New York’s 65-year-old iconic Village Voice is being revived. Sort of. It has been acquired by Street Media, the investment group owner of LA Weekly, for an undisclosed “nominal sum”. But it is three years since the last print edition and two years since the website stopped.
Street Media CEO Brian Calle may not have bought much more than memories, but says: “The Village Voice represents one of the most iconic papers in our nation and the very best of local media. For more than six decades, it was the heart of New York City and the voice of the community it served. We are proud to be able to revive both the digital and print editions of this paper.”
What that means is that the website will re-start this month (January) and a print edition is planned with a quarterly frequency which “could increase its frequency over time”.
The Voice has been owned since 2015 by fashion entrepreneur Peter Barbey, whose 2018 closure announcement had seemed almost too dramatic for a paper that few wanted to buy: “This is a sad day for The Village Voice and for millions of readers. The Voice has been a key element of New York City journalism and is read around the world. As the first modern alternative newspaper, it literally defined a new genre of publishing.”
Barbey pledged to digitize the paper’s newspaper print archive. The 292,000 pages of newsprint are almost done and the archive will be donated to a public institution. It’s the only part of The Voice’s future that seems secure.
The Village Voice was founded in 1955 by a group including author Norman Mailer. It served as a launch pad for a long line of journalists and writers including Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and James Baldwin. It won three Pullitzer Prizes and was always something more than a mere newspaper, evidenced by a succession of hungry owners including (45 years ago) one Rupert Murdoch. But, in 2006, it was bought and folded into a larger group of alternative weeklies across the US. Six years later, a group of editors bought the paper to split it from the classified site Backpage that was later seized by the police for allegedly promoting prostitution. That was the low point – until the whole thing stopped in 2018.
Last month’s sale of The Voice was all over the world’s newspapers and web sites like an obituary for a one-time celebrity long-forgotten. But, perhaps, the deal is significant. These may be just the times to fuse together media new and old to make something, well, new.
Millions of New Yorkers found their first apartments in the pages of The Village Voice and their soul mates in its personal classifieds. The once bulging weekly was surely one of the inspirations for Tony Elliott’s launch of Time Out in London in 1968 as well as for generations of political and cultural movements.
Its been decades since The Voice was consistently profitable, a victim of Craigslist and much else. The brand may mean little to 21st century residents of New York who (pandemic willing) crowd onto the city’s subway with smartphones not papers.
The Village Voice (whose 20th century decision was it not to protect a brand name that has since been cloned all over the world?) can become a new business. But it’s more likely to be a video or audio streaming/podcast service, not text in print or on screen. Brian Calle might yet turn his giveaway deal into a good business. Go figure.
