Village Voice

The Village Voice is vanishing from the streets of New York--and something critical will go with it.

Yesterday, the Hollywood Reporter announced that the Voice will soon be going digital only. No more print. No more paper. No more ink. After 62 years of gracing the streets of the city, from newsstands to red boxes, no more.



The decision came from the paper's latest owner, Peter Barbey, media mogul and heir to the billion-dollar fortune behind retail brands like The North Face and Timberland. Barbey has recently been at the center of a struggle with the Voice's union workers--they published an open letter to him just last month, asking him not to weaken the union and cut benefits.

And now this cut.

Across social media, public outcry against the decision was swift, with many New Yorkers fondly recalling the days of waiting for the paper to come out each week, lining up at the old newsstand on Astor Place to grab the first copies from the pile, to be the first to search for jobs and apartments.

Wrote the Times, "Without it, if you are a New Yorker of a certain age, chances are you would have never found your first apartment. Never discovered your favorite punk band, spouted your first post-Structuralist literary jargon, bought that unfortunate futon sofa..." "But," they concluded, "the printed paper was also an artifact of a downtown world that no longer exists."


Astor Place

A vanished paper from a vanished city?

I asked Michael Musto and Penny Arcade their thoughts on the Voice's physical demise.

Michael Musto said, "The Voice has long valued their online presence, so I think it will stay valid. There's something lost in that the actual paper was historic and there's something about holding a paper in your hand that was always personal and special. But things are changing, and the focus on the Internet venue--while not necessarily as lucrative as the paper used to be--still allows for possibility, surprise, and hopefully relevance."

Penny Arcade told me, "Truth is, the Village Voice was destroyed and made redundant by 1995. It was an exquisite relic, like some Catholic saints that die but do not physically rot, a monument to a way of life that was eroding in our city. But when New York was New York and downtown was downtown, the Village Voice was the communication organ we were all connected to, not only those of us who lived in New York, but from all over the world. Like-minded people communicated through the Voice. It was the town crier. That back page was the neighborhood bulletin board. The Voice was a tangible piece of New York, so I suppose now that New York itself is no longer tangible, the physical, palpable Voice is no longer necessary."


The original Astor Place newsstand, 2007

It may not be what it was, but the Voice's physical presence on the street still maintains a certain gravitas. You see it almost everywhere you go, reading its headlines as you pass. Opening the kiosk door and bending down to grab a copy, folding it under your arm as you hurry on, it feels right, part of the urban hustle and routine.

The people holding the Voice exude a cool intelligence. When you see them, you feel a kinship. Of course, you see them less and less, all those artsy lefties, all those cranky city people. Where did they go? Back in 1994, in an article titled "Last of the Red-Hot Lefties," Voice publisher David Schneiderman told New York magazine, "The perception that we're actually difficult, cranky, and cantankerous is our reality."

"Cantankerous" might be the word most often associated with the paper. That used to be a good thing around here. It meant dissent. It meant New York. But that good, old crankiness that kept the city so brilliant and brisk has been under assault for awhile.

In the suburbanized, corporatized city, crankiness isn't welcome. They don't want us to be difficult.


1987

Back in 1995 David Brooks wrote in the neoliberal, conservative City Journal, “It would be a shame if New York dragged on through the next decades as a wayward home for cranky, marginalized dissenters.” The city was changing in a new way, and Brooks saw the future. “Over the longer term,” he wrote, “New Yorkers might--dare I say it?--change. New York liberalism will gradually dissolve; cultural attitudes will drift toward the mainstream.”

Today the mainstreaming of the city is nearly complete. The corporations, real estate developers, and financial elites--along with their aspirational followers--don't like the cantankerous and the cranky. They want us to be docile, to go along with it, to lie back and think of England while they do their business.

If you resist? They'll call you cranky--and they won't mean it as a compliment.

I am often dismissed as cranky by these people. Recently, I was fortunate to be on the cover of the Voice--and to be reviewed in its inky pages. It was an honor. I write a blog, but I have little love for the digital. Print is powerful. Print is legit. The digital is--too often--a lot of noise. Stuff to be skimmed. Piles of content to feed our increasingly shitty attention spans. I'd like to think the Voice included me because they saw me as cranky like them. In the good way.



The Voice was born of New York's rebel spirit. Over the last two decades, the teeth have been taken from the mouth of this town crier. And now it will be deprived of its body.

Maybe the Internet will free it again, make it wild. But many of us will miss its physical presence, the way it took up space on the streets, how it accompanied us as we walked along, plowing the sidewalks, cranky and difficult and very much alive.

The Voice on paper, however much of a relic it has become, still stands as a visible reminder of what the city used to be. Let us not forget.