access to Robert Moses's old papers when he was Park Commissioner. And...
I didn't know this, but she actually calls up the investigative writer Robert Caro, who until this point had not been able to get access to the records himself. And she says, basically, you didn't know this, Robert Caro, but there's this huge archive of Moses's correspondence when he was in government. And this phone call was arguably the birth of Robert Caro's iconic book, The Power Broker.
Yes. One of the writers for The Voice that I interviewed, Clark Weldon, he was there when Mary was there at The Voice. He said she was very nosy. She got into a storage area under Central Park itself. There was an iron door built into a stone wall.
And she said, what's behind there? And they said, oh, it's just a bunch of old records and things. She said, I want to see it. She was very curious, very nosy person, great newswoman. So they opened the iron door, and there was a cave-like room, gigantic room, full of file cabinets with papers. So she started opening the filing cabinets, and lo and behold...
They're the files of Robert Moses. So she was very into figuring out information and looking probably where she shouldn't, and that's how she found it. The offices of the Village Voice were right next to the Stonewall Inn. Voice reporters were there in 1969 and covered when the bar was raided in an event that sparked the modern-day gay rights movement.
How did The Voice cover the Stonewall uprising? And why were they targeted by the gay rights movement in the so-called Zaps? Since the office was right there, all the writers could see what was happening from the windows. So back in the day, gay bars were not allowed. Also, I should say, most of the gay bars, if not all of them, were owned by the mafia.
So it was sort of this game that the police and the mafia would play, which was they'd go raid the gay bar and the mafia would pay off the police and then the bar would reopen. But in this case, they were raided and the patrons were fed up.
And they said, this is ridiculous. And they started getting kind of roughly handled by the police outside. And there were more of them than police. And Howard Smith went inside. He was kind of like a nightlife reporter on the scene in the 60s and 70s. He was inside with the police.
And he wrote from that perspective. And Lucian Truska, who was walking home, wrote from the outside. And, you know, they are both straight white men. And the way they covered it was both with more seriousness and length than you would see in any other publication. There were two, probably 1,200-word-something articles inside the paper, whereas any other paper, I think, maybe ran a little squib length.
And no one was there. But they used words that we would find offensive today. The headline was forces of and then the F slur that's offensive today. But it was offensive then, too. And gay readers of the news coverage were not happy with it. They were not happy with that. And they were also not happy with the fact that The Voice wouldn't take ads that said the word gay anymore.
So they were zapped, zapped meaning like protested. And the voices offices were pretty transparent. The windows, I think, were showing to the street and they just sort of...
disrupted the meetings and such long enough that Dan Wolf, the editor-in-chief, was like, okay, I guess we got to deal with this. That was a learning lesson for The Voice, and it happened much sooner than it did for other media. And one of the sort of internal agitators at The Voice, who was quite critical of the homophobic language that was used in its coverage of Stonewall,
was Richard Goldstein, who you've already mentioned. He was arguably the paper and America's first real rock critic. He was a gay man who helped shape the music writing of the paper. In addition to Goldstein, there was Robert Criscow, who joined in the late 1960s as a rock critic and columnist. And he went on to be the paper's longtime music editor. He jokingly referred to himself as the, quote, dean of American rock critics, which would be this kind of...
nickname that would follow him around for the rest of his career. These guys hung out around the village, including the iconic bar and venue CBGB, where they hung out with, you know, Lou Reed and Patti Smith and saw early shows of Blondie and the Ramones. How did these early rock writers help create the genre of music criticism as we understand it today?
When Richard comes along, he's around the same time or just before Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy.
Rock and roll was considered like kids' music or teens' music. It wasn't taken seriously. And Richard and then Robert Christel and later James Wolcott, they believed that it should be treated with the same seriousness as, you know, the opera or literature. They applied those type of critiques to music.
a genre that was just growing, rock music. Chris Gale especially, when he took over the music section, he really had a vision for what the section could be. And by that time, Rolling Stone is much bigger and it's flourishing. And so now there starts to be a lot more people writing about music in a serious way. So he starts recruiting people and he creates this
Bold section. And James Wolcott, who's now a very well-known writer who worked at Vanity Fair and is also writing for Airmail,
He was like 20 or something, just working on the circulation desk or the front desk. But he was going out every night. That's what you do in New York when you're in your early 20s. And CBGB was not very far away from The Voice's office. And it was where you went to see local bands, great new music. And those bands just happened to be
legendary or they would become legendary in part because the voice was shining a light on them. They weren't the only one, but they were certainly the local outlet to do that. And it was like television, talking heads, Blondie, Ramones, all that stuff happening every night.
And James Wolcott just started writing about CBGB. And that was in part because Robert Criscow gave him a chance. Robert Criscow would later become known for his consumer guides, where he gave new albums a letter grade, like, you know, A, B, or C, or whatever. And as one of the men you quote in the book describes it, Criscow was hated by bands because he was so honest and he was so brutal. His album grades were so influential that
over the years have responded to his criticism. There's a famous live performance of Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed from 1978. He's kind of vamping while playing the song, and he says this about Robert Criscow. What does Robert Criscow do in bed? I mean, is he a toe fucker? We're probably not going to be able to use this. Man, anal retentive. A consumer's guide to rock. Nice little boxes. B-plus.
Imagine working for fucking Yee and you got a B-plus from an asshole in the village. I've never heard the whole thing. That's amazing. Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore clearly did not like a negative grade from Chris Gow and made it known in the band's 1983 single, Kill Your Idols. Do you want to describe the lyrics from that song? How do we say that for the general audience?
He says, I don't know why you want to impress Chris Gow. Let that shit die. You know the real title of that song is like Robert Chris Gow stuck my fucking dick. I'm not going to look at it. Can I click that? I don't know.
I think it's, I killed Chris Gow with my big fucking dick. Yeah. Amazing. And, you know, later he went on, of course, to give Sonic Youth, like, really good reviews. You know, the thing about Bob, which is different than a lot of music writers, is that he did not want to be friends or friendly with the band's.
because his gruff exterior belies a very soft interior. And if he liked somebody as a person and then hated the record or had to be critical of it, he felt bad. And so he found it easier to be just...
completely apart from the bands. I learned from your book that it wasn't really until the 1970s where the paper became more professional. Dan Wolfe and Ed Fancher, during this time, sold their controlling interest, and Clay Felker, the founder and editor of New York Magazine, bought the paper in 1984. He became the editor-in-chief, much to the chagrin of some of the village voice writers at the time, who saw themselves as more downtown, while New York Magazine was kind of more outlandish.
uptown and catered to the fancy people and sensibilities of uptown life. Then Clay Felker sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing media mogul in 1977. People at The Voice freaked out. The staff ended up unionizing. And the unionization effort was really interesting in part because of some of the progressive measures the union was able to
to advocate for? The Voice was part of a package. It was New York Magazine and The Village Voice. And Rupert Murdoch didn't really want The Village Voice. He wanted New York Magazine. But come to find out, New York Magazine is actually not the moneymaker The Voice is. So when he took over, the New York Magazine staff was fired.
And the voice staff freaked out. And so when they formed this union, it was a major step up until that point. Dan Wolf, the original owners, they did not believe in unions. They were like, well, we're all family here. You could just come in and talk to me if you have problems.
The thing is, when Dan and Ed Bancher, the publisher, sold it the first time to Carter Burden, they made money. They made a couple million, I think, like three million. And the staff was furious because they were being paid peanuts. In some cases, Pfeiffer, he was paid nothing for years and years and years.
And so they felt like they should have some of the spoils. And that created an animosity, I think, towards owners. And so when Ruben Murdoch comes in, they're like ready. After a few years...
Jeff Weinstein's at a meeting, union meeting, and they're talking about health care. And we had a thing where if you had a live-in partner, they could be on your health care. Somebody that you're dating but who you're not married to. Yes. They could get on your health care program. And Jeff Weinstein was like, well, why wouldn't it count gay people? That was a big thing in their negotiations to get spousal benefits. Yes.
for unmarried couples and extend that to gay couples. And they got it. Murdoch was like, can we not trumpet this? And the lawyer was like, oh no, but they are going to trumpet this. They're going to trumpet it specifically. This was really fascinating to me because even before the union negotiations started,
Rupert Murdoch, at the same time that he's like kind of squawking at the editors for covering gay life as a normal part of New York life, he ultimately approves this really progressive influential provision in the union contract that allows gay couples at the paper to share health insurance. And you suggest in the book that this might have actually been
played an important role in the ultimate same-sex marriage movement. Yeah. I mean, as far as they know, they're definitely the first newspaper that did it and possibly the first organization at all that did it. And,
There were certain guidelines and, you know, it had to be notarized that you were a couple living together. I think, you know, it wasn't just like you could get your friend on it. That's the foundation to some degree of the ultimate gay marriage law that was passed and upheld by the Supreme Court. You mentioned that Rupert Murdoch saw that the Village Voice was more of a moneymaker than New York Magazine. How did the paper make real money?
Well, I mean, for many, many years, apartment ads, the classified ads in the back of the paper were basically a form of printing money. That was a source of...
It come for decades for The Voice. And for a long time, people lined up at Astor Place on Tuesday night waiting in line to get the first edition of the paper so they could get a jump on apartment ads. Yes, there was this quote from Jackie Rudin in your book who worked in advertising who said, quote, People found their lives through The Village Voice, whether it was a partner or a job or an apartment or whatever. Blondie and Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band mentioned
found their drummers through classified ads in the Village Voice. The Max Weinberg story is really great because, you know, he was a very well-trained, jazzy drummer. Who was auditioning to be Bruce Springsteen's drummer. Yes. Everybody got a half hour in the audition. He got there and he ended up doing like three hours of
He didn't know that it was unusual. He thought everybody was getting that kind of audition. And at some point, Bruce says, where are you from? And Max Weinberg is like, Jersey. He's like, that's good. He didn't know that that was the best thing he could have said. The best thing he could have said. So, you know, Max Weinberg was like, the Bill's voice changed my life.
And also, I think Kiss found one of their bandmates in The Voice. I mean, there's more than that. I only barely scratched the surface. That's where you would post. There's no Craigslist. There's no Facebook Marketplace, no Twitter. There's nothing like that. That's where you would post your Help Wanted ads. And musicians did the same thing as some office looking for a secretary.
Your book outlines this kind of rift at the paper between the mostly white male reporters who covered the news for the front of the book, the so-called white boys, as they were known, and the feminist and gay writers who mostly covered arts and culture in the back of the book.
You write about this really interesting episode in 1986 when Robert Friedman, the editor of the paper, made the call to put performance artist Karen Finley on the cover of the paper. What was so provocative about this cover story and what conflict did it spur? The article was written by Cynthia Carr, who went by C. Carr, and she had had a column about performance art for several years and she
She came to Richard Goldstein and her editor, Karen Durbin, and said, there's this performance artist I really want to cover. She's pretty controversial. I think you should come see her. And the thing that she was known for was using food
as a reference point and she would often be naked or partially naked or wear like little prom dresses and she would crush the food on her body while she sort of had this incantation kind of possessing the male voice. It's one of those things you really have to see to understand.
Cynthia Carr writes this story and they decide to put it on the cover. And she was just posing with her dog. It's a very pretty cover shot. But you have to realize back then, papers are finite and space is finite. And so what gets on the cover is a big thing. It's a big deal. And at the time, Pete Hamill, who's
One of the famous columnists in New York journalism worked at Daily News. And he was like a star. And he sort of led this charge against this piece because he saw it as unworthy of being on the cover because it wasn't real journalism in his eyes. And it diminished the hard news that all the guys in the front of the book did. He never even saw the work.
But he wrote like a full page denouncing the story and the work and the idea of the art that she was doing. It was really, I mean, obscenity seemed like kind of deliberate in this performance. Do you want to describe what she was doing with the yams? She was using canned yams. And so she would kind of push them on her body while she was talking. And one of the pieces was called Yams Up My Granny's Ass.
It was sexually explicit and meant to be provocative. And it was a commentary on the male gaze and objectification of women and
etc. And, you know, it's just the kind of thing that those guys, it just is going to go over their heads. So they led this charge. It was him, Nat Hentoff, Barrett, Newfield. These are like some of the heavy hitter investigative reporters. Wayne Barrett, who, you know, wrote about Trump. Jack Newfield, who did the Worst Judges and Worst Landlords series. Nat Hentoff, the infamous First Amendment writer who later came out against
abortion. All these guys were like heightened at the paper by this time. And they go marching in and say, how can you put this filth on the front? And not really understanding that their city was very different from the city that Cynthia Carr was in. But they were both in the same city. Du Bois was a reflection of that, of Manhattan, of Brooklyn, of the moment that New York was in.
So the front of the book left graffiti in the office, in the bathroom. They left cans of yams everywhere on desks and around the cubicles everywhere.
And they had a softball team and there was a softball tournament. And when the voice won, the trophy had a can of yams on it. It was the whole thing. And what was the point? To mock the paper for running the cover story? Yes. And it was childish. And the more upset the back of the book got, the more the front of the book would push it, vice versa. It's interesting to note that the front of the book wasn't as big, right?
I mean, literally space-wise, as the back of the book. The back of the book was all the listings and the film reviews and the music and the theater and art and dance, all of it. It just didn't make the cover as often. Cynthia Carr was like, if it hadn't made the cover, I don't even know if they would have realized it was in the paper. But because it was on the cover, they were furious.
You're describing this tension at the paper and reading the book, it felt to me like there was this sort of constant hum of struggle where on one hand you have the village voice as this
very radical, very progressive paper. And yet we keep seeing moments where it's kind of failing to live up to its own values. On one hand, the paper is celebrating great black music. And on the other hand, there were very few people of color writing for the paper in its first couple decades. The paper was among the first to write about abortion. It had this great stable of feminist writers like Ellen Willis, Laurie Stone, Karen Durbin, and Mark. And yet it's
internally they face derision from their own colleagues.
the paper had these pioneering gay writers, even as the Village Voice is publishing homophobic slurs in its coverage of the Stonewall uprising. You know, it was a constant learning process, I think, for the people on the paper and the people reading it, right? And the fact that they didn't really have any Black writers until Stanley Crouch shows up is crazy.
I think it was 1976 or something. Basically 20 years in. Yeah. They wrote about black causes. Wayne Barrett, the reporter that covered Trump and Giuliani and Jack Newfield, who wrote about worst landlords and the worst judges. And Nat Hentoff, who got his start writing about jazz.
They were all very much about civil rights and were a big part of that movement. But they were sort of blind to the fact that there were really no black people at the paper. Right.
And no one seemed to figure that out. And so Schneiderman, David Schneiderman, who is an op-ed editor at the New York Times in the 70s, comes on board and he's the editor-in-chief. And he says, what? This is the progressive village voice and there are no black people on staff? And then they also got investigated by a government agency for this. So they had to take action.
And the thing is, right around that time is when hip hop is sort of born. And Robert Criskell is given a name by one of the first black editors at the paper, Shalani Davis, in the name of Greg Tate. And Greg Tate is this unbelievable cultural critic. And hip hop helped usher in a whole bunch of black writers into the paper. Carol Cooper,
Barry Michael Cooper, not related. They're covering hip-hop. Later, Barry Michael Cooper becomes more of an investigative reporter and covers the crack epidemic and does a story that is New Jack City that becomes the movie. They also have writers like Nelson George and Lisa Jones, who writes a cultural column about race. Lisa Kennedy, who is the film editor, she...
joins the paper in the 80s. So by the mid-80s, it becomes a focal point for Black writing. And Hilton Owls joins the paper. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic now at The New Yorker. It just opens the doors to these voices. And once a group of people come in, they have friends and they know people who are writers and they get introduced and it just grows.
But for decades, there was nothing. And it still was a very, quote unquote, white paper, even towards its end.
I'm going to jump way ahead to the 2000s when we're starting to see cracks in the Village Voice, its business model. Anil Dash, now a famous technologist and writer, joined the Village Voice in 2001. And this is when Craigslist, the classified ads website, was first becoming a thing. And then 9-11 happens. How did the internet and 9-11 converge together?
to ruin the Village Voice's whole business model.
It ruined all of the Alt Weekly or free paper business models, really. When Anil and Akash Goyal, who is essentially an online editor, when they were telling me this story, my jaw dropped because the timing is just so crazy. So Anil gets to The Voice in the summer of 2001. And it happens to be the summer that Craigslist is about to hard launch in New York. And he came from San Francisco and he knew what was coming. And
And he's telling them, "You guys, we're about to get disrupted in a major way." And people ignored this. He's like, "I felt like Chicken Little." - So like the second work day, my third day there, Craigslist launched in New York. And I'm just talking to somebody, I'm like, "Hey, what are we doing about Craigslist?" And it was like, "Who's Craig? "What are you talking about?" And I couldn't articulate why it mattered so much. Like I couldn't tell people like, "The whole world is about to change.
And it's these weird, janky looking websites like Craigslist. I felt like Chicken Little, you know what I mean? Like a cat running around being like, the internet is coming. I mean, it was just because it sounds crazy, right? Like you sound like a crazy person. But then 9-11 happens and Google News wasn't a thing yet. But people wanted immediate information at that point. They didn't want to wait until the next day.
They wanted to find their relatives or their loved ones that worked in the towers or nearby. And that's when people started pushing out news a lot faster online.
So the combination of those two things starts to render print not necessarily useless, but slow and behind. When 9-11 happens, there's a little bit of a recession in New York, especially like people leaving or not moving into it as much. I mean, we had anthrax scares still going on and people were afraid of the subway bombs and everything.
It was a really tense time. And the apartment ads stopped being placed with the same level and the same numbers that they were before. And then you have Craigslist saying, hey, you don't need to mail in or call anyone or fax your listing to some number. You can just post it directly online and it's free.
And so a lot of people just shifted to that. And the apartment ads never recovered after that. They still had them, but the shift to Craigslist was well underway. If that's like the easiest way to make money, like we were talking about earlier in the 70s, and that's gone, you have to figure out something fast.
And I don't think any of the legacy media and journalism ever pivoted fast enough.
And that's partially why I think we're in the situation we are now, where you have layoff after layoff after layoff after layoff. In 2005, Village Voice Media, which at this point was owned by a financial management group along with six other Alt Weeklys, merged with The New Times, a newspaper chain. They became the biggest company of Alt Weeklys with 17 papers.
The New Times had long coveted the Village Voice, but once it bought Village Voice Media, it eventually started kind of...
Picking it apart limb by limb. Yeah, it was very weird. It was sort of like I never understood what they were doing because if you wanted something so badly, why would you alter it in such an extreme way? It was sort of like they just wanted the logo and the name. But that logo and name only has value because of what was there when you bought it. This collection of voices. Yeah.
that made it the village voice. And those voices changed. Some people came and went, but there's a core sensibility that they just didn't get. And there was some arrogance to them. And I think also insecurity, like,
They think there were these cowboys from the West Coast and we don't know anything. We're going to show them. But the thing is, New York is a different animal from any of these other cities. They just didn't get that. And they also wanted to put their own template on everything.
And New Yorkers are going to rebel against anything that's templated and one-sized is all. And they started to lose advertisers. I know for a fact that over the course of the year and a half that I was there while they were still making changes to it, we had six editors or something. And one of the editors, he was putting stuff on the cover that was just not right for the paper. And advertisers were fleeing. It's like, you got to know what you don't know.
And they just were too arrogant to listen. Right after that, it was a financial crisis and coinciding all of that with the Craigslist and decline of print in general. It's just the perfect mixture for the paper to become weaker and weaker and weaker until it barely has any presence. In 2017, the print paper for The Voice was shut down. And a year later, it seemed like the digital version was dead too.
until 2020 when it was revived by a new crop of ownership. I think we can confidently say that the village voice of old is gone. What's the latest iteration like? It's a zombie. The person that owns it is a guy named Brian Callie. He has a bunch of neighborhood newspapers. And he had bought the LA Weekly, I think, in 2017. This last weekend, I think he just gutted the whole staff, like 15 people. Yeah.
That was a place that the Voice website was pulling a lot of material from. Like they were cross-posting a lot of the art and music and film reviews that the LA Weekly was running. And the Voice, to my knowledge, only has one employee, and that's R.C. Baker, who is essentially the editor, and they run some freelance pieces. So it's just this sort of
there. But it's not present in the city the way it should be. And this is true of many Alt Weeklys around the country. More and more are shutting down each year, and the ones that remain are often very, very lean.
What do you think we lose when this kind of fiercely independent local paper with personality, with perspective, with its finger on the pulse dries up? I think The Voice was a guide to life. It was a very curated, edited guide to a specific kind of life in New York City at specific times. That collection of knowledge from people who cared about what they were covering was
with such intensity that there were fistfights and brawls inside the paper. That's gone. Now you can kind of pick and choose what you want to read about or what you're interested in or just whatever comes up on your Twitter stream or on your social media or TikTok. It doesn't have this cohesive viewpoint. Everything you need to know and everything you need in life is in this thing that you can hold in your hand.
And that doesn't exist anymore. You're saying it existed with the voice, but it doesn't exist with a literal handheld phone? Yeah.
No, I mean, it's not the same when you're on your phone and you're like reading article from this place, getting a Facebook event from that place. It doesn't have the same power, in my opinion. Like, I don't even know what's going on anymore in my neighborhood or in my city. It's not the same as picking up a weekly newspaper and flipping through it and being like, oh, so-and-so's coming to town and...
oh, I want to go see that play. And, you know, I read that about that book. Maybe I'll go pick that up. It was just all there. You didn't have to like go to a hundred different sources to find it. The subtitle of your book is
Includes the phrase, the radical paper that changed American culture. So how is journalism today influenced by The Village Voice? I mean, I think it's all around us, right? The first person writing that came to really be embodied by blogging in the early aughts.
the deep critical thinking about music, pop music, taking off-guard film and independent film seriously or more seriously than superhero or mainstream blockbusters. That's a Village Voice thing. I think, obviously, the uncovering of Trump was something that Village Voice did first. The Village Voice is all around us now.
Every media entity owes something to the Village Voices legacy, whether it's what they're covering or how they're covering it. I mean, even the New York Times.
is writing about stuff in a way that The Voice would have written about it in the 80s. And they're writing about the kind of stuff that The Voice would have covered in the 80s or 90s. That is a relatively new development. The style section was definitely something that was created as a response to The Voice. Trisha, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
Trisha Romano is the author of the new book, The Freaks Came Out to Write. Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. Tune into The Big Show this Friday for even more delicious dirt from the lost world of the Alt Weekly. Keep up with the show by following us on Instagram and threads. I'm Michael Onger.