The Village Voice Is Shutting Down

[DonViejo]

Source: Mediate


by Josh Feldman | Aug 31st, 2018, 1:58 pm

Today in upsetting media news: the Village Voice is no more. Gothamist broke the news this afternoon, revealing that owner Peter Barbey spoke to staff about the decision today:

“Today is kind of a sucky day,” Barbey told the staff in a phone call, according to audio obtained by Gothamist. “Due to, basically, business realities, we’re going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.”

Barbey said that half of the staff, which is around 15 to 20 people, will remain on to “wind things down,” and work on a project to archive the Voice’s material online.

The rest of the staff will be let go today.

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/online/the-village-voice-is-shutting-down/

[DonCoquixote]

1. CRAP

WE have needed these folks for a long time, as they were the ones who would not be afraid of telling the truth.

[hlthe2b]

2. Damn...After losing Wayne Barrett, I thought, well, at least the Village Voice would go on

This really really sucks.

[Emoji Guy]

3. Isn't it the same company that owns Westword?

Sad news...

[hlthe2b]

4. Yeah... They've announced cutbacks, but to my knowledge, are not folding.

[Emoji Guy]

7. Hope not.

My wife still likes to read it!

[zentrum]

5. The Village itself

.....is being destroyed by too many NYU students who know nothing of the local neighborhood but it's new bars and by tourists who come to shop and take a few self(ish)ies.

Huge cultural and historical loss.

[brooklynite]

8. As an Urban Planner, let me say this: Cities are dynamic

The edgy Village of the 50s and 60s was far different in the decades before that. Neighborhoods change; so do cities.

[zentrum]

31. This doesn't feel dynamic.

It feels like it's homogenizing into a glass box monolith with a growing tier of off-shore landlords investing in NY real estate to store their money and the truly "dynamic" artists, writers, and small businesses are finished.

Corporate franchises that you can find in any city do not strike me as dynamic. Starbucks is dynamic? Please! The workers in them seem miserable and the atmosphere has no sense of "place" at all.

The city has never changed so much so fast.

The Village as a place and as an idea was important to the whole country. It's hardly dynamic to make it like downtown Cleveland. No insult to downtown Cleveland. Same is happening to Harlem.

[LanternWaste]

35. Yet sometimes the change is organic, while others times the change is manufactured.

And no one on this thread is arguing that change doesn't happen (even non-urban planners are aware of this-- thanks anyway), but rather the mechanism of change being the relevant issue.

[brooklynite]

36. What "mechanism of change" are you complaining about?

Today, I live in Brooklyn Heights, an upper-income (as least as far as townhouses go) neighborhood. 70 years ago, is was a rundown neighborhood housing longshoremen from the Brooklyn piers. 70 years before that, it was an upper-middle class neighborhood until the subway allowed the population to move further out.

Starbucks didn't move into Greenwich Village with the intent of gentrifying it; it moved in because (for some reason that escapes me), the residents wanted to buy their coffee. Now, there are still plenty of local shops, restaurants and music clubs there, but the public's desire for "beat poetry" and folk music waned as cultural tastes changed...like they do generationally. The Village changed because the people who lived there changed. That's the dynamic development I'm talking about.

[lapucelle]

28. I was at the Bobst Library Thursday to see the Wojnarowicz exhibit

and the campus and park were so different. The cobblestones in the mews were gone, and it was half paved.

[zentrum]

32. Yes. It's a loss of history itself.

Of course Bobst is one of the ugliest buidings ever----and on the edge of that magic park.

[LudwigPastorius]

6. Damn

Another part of old New York dies.

[NJCher]

12. yeah, that and the Lion's Head closing back in '96

I used to go there and talk to the writers from the Village Voice, Nat Hentoff being one of them. Of course, Nat is now dead having passed a year or so ago at 92, I think.

Here's a quote from a NY Times article about The Lion's Head:

The bar was an especially powerful magnet for writers and for those who toiled at newspapers like The Village Voice, mere yards away in the Head’s early years. Writing is “the loneliest profession,” Mr. McEvoy said. “You have this built-up thing where you start working early in the morning. By about 3 o’clock, you want to scream. That’s when people used to descend on the Lion’s Head in the afternoon.”
“We had too much fun,” he said. “Every day, you would laugh in that place.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/nyregion/05nyc.html

I used to get all my boyfriends there. I can think of three just off the top of my head. When one relationship was over, I'd just stop back and pick up a new one. Pretty good quality of men there, or so I thought at the time.

At least there will be archives to console us.

[LudwigPastorius]

22. Thanks for the read.

The Lion's Head reminds me a bit of the last good bar in Dallas. It was called Joe Miller's, and it was were you'd find most of the writers for the Dallas Times Herald and the Morning News....a place for serious drinking and conversation. No blaring jukebox, karaoke, video poker, or other distractions, it was just a dark quiet place with a pro behind the bar dealing the drinks.

Real estate developers eventually swooped in and, like their brethren: lawyers, ruined a good thing by pricing the owner/operator out of the neighborhood.

I miss that place.

[BamaRefugee]

9. I owe a lifetime debt to the Village Voice

Last edited Fri Aug 31, 2018, 08:33 PM - Edit history (1)

I was a youngster in Manhattan, 1972 or so, had moved there from Atlanta with $400 in my pocket. You could actually do that in those days!
I was going to Strasberg for acting school, driving a cab, being a waiter, the NYC Dream
One day, I saw an classified ad in the back of the Village Voice (which I totally loved and read religiously) for a singer/guitar player for a band. I really don't play guitar that great, but after 2 of my acting buddies who COULD play got turned down for their auditions, they urged me to try, because they were convinced the band really just wanted a lead singer.

So I went, got the job, and began touring around the world with a band that had a Number 1 hit that you probably hear somewhere almost every day still


Great great times, money was unbelievable, and SO MUCH MORE fun to live in Mahnattan and not be starving all the time

[SergeStorms]

11. Is that you.....

Mungo Jerry? Send me a PM if you want to share your past musical info. You've piqued my interest.

[BamaRefugee]

13. hahaha not Mungo Jerry but i did move there in the summertime, when the weather is hot ;-)

[Duppers]

21. I'm intensely curious.

Googling and googling but yet only a faint idea. I can keep secrets if you wanna pm me.

[lapucelle]

29. It's probably in here somewhere...

List of Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles of the 1970s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_number-one_singles_of_the_1970s

[Docreed2003]

26. Wow...amazing story! Thanks for sharing NT

[YouKnowFred]

33. I have a guess....

Tommy Brown, Hughes Corporation???

[gopiscrap]

38. welcome to DU

[SergeStorms]

10. It was inevitable.

Print media is suffering, "bigly". I remember the Voice back in the 60s as a counter-culture paper we all looked to for the "real story". There were hundreds of not-so-famous counter-culture papers back then. The 'East Village Other' was another in NYC. On the west coast there was The San Francisco Oracle, The Berkeley Barb, in L.A. there was Tuesday's Child. Those "underground" newspapers were the only link to counter-culture news. Man, am I getting old.

It's a shame, it really is. All that changes does not necessarily progress.

[BamaRefugee]

14. Atlanta had the Great Speckled Bird, and it WAS NOT EASY being progressive Down South...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Speckled_Bird_%28newspaper%29

[SergeStorms]

17. I certainly agree.

I would have been hunted down like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in 'Easy Rider' back in those days, simply for the length of my hair. Well, my politics wouldn't have won me too many friends in the deep south either.

[BamaRefugee]

18. I lived that, going to college in Alabama.

I organized the only anti Vietnam War protest I ever heard of in Birmingham, permits and everything, the Birmingham cops left us, alone for about 30 minutes, then started bashing our heads in with billy clubs.
Lots of rocks, beer cans, anything thrown at any of us with long hair anytime we stepped out. This was 1969-70.

[SergeStorms]

23. You were living on the edge.

Being in Birmingham, long hair, organizing anti-war demonstrations.......what, you had a death wish? Caution is more important than bravery. Glad you lived through that crucible of hate and racism.

[BamaRefugee]

24. My favorite place to eat was Ollie's Bar B Q

Look it up for some real down home racism, along with fantastic barbecue. Then a piece of coconut cream pie. Ollie hired white guys just out of jail as the cooks, he believed in redemption and the restaurant was littered with crazy overheated religious pamphlets.
The waitresses were the sweetest black ladies you could ever meet, and no matter how many people at your table, they never wrote the orders down, and they never got the orders wrong. I asked my Mom when I was a kid why they didn’t write things down like at other restaurants. “Why darlin’” she said, “those women can’t read or write!”
Old Birmingham in a nutshell.

[DonaldsRump]

25. Ollie's Barbecue is very famous, if I recall correctly, for a landmark civil rights case

Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294 (1964), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court unanimously held that Congress acted within its power under the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution in forbidding racial discrimination in restaurants as this was a burden to interstate commerce.

Ollie's Barbecue was a family-owned restaurant that operated in Birmingham, Alabama, that seated 220 customers. It was located on a state highway and was 11 blocks from an interstate highway. In a typical year, approximately half of the food it purchased from a local supplier originated out-of-state. It catered to local families and white-collar workers and provided take-out service to African American customers.

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing segregation in American schools and public places. One section of the act, Title II, was specifically intended to grant African-Americans full access to public facilities such as hotels, restaurants, and public recreation areas. On the same day, the Supreme Court heard challenges to Title II from a motel owner and from Ollie McClung. Both claimed that the federal government had no right to impose any regulations on small, private businesses. Both ultimately lost. Ollie McClung had won an initial round in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama when he received an injunction preventing the Government from enforcing Title II against his restaurant. But then Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katzenbach_v._McClung|

[SeattleVet]

15. Started reading The VV in 1967, and used to wait at the newsstand every week for delivery.

Carried a copy around with my books just about every day from Jr. High School until graduation. I don't think I ever missed a week until I reported for USAF Basic Training in August of 1972. Started buying it again when I got to tech school in Denver.

Saw many (sometimes massive) changes through the years...some good, some bad, but rarely wavered from my weekly fix. I got to enjoy around 40 years of Jules Feiffer, articles by Jean Shepherd, and used it as my main source of information about concerts, plays, and other cultural events in the area.

After they were taken over and made into a free weekly it seemed like everything really started falling apart, and it seemed that they lost a lot of the edginess that they had though the years.

They retained some excellent staff writers, but over the past several years I found myself checking their online version less and less.

Nonetheless, the Voice will be missed, and will always hold a special place in my own personal history.

[Honeycombe8]

16. I hate to hear this. nt

[JonLP24]

19. Is this the same group that owns Phoenix New Times?

Village Voice media?. If so bad news.

[BigmanPigman]

20. That sucks!

When I attended Parsons my friends and I never were without the Village Voice. It was almost mandatory to read it.

[bronxiteforever]

27. Sob!

A great New York institution. What a loss.

[klook]

30. This is a tragedy - what a great paper.

My wife used to subscribe to the Voice, and we'd read with anguish all about the incredible cultural events we were missing every week. In the meantime, the once or twice yearly visits to NYC would have to satisfy us -- and we could read all the great journalists and columnists they published.

So many great writers -- as a jazz lover, I most remember pieces by Nat Hentoff, Gary Giddins, Gene Santoro, and others.

I'm just shaking my head... another huge loss in this dark period. Here's one of their last published pieces:
For Many Women, a World Without Abortion Access Is Already Here

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

34. Kick! nt

[Seeking Serenity]

37. Please forgive my ignorance, but

Other than being in New York (from what I've gathered), can someone tell me where "The Village" is and why it's considered important?

(And though I've never read "The Voice," I'm always sad whenever print publications fold. I'm still missing the Arkansas Gazette, and it folded back in 1991. Before Gannett ruined it and sold it, the Gazette was "the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi," having been launched in 1819, 17 years before Arkansas gained statehood.)

[melm00se]

40. The Village Greenwich Village

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Village#Reputation_as_urban_bohemia

[tonekat]

39. My older sis had a subscription

In H.S., I would go to her house and get the print issues after she read them. It let me visualize a world beyond the silly upstate town I lived in. That was followed by lots of trips to the city.