![]() The fourth would be early Voice editor, theater critic, and creator of the Obie Awards Jerry Tallmer, who died in 2014 at age 95. But you’ll sometimes see references to five founders. Fancher told me he counts as founders only the three men who put up money to create the paper, meaning Wolf, Mailer, and himself. We should pause here: This being the Voice, even the number of founders is in dispute. That’s what made the paper both ahead of the establishment rags on major cultural trends and so frequently rent with bitter in-house feuds: The kids ran the school. But there was nothing like the Voice, a pop tabloid that often gave the impression that it was being written at ground zero of the postwar cultural shift.Īt a time when editors at other newspapers frequently trimmed and rewrote whatever a journalist submitted without fear of argument, the Voice let writing breathe and individuals find the space to be heard. Before World War II, there were the “little magazines,” aimed at a small, discerning class of serious readers. It’s a little hard to imagine today, when the most linked-to piece on might be a recap of Game of Thrones, but that kind of journalism was once frowned upon in America-or at least relegated to the supermarket tabs. Later, especially in Vienna, the feuilleton became a form of journalism in which coverage of the arts and fashion was informed by politics, and vice versa. More than two centuries ago, French newspapers began printing a feuilleton-a supplement, or “leaf,” attached to political or business pages-that talked about the arts, literature, culture, fashion, and, of course, gossip, in a personal style. The Voice was an original, but it wasn’t unprecedented. If you could stack side-by-side the ironies of the Voice’s many lives and deaths, this would probably rank as one of the greatest: The Voice’s sensibility has over the years so thoroughly infiltrated most contemporary journalism that it no longer stands out in the marketplace. “The whole idea of the Voice,” said Fancher, “was that people on the street could come and write articles, and if the editor was impressed with their sincerity and intelligence,” the Voice would publish it. It was an open paper, as Fancher later told me by phone, in that you could pretty much write about whatever you wanted-not so unlike social media today. When it started, the Voice was a kind of weekly criticism of the sponsored journalism that dominated both the tabloid and the broadsheet newspapers (there once were so many!) in the city. “I’m really glad we’re doing this,” former managing editor Dave Herndon shouted from a stage, as he and other formers took turns reading the names of the 130 Voice people who had died-“because we’re all going to be on this list some day! And we’ll be lucky to be on this motherfucking list!” But, if this makes sense, it was a good mortality. Maybe it’s true of all reunions, but inevitably the theme was mortality-of the old Voice, of print journalism, of ourselves. But after the deaths, last January, of two Voice pillars, Nat Hentoff and Wayne Barrett, there was a new urgency to get together before, frankly, more of us died. In fact, the former Voice writer Mike Tomasky had been batting around the idea of a reunion with some of us other ex- Voice-ers for a few years. But the party was planned long before the news of the paper’s folding. In August, when Voice owner Peter Barbey announced that the storied newspaper would henceforth publish only online, he was greeted with headlines like “ The Village Voice As We Knew Her Is Dead (For Real This Time).” The death knells only grew louder with the news, about a week later, that Barbey-a very wealthy liberal who was regarded as the Voice’s savior when he purchased the paper in 2015-would lay off 13 of the remaining 17 Voice union members, effectively busting the union.Īnd so when 300 former (and a few current) Voice staffers and freelancers gathered for the first-ever Village Voice reunion in early September, it did at times feel like a wake.
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