Transcript
Micah Loewinger: Hey, it's Micah Loewinger. You're listening to the On the Media Mid-week podcast. The big show this week is all about the rise and fall of the Alt Weekly. The type of offbeat, fearless publication that once upon a time you could pick up on a street corner in cities across the country. I interviewed Tricia Romano, the author of a new oral history titled, The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, The Radical Paper That Changed American Culture. Our conversation about this legendary New York publication was wide-ranging, and too long for the radio, and too profane for the radio. We're bringing you a longer uncensored version here. Don't listen to this one with kids. Tricia, welcome to the show.
Tricia Romano: Thank you for having me.
Micah Loewinger: The book begins with the very scrappy origins of The Village Voice in 1955. It was founded by editor Dan Wolf, a psychologist and publisher Ed Fancher, and the writer Norman Mailer, who used money from his 1948 debut novel, The Naked In the Dead to get the paper off the ground. Jerry Tallmer and John Wilco*ck were two early key editors and writers. What kind of paper did they set out to create?
Tricia Romano: They wanted to create a paper that reflected the Greenwich Village that they knew and loved. Beatnik culture and jazz and writers like James Baldwin, they didn't see anything that reflected that and the media landscaped it all. They wanted to put out something they wanted to read. Also, they were very anti Tammany Hall, which was the Democratic political machine in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and they did not like the guy that represented that area, Carmine Di Sibio and they wanted to push forward a different kind of government, different kind of representation. That was the two reasons they really started it.
Micah Loewinger: In the first page of your book, you featured this quote from editor Dan Wolf. "The Village Voice was originally conceived as a living, breathing attempt to demolish the notion that one needs to be a professional to accomplish something in a field as purportedly technical as journalism. It was a philosophical position. We wanted to jam the gears of creeping automatism." Tell me a little bit about Wolf's preference for hiring amateurs. How did it influence the style and the content of the paper at the beginning?
Tricia Romano: He was more interested in people who could write. He was more interested in literature versus reporting. Journalism at that time was very much who went where, why, when. Your reporting skills were more valued than your writing skills. If you've ever gone to journalism school or done very straight news reporting, it's almost like constructing a puzzle piece rather than it is writing lyrically in any way. He and Norman Mailer also leaned towards writers writing, and they knew that if you loved something and you were passionate about a subject, you were going to bring that passion to The Voice in a way that an objective newspaper reporter really wasn't even allowed to.
Micah Loewinger: Give me a couple examples of people who fit in at The Village Voice helped define its style, but probably wouldn't have gotten hired at one of its competitors.
Tricia Romano: You've got Jules Feiffer, who was the poster-winning cartoonist who wrote these satirical, very adult comics about relationships between men and women called Sick, Sick, Sick and he literally says that no one would publish anything he was working on, and they told him they really liked it, but that he needed to go get famous first before they would publish him. The Voice was like, "Oh, we love these. These are great." They started running them every week and they ran him for free. He got paid nothing for many years.
He was somebody that a lot of people picked up to pee from the beginning. Then Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian refugee, who was an avant-garde filmmaker and director and hosted loft parties and showed Andy Warhol films. He walked in one day and says, "How come you don't have any columns on cinema?" He said, "I don't know. Why don't you do it?" He started doing that. Then you had Richard Goldstein that comes along later, and he is the first rock critic by many people's calculations. He is actually one of the few people who actually did go to journalism school, which he tried to hide. [laughs]
Micah Loewinger: Because it seemed like a square?
Tricia Romano: Yes. He was the weirdo at his journalism school. He had long hair and he tells a joke how to mess with the instructors, he would put a sugar cube on his desk.
Micah Loewinger: Because they would think it was acid.
Tricia Romano: Yes. [laughs] He was embedded in the early rock scene and hanging out with [unintelligible 00:05:14] and the Velvet Underground and all those people. He wrote about what he was passionate about, music that he was passionate about, and he used first-person, he used reporting techniques. He quickly became very well known for this because that music was just starting to explode.
Micah Loewinger: From December 1962 to March 1963, seven major daily newspapers in New York went on strike.
Reporter: No news is bad news to eight million New Yorkers when strikes closed down their daily papers. Manhattan Knights who pride themselves on being the best-informed people on earth, get little information on what's going on in the next block, let alone in the rest of the world.
Micah Loewinger: The Voice didn't and since it was available on newsstands, it stood out to New Yorkers outside of Greenwich Village for the first time leading to a spike in its circulation from about 28,000 to 35,000.
Tricia Romano: People don't understand. In a day right now when say a bunch of papers go on strike, there's all kinds of news outlets we can turn to to find out what's going on. When the vast majority of the written publications are not producing anything, and all you've got is this little weird downtown because of its original MO, it was for the Village. You suddenly have a much larger audience, and that audience discovers, "Oh, we're covering stuff that I go to or I'd like to go to and I don't read about it anywhere else." We suddenly got more advertising and a greater audience from that. It just grew from there.
Micah Loewinger: The paper was roughly speaking, divided into the front of the book, which was the news coverage, and the back of the book, which was more arts and culture. One of the early news reporters is this amazing woman, Mary Perot Nichols, who started at the paper in 1958. Her origin story at the paper, it turns out, is not that unusual. She just walked in through the front door, right?
Tricia Romano: Yes. [laughs] That's what a lot of people did. They just would walk into the office, they would just come in and be like, "Hey, do you know about this thing?" Or, "Why aren't you covering this or that?" She was a mother who lived nearby, and her and a group of other mothers would hang out in Washington Square Park, one of them being Jane Jacobs. This is the time when Robert Moses was trying to either build highways through that area or cars all the way through the park.
He just had this high vision for the city that was much more car-centric and would have bulldozed the lower part of Manhattan as we know it now. She began going into The Voice and saying, "Why aren't you covering this?" After a few tries, they said, "Why don't you do it?" She had literally no reporting skills and had never done that before but she apparently loved the research and she loved the hunt.
Micah Loewinger: Robert Moses, of course, was an incredibly powerful urban planner in New York City for decades. What happened to his attempt to turn the beloved Washington Square Park into just another thoroughfare?
Tricia Romano: A lot of what Mary did was advocate against it every week in the Village Voice and getting the neighbors involved, especially a lot of the women who were using that park every day with their kids to block it. Eventually, politically, she was able to convince a lot of the mafia store owners also who would've been affected to block it as well and so he backed off.
Micah Loewinger: That's wild. You don't think of a newspaper reporter as calling up a mob boss in your neighborhood and saying, "You should be against this local policy."
Tricia Romano: Yes, she would put it to them like, look, all those people that pay tribute to you, you meaning all the people that he got money from or they got money from, they're not going to be there anymore. None of those stores will be there. That restaurant won't be there, so you're going to lose money.
Micah Loewinger: After her years working as a writer at The Village Voice, she went on to work with the Parks Commission under Mayor John Lindsay, which is how she got access to Robert Moses' old papers when he was part commissioner. I didn't know this, but she actually calls up the investigative writer, Robert Caro, who until this point had not been able to get access to the records himself. She says, basically, you didn't know this Robert Caro, but there's this huge archive of Moses' correspondence when he was in government and this phone call was arguably the birth of Robert Caro's iconic book, The Power Broker.
Tricia Romano: Yes. One of the writers for The Voice that I interviewed Clark Weldon, he was there when Mary was there at The Voice. He said she was very nosy.
Clark Weldon: She got into a storage area under Central Park itself. An iron door goes into a stone wall. She said, "What's behind there?" They say, "Just a bunch of old records and things." She goes, "I'm going to see it." She was very curious, very nosy person. Great newswoman. They opened the iron door and there was a cave-like gigantic room full of file cabinets with papers. She started opening the filing cabinets and lo and behold, there are the files of Robert Moses.
Tricia Romano: She was very into figuring out information and looking probably where she shouldn't and that's how she found it.
Micah Loewinger: The offices of the Village Voice were right next to the Stonewall Inn. Voice reporters were there in 1969 and covered when the bar was raided in an event that sparked the modern-day Gay Rights Movement. How did The Voice cover the Stonewall uprising and why were they targeted by the gay rights movement in the so-called zaps.
Tricia Romano: Since the office was right there, all the writers could see what was happening from the windows. Back in the day, gay bars were not allowed. Also, I should say most of the gay bars, if not all of them were owned by the mafia. It was this game that the police and the mafia would play, which was they'd go raid the gay bar, and the mafia would pay off the police, and then the bar would reopen. In this case, they were raided and the patrons were fed up. I said, "This is ridiculous." They started getting roughly handled by the police outside. There were more of them than police.
Howard Smith went inside. He was like a nightlife reporter on the scene in the '60s and '70s. He was inside with the police and he wrote from that perspective, and Lucien [unintelligible 00:12:12] who was walking home from the outside. They're both straight white men and the way they covered it was both with more seriousness and length than you would see in any other publication. There were two, probably 12 under-word something articles inside the paper, whereas any other paper I think maybe ram a little squib and no one was there. They use words that we would find offensive today.
Micah Loewinger: The headline was Forces of and then the F slur that's offensive today, but it was offensive then too and gay readers of the news coverage were not happy with it.
Tricia Romano: They were not happy with that and they were also not happy with the fact that The Voice wouldn't take ads that said the word gay. [unintelligible 00:13:03] zap meaning protested, and The Voice's offices were pretty transparent. The windows I think were showing to the street and they just disrupted the meetings in such long enough that Dan Wolf, the editor in chief was like, "I guess we got to deal with this." That was a learning lesson for The Voice and it happened much sooner than it did for other media.
Micah Loewinger: One of the internal agitators at The Voice who was quite critical of the hom*ophobic language that was used in its coverage of Stonewall was Richard Goldstein, who you've already mentioned, he was arguably the paper and America's first real rock critic. He was a gay man who helped shape the music writing of the paper. In addition to Goldstein, there was Robert Christgau who joined in the late 1960s as a rock critic and columnist, and he went on to be the paper's longtime music editor. He jokingly referred to himself as the "dean of American rock critics" which would be this nickname that would follow him around for the rest of his career.
These guys hung out around the village including the iconic bar and venue CBGB where they hung out with Lou Reed and Patti Smith and saw early shows of Blondie and the Ramones. How did these early rock writers help create the genre of music criticism as we understand it today?
Tricia Romano: When Richard comes along, he's around the same time or just before Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, rock and roll was considered kids' music or keynes music. It wasn't taken seriously. Richard and then Robert Christgau and later, James Wolcott, they believed that it should be treated with the same seriousness as the opera or literature. They applied those type of critiques to a genre that was just growing, rock music. Christgau, especially when he took over the music section, he really had a vision for what the section could be. By that time, Rolling Stone is much bigger and it's flourishing.
Now there starts to be a lot more people writing about music in a serious way. He starts recruiting people, and he creates this bold section, and James Wolcott, who's now a very well-known writer who worked at Vanity Fair and is also writing for Airmail, he was 20 or something just working on the circulation desk or the front desk, but he was going out every night. That's what you do in New York when you're in your early 20s.
CBGB was not very far away from The Voice's office. It was where you went to see local bands, great new music, and those bands just happened to be legendary, or they would become legendary, in part because The Voice was shining a light on them. They weren't the only one but they were certainly for local outlets to do that and it was like Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, Ramones, all that stuff happening every night. James Wolcott just started writing about CBGB. That was, in part, because Robert Christgau gave him a chance.
Micah Loewinger: Robert Christgau would later become known for his consumer guides, where he gave new albums a letter grade like A, B, or C or whatever. As one of the men you quote in the book describes it, Christgau was hated by bands because he was so honest and he was so brutal. His album grades were so influential that artists over the years have responded to his criticism. There's a famous live performance of Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed from 1978. He's vamping while playing the song. He says this about Robert Christgau.
Lou Reed: What does Robert Christgau do in bed?
Micah Loewinger: What does Robert Christgau do in bed? Is he a toe f**ker? We're probably not going to be able to use this.
Lou Reed: Man, anal retentive.
Micah Loewinger: Man, anal retentive, a consumers guide to rock.
Lou Reed: Nice little boxes,B+. Can you imagine working for a f**king year and you got a B+ from some a**hole in The Village Voice.
Tricia Romano: I've never heard the whole thing. That's amazing.
Micah Loewinger: Sonic Youth Thurston Moore clearly did not like a negative grade from Christgau and made it known in the band's 1983 single Kill Your Idols. Do you want to describe the lyrics from that song?
Tricia Romano: How do we say that for the general audience?
Micah Loewinger: He says, "I don't know why you want to impress Christgau. Let that s**t die."
[MUSIC - Thurston Moore: Kill Your Idols]
Tricia Romano: Does he know the real title that says Robert Christgau can suck my f**king dick.
Micah Loewinger: I think it's I killed Christgau with my big f**king dick.
Tricia Romano: Yes. Amazing. Later he went on, of course, to give Sonic Youth really good reviews. The thing about Bob, which is different than a lot of music writers is that he did not want to be friends or friendly with the bands because his gruff exterior belies a very soft interior. If he liked somebody as a person and then hated the record, or had to be critical of it, he felt bad. He found it easier to be just completely apart from the bands.
Micah Loewinger: I learned from your book that it wasn't really until the 1970s where the paper became more professional. Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher during this time sold their controlling interest, and Clay Felker, the founder and editor of New York Magazine bought the paper in 1984. He became the editor-in-chief, much to the chagrin of some of the Village Voice writers at the time, who saw themselves as more downtown while New York Magazine was more uptown and catered to the fancy people and sensibilities of uptown life.
Then Clay Felker sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing media mogul in 1977. People at The Voice freaked out, the staff ended up unionizing and the unionization effort was really interesting in part because of some of the progressive measures the union was able to advocate for.
Tricia Romano: The Voice was part of a package. It was New York Magazine and the Village Voice and Rupert Murdoch didn't really want the Village Voice, he wanted New York Magazine but come to find out New York Magazine is actually not the moneymaker. The Voice is. When he took over, the New York magazine staff was fired and The Voice staff freaked out. When they formed this union, it was a major step. Up until that point, Dan Wolf, the original owners, they did not believe in unions. They were like, "We're all family here. You could just come in and talk to me if you have problems."
The thing is, when Dan and Ed Fancher, the publisher sold it the first time to Carter Burton, they made money. They made a couple million, I think like 3 million and staff was furious because they were being paid peanuts. In some cases, Pfeiffer, he was paid nothing for years and years and years. They felt like they should have some of the spoils and that created an animosity, I think, towards owners. When River Murdoch comes in, they're ready. After a few years, Jeff Weinstein's at a union meeting and they're talking about healthcare and we had a thing where if you had a live in partner, they could be on your healthcare.
Micah Loewinger: Somebody that you're dating, but who you're not married to.
Tricia Romano: Yes. They could get on your healthcare program. Jeff Weinstein was like, "Why wouldn't it count gay people?" That was a big thing in their negotiations to get spousal benefits for unmarried couples and extend that to gay couples, and they got it. Murdoch was like, "Can we not trumpet this?" The lawyer was like, "Oh no, but they are going to trumpet this. They're going to trumpet it specifically."
Micah Loewinger: This was really fascinating to me because even before the union negotiations, Rupert Murdoch, at the same time that he's squawking at the editors for covering gay life as a normal part of New York life, he ultimately approves this really progressive influential provision in the union contract that allows gay couples at the paper to share health insurance. You suggest in the book that this might have actually played an important role in the ultimate same-sex marriage movement.
Tricia Romano: Yes. As far as they know, they're definitely the first newspaper that did it and possibly the first organization at all that did it. There were certain guidelines. It had to be notarized that you were a couple living together, I think. It wasn't just like you could get your friend on it. That's the foundation to some degree of the ultimate gay marriage law that was passed and upheld by the Supreme Court.
Micah Loewinger: You mentioned that Rupert Murdoch saw that the Village Voice was more of a money maker than New York Magazine. How did the paper make real money?
Tricia Romano: For many, many years, apartment ads, the classified ads in the back of the paper were basically a form of printing money. That was a source of income for decades for The Voice. For a long time, people would lined up at Astor plays on Tuesday night waiting in line to get the first edition of the paper so they could get a jump on apartment ads.
Micah Loewinger: Yes. There was this quote from Jackie Rudin in your book who worked in advertising who said quote--
Jackie Rudin: People found their lives through the Village Voice, whether it was a partner or a job or an apartment or whatever.
Micah Loewinger: Blondie and Bruce Springsteen in the E Street band found their drummers through classified ads in the Village Voice.
Tricia Romano: The Max Weinberg story is really great because he was a very well-trained jazzy drummer.
Micah Loewinger: Who was auditioning to be Bruce Springsteen's drummer?
Tricia Romano: Yes. Everybody got a half hour in the audition. He got there and he ended up doing like three hours. He didn't know that it was unusual. He thought everybody was getting that kind of audition. At some point, Bruce says, "Where are you from?" Max Weinberg's like, "Jersey." He's like, "That's good." [laughter]
Micah Loewinger: He didn't know that that was the best thing he could have said.
Tricia Romano: The best thing he could have said. Max Weinberg was like, "The Village Voice changed my life." Also I think Kiss found one of their band mates in The Voice. There's more than that. I only barely scratched the surface. That's where you would post. There's no Craigslist, there's no Facebook marketplace, no Twitter. It was nothing like that. That's where you would post your help wanted ads. Musicians did the same thing as some office looking for a secretary.
Micah Loewinger: Your book outlines this rift at the paper between the mostly white male reporters who covered the news for the front of the book, the so-called White Boys as they were known, and the feminist and gay writers who mostly covered arts and culture in the back of the book. You write about this really interesting episode in 1986 when Robert Friedman, the editor of the paper, made the call to put performance artist Karen Finley on the cover of the paper. What was so provocative about this cover story and what conflict did it spur?
Tricia Romano: The article was written by Cynthia Carr who went by C. Carr. She had had a column about performance art for several years and she came to Richard Goldstein and her editor Karen Durbin, and said, "There's this performance artist I really want to cover. She's pretty controversial. I think you should come see her." The thing that she was known for was using food as a reference point. She would often be naked or partially naked or wear little prom dresses and she would crush the food on her body while she had this incantation possessing the male voice.
It's one of those things you really have to see to understand. Cynthia Carr writes a story and they decide to put it on the cover and she was just posing with her dog. It's a very pretty cover shot. You have to realize back then papers are finite and space is finite. What gets on the cover is a big thing. It's a big deal. At the time, Pete Hamill, who's one of the famous columnists in New York journalism, worked at Daily News. He was like a star.
He led this charge against this piece because he saw it as unworthy of being on the cover because it wasn't real journalism in his eyes and it diminished the hard news that all the guys in the front of the book did. He never even saw the work, but he wrote a full page denouncing the story and the work and the idea of the art that she was doing.
Micah Loewinger: Obscenity seemed like deliberate in this performance. Do you want to describe what she was doing with the yams?
Tricia Romano: She was using canned yams and so she would push them on her body while she was talking. One of the pieces was called Yams Up My Granny' Ass. It was sexually explicit and meant to be provocative and it was a commentary on the male gaze and objectification of women, et cetera. It's just the thing that those guys, it just is going to go over their heads. They led this charge. It was him, Nat Hentoff, Barrett, Newfield.
Micah Loewinger: These are like some of the heavy hitter investigative reporters.
Tricia Romano: Wayne Barrett, who wrote about Trump, Jack Newfield, who did the Worst Judges and Worst Landlord series, Nat Hentoff the infamous First Amendment writer who later came out against abortion. All these guys were heightened at the paper by this time, and they go marching in and saying, "How can you put this filth on the front?" Not really understanding that their city was very different from a city that Cynthia Carr was in, but they were both in the same city.
The Voice was a reflection of that, of Manhattan, of Brooklyn, of the moment that New York was in. The front of the book left graffiti in the office, in the bathroom. They left cans of yams everywhere on desks and around the cubicles and they had a softball team and there was a softball tournament. When The Voice won, the trophy had a can of yams on it. It was the whole thing.
Micah Loewinger: What was the point? To mock the paper for running the cover story?
Tricia Romano: Yes. It was childish and the more upset the back of the book got, the more the front of the book would push it, vice versa. It's interesting to note that the front of the book wasn't as big, literally space-wise as the back of the book. The back of the book was all the listings and the film reviews and the music and the theater and art and dance, all of it. It just didn't make the cover as often. Cynthia Carr was like, "If it had to made the cover, I don't even know if they would've realized it was in the paper." But because it was on the cover, they were furious.
Micah Loewinger: You're describing this tension at the paper and reading the book, it felt to me like there was this constant hum of struggle where on one hand you have The Village Voice as this very radical, very progressive paper, and yet we keep seeing moments where it's failing to live up to its own values. On one hand, the paper's celebrating great Black music, on the other hand, there were very few people of color writing for the paper in its first couple decades.
The paper was among the first to write about abortion. It had this great stable of feminist writers, like Ellen Willis, Laurie Stone, Karen Durbin, and Mark, and yet, internally, they faced derision from their own colleagues. The paper had these pioneering gay writers, even as The Village Voice is publishing hom*ophobic slurs in its coverage of the Stonewall Uprising.
Tricia Romano: It was constant learning process, I think, for the people on the paper and the people reading it. The fact that they didn't really have any Black writers until Stanley Crouch shows up is crazy. I think it was 1976 or something.
Micah Loewinger: Basically, 20 years in.
Tricia Romano: Yes, they wrote about Black causes. Wayne Barrett, the reporter that covered Trump and Giuliani, and Jack Newfield, who wrote about worst landlords and the worst judges, and Nat Hentoff, who got his start writing about jazz. They were all very much about civil rights, and were big part of that movement, but they were blind to the fact that there were really no Black people at the paper. No one seemed to figure it out, and so David Schneiderman, who was an Op-Ed editor at The New York Times in the '70s, comes on board and he's the editor in chief.
He says, "What? This is the progressive Village Voice and there are no Black people on staff." Then they also got investigated by a government agency for this, so they had to take action. The thing is, right around that time is when hip-hop is born, and Robert Christgau is given a name by one of the first Black editors at the paper, Thulani Davis, the name of Greg Tate. Greg Tate is this unbelievable cultural critic. Hip-hop helped usher in a whole bunch of Black writers into the paper.
Carol Cooper, Barry Michael Cooper, not related, they're covering hip hop. Later, Barry Michael Cooper becomes more of an investigative reporter and covers the crack epidemic and does the story that is New Jack City that becomes the movie. They also have writers like Nelson George and Lisa Jones, who writes a cultural column about race. Lisa Kennedy, who is the film editor, she joins the paper in the '80s.
By the mid-'80s, it becomes a focal point for Black writing, and Hilton Als joins the paper. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning critic now at The New Yorker. It just opens the doors to these voices. Once a group of people come in, they have friends and they know people who are writers and they get introduced and it just grows. For decades, there was nothing. It still was a very "White paper" even towards its end.
Micah Loewinger: I'm going to jump way ahead to the 2000s, when we're starting to see the cracks in The Village Voice, its business model. Anil Dash, now a famous technologist and writer, joined The Village Voice in 2001. This is when Craigslist, the classified ads website, was first becoming a thing. Then 9/11 happens. How did the internet and 9/11 converge to ruin The Village Voice's whole business model.
Tricia Romano: It ruined alt weekly or free papers business models, really. Anil and Akash Goyal, who is essentially an online editor, when they were telling me this story, my jaw dropped because the timing is just so crazy. Anil gets to The Voice in the summer of 2001, and it happens to be the summer that Craigslist is about to hard-launch in New York. He came from San Francisco and he knew what was coming. He's telling them, "You guys, we're about to get disrupted in a major way." People ignored this. He's like, "I felt like Chicken Little."
Anil Dash: The second workday, my third day there, Craigslist launched in New York. I'm just talking to somebody, I'm like, "Hey, what are we doing about Craigslist?" It was like, "Who's Craig? What are you talking about?" I couldn't articulate why it mattered so much. I couldn't tell people like, "The whole world is about to change, and it's these weird janky-looking websites like Craigslist." I felt like Chicken Little, you know what I mean? I kept running around me like the internet is coming. It sounds crazy. You sound like a crazy person.
Tricia Romano: Then 9/11 happens, Google News wasn't a thing yet, but people wanted immediate information at that point. They didn't want to wait until the next day. They wanted to find their relatives or their loved ones that worked in the towers or nearby. That's when people started pushing out news a lot faster online. The combination of those two things starts to render print, not necessarily useless, but slow and behind. When 9/11 happens, there's a little bit of a recession in New York, especially people leaving or not moving into it as much.
We had anthrax scares still going to on, and people were afraid of the subway bombs. It was really tense time, and the apartment ads stopped being placed with the same level and the same numbers that they were before. Then you have Craigslist saying, "Hey, you don't need to mail in, or call anyone, or fax your listing to some number. You can just host it directly online, and it's free."
A lot of people just shifted to that, and the apartment ads never recovered after that. They still have them, but the shift to Craigslist was well underway. If that's the easiest way to make money, like we were talking about earlier in the '70s, and that's gone, you have to figure out something fast. I don't think any of the legacy media and journalism ever pivoted fast enough. That's partially why I think we're in this situation we are now, where you have layoff after layoff, after layoff, after layoff.
Micah Loewinger: In 2005, Village Voice Media, which at this point was owned by a financial management group along with six other alt weeklies, merged with The New Times, a newspaper chain. They became the biggest company of alt weeklies with 17 papers. The New Times had long coveted The Village Voice, but once it bought Village Voice Media, it eventually started picking it apart limb-by-limb.
Tricia Romano: It was very weird. I never understood what they were doing because if you wanted something so badly, why would you alter it in such a extreme way? It was like they just wanted the logo and the name, but that logo and name only has value because of what was there when you bought it. This collection of voices that made it The Village Voice. Those voices changed. Some people came and went, but there's a core sensibility that they just didn't get. There was some arrogance to them, and I think also, insecurity.
They think there were these cowboys from the West Coast and we don't know anything, we're going to show them. The thing is, New York is a different animal from any of these other cities. They just didn't get that, and they also wanted to put their own template on everything. New Yorkers are going to rebel against anything that's templated and one-size-fits-all. They started to lose advertisers.
I know for a fact that over the course of the year and a half that I was there, while they were still making changes to it, we had six editors or something, and one of the editors, he was putting stuff on the cover that was just not right for the paper and advertisers were fleeing. It's you like got to know what you don't know. They just were too arrogant to listen. Right after that, it was a financial crisis and coinciding all of that with the Craigslist and the decline of print, in general, it's just a perfect mixture for the paper to become weaker, and weaker, and weaker until it barely has any presence.
Micah Loewinger: In 2017, the print paper for The Voice was shut down. A year later, it seemed like the digital version was dead too, until 2020 when it was revived by a new crop of ownership. I think we can confidently say that The Village Voice of old is gone. What's the latest iteration like?
Tricia Romano: It's a zombie. The person that owns it is a guy named Brian Calle. He has a bunch of neighborhood newspapers, and he had bought the LA Weekly, I think in 2017. This last weekend, I think he just gutted the whole staff, like 15 people. That was a place that The Voice website was pooling a lot of material from. They were cross-posting a lot of the art, and music, and film reviews that the LA Weekly was running.
The Voice, to my knowledge, only has one employee and that's R.C Baker who is essentially the editor and they run some freelance pieces, so it's just there, [chuckles] but it's not present in the city the way it should be.
Micah Loewinger: This is true of many alt-weeklies around the country. More and more are shutting down each year and the ones that remain are often very, very lean. What do you think we lose when this kind of fiercely independent local paper with personality, [chuckles] with perspective, with its finger on the pulse dries up?
Tricia Romano: I think The Voice was a guide to life. It was a very curated, edited guide to a specific kind of life in New York City at specific times. That collection of knowledge from people who cared about what they were covering with such intensity that there were fist fights and draws inside the paper. That's gone. Now, you can pick and choose what you're want to read about or what you're interested in, or just whatever comes up on your Twitter stream or on your social media or TikTok. It doesn't have this cohesive viewpoint. Everything you need to know and everything you need in life is in this thing that you can hold in your hand, and that doesn't exist anymore.
Micah Loewinger: You're saying it existed with The Voice, but it doesn't exist with a literal handheld phone?
Tricia Romano: [chuckles] No, it's not the same when you're on your phone and you're reading article from this place, getting a Facebook event from that place, it doesn't have the same power in my opinion. I don't even know what's going on anymore in my neighborhood, [chuckles] or in my city. It's not the same as picking up a weekly newspaper and flipping through it and being like, "Oh, so-and-so's coming to town," and "Oh, I want to go see that play and I read that about that book. Maybe I'll go pick that up." It was just all there. You didn't have to go to 100 different sources to find it.
Micah Loewinger: The subtitle of your book includes the phrase, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture. How is journalism today influenced by The Village Voice?
Tricia Romano: I think it's all around us. The first person writing that came to really be embodied by blogging and the early odds, the deep critical thinking about music, pop music taking avant-garde film and independent film seriously or more seriously than superhero or mainstream blockbusters. That's a Village Voice thing. I think obviously the uncovering if Trump was something that The Village Voice did first.
The Village Voices, it's all around us now. Every media entity owes something to The Village Voices' legacy. Whether it's what they're covering or how they're covering it. Even The New York Times is writing about stuff in a way that The Voice would've written about it in the '80s, and they're writing about the kind of stuff that The Voice would've covered in the '80s or '90s. That is a relatively new development. The style section was definitely something that was created as a response to The Voice.
Micah Loewinger: Tricia, thank you very much.
Tricia Romano: Thank you for having me.
Micah Loewinger: Tricia Romano is the author of the new book, The Freaks Came Out To Write. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. Tune into the big show this Friday for even more delicious dirt from the Lost World of the Alt Weekly. Keep up with the show by following us on Instagram and Threads. I'm Micah Loewinger.
[MUSIC - Thurston Moore: Kill Your Idols]
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