What Replaced the Village Voice?

It might not be what you think

In Jacobin, Alex Press offered a worthy review of Tricia Romano’s new oral history of the Village Voice, a book that mattered to me as an ex-Voice writer and New York nostalgist. The Voice was, at its various peaks, a remarkable hub for cultural debate and investigative reportage, simultaneously muckraking at City Hall while discovering hip hop and publishing incisive literary criticism. It was, somehow, both an alternative newspaper for the streets and the intellectual class, capturing, as much as any publication could, polyphonic New York. It was a rowdy, chaotic place, fraught with tension even when it was profitable, and its demise was a great blow for the city and the rest of America. The Voice, when humming, was an enchantment for young creatives, a window into what was possible.

The fall of the Voice is a common newspaper story, both in its economic slide and heinous mismanagement. Once the twenty-first century arrived, the Voice faced a certain doom, as its profitable classifieds section evaporated almost overnight—Craigslist made it so apartment ads didn’t need to be taken out in the Voice anymore—and other advertisers suddenly figured out how to make use of the new internet. In the 2000s, the Voice also had a remarkably insidious conglomerate owner, New Times, which fired just about every reporter and critic of note and never figured out an alternative business model. Another terrible owner followed, billionaire Peter Barbey, who proved so inept that he made my old boss at the New York Observer, Jared Kushner, look like a wunderkind. Barbey shuttered the print edition, then the entire paper, and now the Voice lives on, with yet another owner, in a greatly reduced form.

Press concludes her review with the understandable argument that, under today’s conditions, it would be very hard to recreate what the Voice was.

And could you pull off print runs, the paper as an object one might come across on the street, rather than just a website?

Probably not. You couldn’t have a Voice-like entity because people don’t need it anymore: they can find apartments, drummers, and just about anything else on the internet. And there are great recent ventures that capture some of the Voice’s spirit online: Hell Gate, a worker-owned local outlet, has an admirable penchant for weirdness. Gothamist and the City take local reporting seriously, with their reporters accumulating sources in ways front-of-the-book Voice pioneers might’ve admired. Yet as New York carries on devouring all that is holy, with power-mad elected officials and their cronies driving working-class people into desperation and crushing artists before they can even get their footing, it’s worth wondering.

I almost agree. It’s true that the utilitarian function of the Voice is long gone. No one will ever seek out a print newspaper to rent an apartment or find a job. It’s hard to understate how valuable that business was to all newspapers, but to the Voice especially. New Yorkers would line up at Voice newsstands hours ahead of time to get a jump on the apartment hunt. They weren’t always hungry for Wayne Barrett’s Trump investigations or award-winning coverage of the AIDS epidemic. They wanted to find a cheap spot on the Lower East Side and the Voice was the place to go; if, while holding the paper, they read a few articles, all the better.

But no publication in New York City has recaptured the Voice spirit or come close to replicating what it was—and this, in part, is by design. None of the new publications Press writes about, which are all very good in different ways, are Voice-like. Hell Gate, the punchy start-up, comes closest, but its staff is too small and the reporters there don’t do nearly enough cultural coverage. The City and Gothamist, for the most part, eschew culture too. They are all quite effective at one particular aspect of the old Voice, which was local reporting, especially when it comes to City Hall. The City, an online nonprofit that has existed since 2019, has broken numerous stories and evolved into a tough Eric Adams watchdog. Hell Gate, similarly, is refreshingly pugnacious on the Adams beat, and Gothamist, owned by WNYC, runs a strong morning newsletter and employs several talented journalists, including the housing reporter David Brand. If you live in New York and want to know more about this massive city—the laws that determine your rent, your taxes, and your transportation—all three of these outlets are worth your time, especially as the New York Times no longer offers granular coverage of the outer boroughs and the Daily News endures perpetual layoffs.

There is no publication, though, that is an intellectual and cultural hub—a clearinghouse for diverse, peculiar, heterodox, and deeply talented people to collaborate and argue with each other, all in the same afternoon. There is no stylistic successor to the Voice, since nonprofit outlets tend to dull prose. The Voice was the home of radical lesbian feminist Jill Johnston, anti-abortion libertarian Nat Hentoff, pioneering hip hop writer Greg Tate, pioneering jazz (and ferociously anti-hip hop) writer Stanley Crouch, and Vivian Gornick, the literary critic and feminist intellectual. And it had its investigative reporting arm, which was both great and carried a more unsettling reactionary undercurrent, since the white male reporters there would complain about the sexual, gay-friendly Voice covers. Replicating all of this under the current economic conditions is almost impossible, but Press shouldn’t imply there isn’t a hunger for it or that New Yorkers, still bereft of the local coverage they had in the twentieth century, particularly on the cultural front, wouldn’t have an interest.

A neo-Voice, with a subscription model and a savvy live events arm, could survive and even thrive. The current media landscape is not absent success stories. Print-based magazines that don’t overexpand and focus on underserved niches can turn a profit or at least stave off collapse. There are few, if any, publications that currently make a beat out of the New York music scenes, as the Voice once did. What’s happening in underground rap? Indie rock? Jazz? Specialized arts publications like ARTnews cover the visual arts in New York, but there are undoubtedly poorer artists who fall through the cracks and don’t get the attention they might merit. In the book world, this is doubly true, since there aren’t many publications beyond Bookforum that focus exclusively on reviewing books. The Voice used to boast a well-regarded literary supplement. Bret Easton Ellis once said he knew Less Than Zero had resonated when the Voice decided to review it.

In terms of writing and commentary, the closest Voice analogue is the multifarious world of Substack. Substack is diffuse, which is a strength and a weakness, but what it does contain, in spades, is writerly talent. I lose track, sometimes, of how many strikingly original writers I’ve found through Substack, the kind of cultural and literary commentators—Chris Jesu Lee, ARX-Han, and Mo Diggs immediately come to mind, along with the critics Terry Nguyen, John Pistelli, and Celine Nguyen—that would have been at home in the old Voice. (And how could I forget the Sams, Kahn and Kriss? Or Anne Trubek on the business of publishing? Or Andrea Petkovic on tennis?) Substack is that raffish, alternative universe that the Voice once was, and it’s gotten easier, over time, to find these kinds of people. Still, there’s a certain power in a single place, a single publication. It can make sense for writers to go it alone, especially if they’re racking up significant subscription revenue. Publications, if run in a typical fashion, will suppress idiosyncratic writers over time, forcing them to homogenize. The Voice never did this and that’s why it succeeded. So many publications, magazines and newspapers and digital outlets like, sound very similar. This is how you fail.

The Voice itself, with more aggressive ownership, could resuscitate itself. The IP, as they say, is strong. You can start with merchandising—t-shirts, tote bags, prints—and branch out to sponsoring live talks and festivals, as the Atlantic and New Yorker do already. There’s always a hunger for more, especially debate series—so many panels are friendly and sleepy, and there’s a market inefficiency to exploit if you get writers together live, in person, who don’t really like each other and let them have at it. There’s a reason we still remember Town Hall, more than a half century later. The Voice once ran a very good musical festival where I saw Stephen Malkmus play at Coney Island. They can do that again, too. You publish a print publication, maybe a monthly, because it adds prestige and serves as a form of valuable, street-level marketing. The new media nonprofits and start-ups do not market themselves nearly enough; too many New Yorkers have never heard of The City. And then, finally, you hire smart, hungry, and off-kilter writers willing to zig where others zag. You hire people to write the stories others won’t write. You hire for talent. If the Voice won’t ever do this, someone else will. Nature, as the cliche goes, abhors a vacuum. There’s still energy out there to make it new.