The Village Voice As We Knew Her Is Dead (For Real This Time)

NEW YORK, NY — The print edition of the Village Voice, the nation's first alt-weekly paper and a pioneer in contrarian New York City journalism whose icon and influence cannot be overstated, died suddenly on Tuesday, Aug. 22, at the age of 61. News of her death was delivered, rather unceremoniously, via a Twitter pic of a press release that had been handed out at an impromptu Village Voice staff meeting that afternoon.

She is survived by an editorial staff of 22 and a production team of 27 — most of whom, like the people of the city, were forced to learn she had passed in the aforementioned press release and otherwise had literally no idea what was going on.

"They told us nothing else and have not announced an end-date for publication," one bewildered editor said over email Tuesday. "Nobody on staff knows what that future might look like or how may issues we should be planning ahead for."

The Voice as we knew her best — printed weekly and stacked in newsstands across NYC — died at the hands of Philadelphia millionaire Peter Barbey, who vowed when he purchased her from a previous owner that she'd "survive and prosper." Now, less than two years after the sale, she's no longer "viable" in physical form, Barbey said Tuesday. However, her "iconic progressive brand" will live on as a website and event company, he said.

So the red lady as we knew her is gone. For real this time. But as every writer — and reader — who's ever loved and left the Village Voice will tell you, the paper died countless mini-deaths before Barbey's final blow. It's an NYC media tradition nearly as rich as the personal essay on leaving New York: Announce the Voice has betrayed you; memorialize her finer days; and declare her, as did the deserter before you, dead in grit and relevance.

"The Voice has been dying since pretty much the day it was founded," Zach Baron, who left circa 2011 and now writes for GQ, tweeted Tuesday.

The paper's earliest years were perhaps the exception. In the 1950s and '60s, according to the New Yorker, the Voice — founded by Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher — grew into a first-of-its-kind, almost internet-like sparring ground for rascally political columnists. And in the 1970s, it pioneered the counterintuitive liberal takedown, attacking unions and other institutions its sister papers wouldn't touch. The Voice had become "the medium through which a mainstream middle-class readership stayed in touch with its inner bohemian."

Then, in 1977, the paper was purchased by Rupert Murdoch. He would be the first in a long line of rich dudes who "imagined that they could do better with a business plan than its founders had done from desperation and instinct," in the words of the New Yorker.

Still, through the '80s, '90s and 2000s, the Voice's all-star editorial staff kept it on the cutting edge — dropping investigative bombshells, holding the powerful to account and banging out some of the best damn nonfiction in American history. Readers got all that, plus a built-in directory of cool shows and apartments for rent and queer, sexy people nearby. If you read the Voice, you were a little bit better at New York.

But the city's flagship alt-weekly, like many local papers, never quite recovered from the Great Recession and the transformation of the info economy. "Ad revenue was decimated — they literally could not afford to keep that many people on staff," Mark Schoofs, who snagged the Voice a Pulitzer during his near-decade as a staff writer in the '90s, said by phone Tuesday.

"It's amazing how many great journalists still got their start at the Voice, even as it lost its ad revenue," Schoofs said. "But you need money to do journalism."

When legendary city reporter Wayne Barrett was laid off in 2011 — and the great Tom Robbins quit in solidarity — the paper "lost Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle,” lamented Don Forst, editor of the Voice from 1996 to 2005. “It was a great institution for what it was," he said. At Robbins' office send-off party, he famously told remaining staff: “Newspapers will break your heart."

Indeed. In 2012, when longtime film critic J. Hoberman was cut in another round of layoffs, he said: "It’s safe to say that I’ll never love an institution as much as I first loved the Voice — because there is unlikely to ever be an institution like that Voice again, unfortunately." With that, Rosie Gray, a former news blogger now at BuzzFeed, declared: "The Voice, dying for so long, seems finally on the verge of actual collapse."

But there would be more carnage yet. After another set of brutal layoffs in 2013 that included gay nightlife guru Michael Musto, arguably the paper's last big name-in-lights, Baron, now at GQ, wrote:

My Voice died in 2006, before I even really started working there. Someone else’s Voice died when I left, or when Camille Dodero left, or Rob Harvilla, or Allison Benedikt — it is always someone’s golden age there, even now, with the staff down to 15 or so people. Someone will some day speak rapturously about working with Stephanie Zacharek in the long ago year of 2013, and why not?

The Village Voice has a way of making true believers out of everyone. One entertaining phenomenon over time has been watching editor after editor switch sides — most recently, Will Bourne and Jessica Lustig, who both walked out in after less than a year on the job, in defense of a paper and a staff they barely knew. Or rather — my guess — they knew it all too well, and that’s why they left, like Mailer, or Tom Robbins, or Tejal Rao and Nick Pinto, both of whom seem to have quit the paper while I was writing this. A big part of loving the Village Voice is leaving it.

It will always have been a great paper. Not now, but just before now. That will be true if it folds tomorrow or in another fifty years. It broke your heart already. That’s the beauty of the place. I miss it, and don’t miss it at all.

Yep. Just as every nostalgic ex-scenester tends to believe American art and bohemia happened to peak right at the time and place of his own self-discovery, all those who've entered and exited the Voice's orbit seem to remember the paper at its most glorious during their personal golden age of creative exploration and activism. No era can feel quite as important as the one in which you fell in love with the Voice, and the city, and yourself.

Now that the print edition is good and dead, though — now that its obituary has been written by the only guy with the actual power to shut off the presses — perhaps we can appreciate it for all the timely gifts it gave through all our various eras. Yes, even Backpage era. Barbey era, too. The Voice was always alive for someone.

And who knows? Maybe the online edition will inspire this same kind of awe in generations of NYC writers and thinkers to come. “The most powerful thing about The Voice wasn’t that it was printed on newsprint or that it came out every week,” Barbey argued in Tuesday's statement, but that "it changed in step with and reflected the times and the ever-evolving world around it." (Although with all the promising new blood on staff now hemorrhaging off to Gothamist, things aren't looking up.)

Below is a running list of our favorite Voice content from 1955 through present day. We'll be adding to the list as we inevitably think of more cool stuff we forgot, so check back. Send us your faves, too: simone.wilson@patch.com.

Also, for hardcore nostalgists: Google has compiled a pretty amazing archive of all the paper's old print editions. (Up until summer 2001, at least. And the Voice was pretty much dead by then anyway.)

Two Minutes To Midnight: The Very Last Hurrah (1968)

An "eyewitness account of Robert Kennedy’s assassination" by Pete Hamill

The (Chinese) Gangs of New York (1977)

A story about who used to run Mott Street, and how they got there, by Mark Jacobson

Where Were You When Elvis Died? (1977)

A "eulogy of sorts for the King" by Lester Bangs

Death Of A Playmate (1980)

A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into a murder at the Playboy Mansion by Teresa Carpenter

Escape From New York (1981)

A travel diary by Ellen Willis

Marvin Gaye's Abiding Unrest (1984)

A portrait of the artist by Nelson George

I'm White! What's Wrong With Michael Jackson (1987)

An uncomfortable piece of pop criticism by Greg Tate

Free Fallin' (1992)

A true-crime long-form about how a SoCal skater kid was reborn as a rapist and killer by Cory Johnson

AIDS: The Agony Of Africa (1999)

A Pulitzer Prize-winning, eight-part series on the AIDS epidemic in Africa by Mark Schoofs

A Dream Detained (1999)

Part of a groundbreaking series on immigration enforcement in America by Alisa Solomon

The Radical Case For Gay Marriage (2003)

One of many historic columns on gay rights by Richard Goldstein, former executive editor

Jack Newfield, 1938-2004 (2004)

An obituary for a Village Voice legend by his friend (and fellow legend) Wayne Barrett

The Last Executioner (2005)

A peek into the files of New York state's final operator of the electric chair by Jennifer Gonnerman

A Month On The Town (2006)

Robert Christgau reviews 32 shows in 30 days

The 9/11 Eulogies (2011)

A profile of Mayor Giuliani's speechwriter, also the most prolific eulogy writer alive, by Harry Siegel

The Strange Fate Of Kim's Video (2012)

"How the museum-quality 55,000 film collection that an East Village video store gave away ended up in a small, possibly mob-run village in Sicily," by Karina Longworth

Hunter Moore Makes A Living Screwing You (2012)

A profile of the unrepentant king of revenge porn by Camille Dodero

This story has been updated.