What a bummer

The Village Voice died. RIP

The Voice was founded as a nickel weekly in 1955 by three New Yorkers, Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher and Norman Mailer. They assembled a crew of writers who engaged readers with their wit and provoked them with their penchant for argument. Later owners included Rupert Murdoch and the pet-food magnate Leonard Stern.

The paper gave a start to the theater critic Hilton Als and the novelist Colson Whitehead, both recipients of the Pulitzer Prize. Its resident muckraker, Wayne Barrett, took aim at New York developers and politicians for nearly 40 years, and his obsessive work on Donald J. Trump has become a resource for reporters covering the president today.

It gave a home to the investigative reporters Jack Newfield and James Ridgeway, and the music critics Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis and Greg Tate. Nat Hentoff focused on jazz and First Amendment issues from 1958 to 2009, and the nightcrawling columnist Michael Musto wrote on celebrities, drag queens and club kids, with wisecracks thrown in, for more than 30 years. 

The voice had serious reporting chops without question.

Over its six-decade run, the Village Voice won three Pulitzer Prizes and became an indispensable source for New York City culture, shining early spotlights on the city’s folk music and hip-hop scenes; an archival photograph of Bob Dylan adorned the final issue of Village Voice in September 2017, when the alt-weekly announced it would suspend its print edition and continue on as an online entity.

Since then, the Village Voice employed 18 staffers, 10 of whom were laid off following Friday’s announcement. The remaining staffers will help digitize the Voice‘s archives and make it “accessible” for “coming generations” before it shutters completely.

The death of print continues, unfortunately but at least The Voice's digital archive lives on.

RIP