The end of the alt-weekly era in NYC mostly signaled the end of a diverse-thinking, open-minded New York. Not just the Voice, but the New York Press, The Aquarian, and even Al Goldstein's Screw, all presented a wildly alive New York from every possible angle. Finding even two New Yorkers working in the same bookstore who had the same ide…
The end of the alt-weekly era in NYC mostly signaled the end of a diverse-thinking, open-minded New York. Not just the Voice, but the New York Press, The Aquarian, and even Al Goldstein's Screw, all presented a wildly alive New York from every possible angle. Finding even two New Yorkers working in the same bookstore who had the same ideas about anything in that time was nigh-impossible. The internet, and the gentrified Brooklyn-brained era (mass gentrified via the same internet forces itself), has flattened thought enough that every "acceptable" liberal/leftie New Yorker has the exact same boring ideas on nearly every subject.
I hope you're right that something like the Voice could exist again, but I really don't see how. An online "subscription" model would likely make it the exclusive purview of the Brooklyn-brained. The beauty of the Village Voice is that it was free, and all over the city, at thousands of street corners. People from all walks could pick it up and instantly become part of of a vast network of unusual thinkers and unusual events in New York. A Nat Hentoff or especially an Al Goldstein would be way outside the confines of acceptability now; anti-journalism "journalists" would probably stage a mass walk out in protest over Hentoff's writing.
Many cities still have their alt-weeklies (and many still have large, flagship record stores too; what the hell New York?), but they've become hotbeds of manufactured consensus and forced conformity. Look at what happened to leftie lesbian Katie Herzog for writing a very thoughtful piece about de-transitioners in The Stranger.
There's also a top-down movement to contain the sort of unruly writing, personals, back pages and classifieds that drove the underground press: the continued unconstitutional destruction-via-lawfare of Backpage is a prime example, that's now claimed the life of one of its founders via suicide. The new long form pod about Backpage even suggests that the new right/QAnon obsession (that most of the Brooklyn "left" somehow share, but in mildly different terms) about sex trafficking being behind nearly door may have even sprung from this ongoing morass.
I do think that the return of samizdat, and printed-on-paper journalism could be the antidote to this stupid era, but would be people support it, could it remain open and thoughtful, and would it befall the same fate as Backpage?
(I was at that same Siren fest watching Malkmus next the cyclone, which whirred loudly past every 90 seconds or so. I seem to remember he did an Eddie Money cover that night. I saw most of the Siren and later 4Knots fests. Fun era.)
"The beauty of the Village Voice is that it was free ..." Not so, it was only free from the mid-1990s onwards -- which was a sign that its business model was weakening. Prior to that, you paid for it. I sold subscriptions to the Voice to college students from New York City in the dorms at SUNY Buffalo in 1971.
You're right, it became free in 1996. That seemed to become standard for alt-weeklies at that time, but maybe that was just how the business went.
(I did read it — and especially peruse the music/movie listings — as a kid/teen in the '80s and '90s — but those were my dad's copies that were always on the kitchen table.)
I should add that I think Barkan's mostly right about Substack approximating the alternative newsweekly, and my inbox is now way, way overfilled with voices from all over the spectrum.
People should get paid for their work, and the idea of people paying for a subscription to a neo- Voice type service would be amazing, but most of the remaining legacy newspapers making money with a subscription model (and NY Times is one of the only ones doing it successfully) became more about planning to a crowd and reinforcing priors, which the Times has clearly done in the Trump era (though they still have a lot of great writing and reporting). My fear is that a new Village Voice would be run like any of the newer online New York newsletters Barkan mentions: Hell Gate, Gothamist, etc., which only present news and opinion from one very specific place. And that Brooklyn-based cohort would run a new Voice exactly like that — and they currently do online, to no readers likely! These are the people who ultimately destroyed the American countercultures and independent arts; I don't think they can revive it.
Hmm, other (admittedly far far thinner, both page count and content) alt weeklies like the Chicago Reader and Seattle Stranger were free from at least the early 80s when I first became aware of them. But the local advertising market was different, and local, back then (plus, all the dinosaurs roaming about).
I wonder:
1) In the 70s and 80s, what fraction of the Voice's revenue came from subscriptions?
2) What fraction of the subscriptions were non-local? I recall a few people in San Francisco in the 70s/early 80s having mail subscriptions.
I recall my dad telling me that the Voice was free in Manhattan well before 1996, so it's quite likely he — and many others — picked up a copy around the NYU campus and bringing it to our outer borough home instead of buying one at a newsstand.
Every city worth its salt, and more than 100,000 residents, had its own free alt-weekly by 1996, so I'd imagine that cut into the Voice's out-of-town subscriptions.
Don’t forget the short lived Seven Days magazine, another publication that my landlord Leonard Stern started. It was on the sixth floor below me. It went nowhere.
As someone who was there (living upstairs on the 7th floor) watching it happen, and personally knowing staff in circulation and finance, I know that the free era was instigated due to dwindling circulation. A decision was made to prop up circulation with making it free while making up the income through increased advertising. For a period, the paper got bulky. With the net, that model weakened. Finally, few good writers were left: they got fired one by one. I remember running into writers in the elevator after they got the news: it was heartbreaking.
When much of the paper was being subsidized by escort ads, I knew that the end was near.
Something else that remains seemingly unsaid in this discussion is the change in the Overton Window: in the 50s - 60s - 70s - 80s, much of The Village Voice was sorta inside of it. By the 90s, it was mostly out. The reading propensities of the city’s demographics was well on its way to being filled by the professional classes, a process that was accelerated under Bloomberg.
The end of the alt-weekly era in NYC mostly signaled the end of a diverse-thinking, open-minded New York. Not just the Voice, but the New York Press, The Aquarian, and even Al Goldstein's Screw, all presented a wildly alive New York from every possible angle. Finding even two New Yorkers working in the same bookstore who had the same ideas about anything in that time was nigh-impossible. The internet, and the gentrified Brooklyn-brained era (mass gentrified via the same internet forces itself), has flattened thought enough that every "acceptable" liberal/leftie New Yorker has the exact same boring ideas on nearly every subject.
I hope you're right that something like the Voice could exist again, but I really don't see how. An online "subscription" model would likely make it the exclusive purview of the Brooklyn-brained. The beauty of the Village Voice is that it was free, and all over the city, at thousands of street corners. People from all walks could pick it up and instantly become part of of a vast network of unusual thinkers and unusual events in New York. A Nat Hentoff or especially an Al Goldstein would be way outside the confines of acceptability now; anti-journalism "journalists" would probably stage a mass walk out in protest over Hentoff's writing.
Many cities still have their alt-weeklies (and many still have large, flagship record stores too; what the hell New York?), but they've become hotbeds of manufactured consensus and forced conformity. Look at what happened to leftie lesbian Katie Herzog for writing a very thoughtful piece about de-transitioners in The Stranger.
There's also a top-down movement to contain the sort of unruly writing, personals, back pages and classifieds that drove the underground press: the continued unconstitutional destruction-via-lawfare of Backpage is a prime example, that's now claimed the life of one of its founders via suicide. The new long form pod about Backpage even suggests that the new right/QAnon obsession (that most of the Brooklyn "left" somehow share, but in mildly different terms) about sex trafficking being behind nearly door may have even sprung from this ongoing morass.
I do think that the return of samizdat, and printed-on-paper journalism could be the antidote to this stupid era, but would be people support it, could it remain open and thoughtful, and would it befall the same fate as Backpage?
(I was at that same Siren fest watching Malkmus next the cyclone, which whirred loudly past every 90 seconds or so. I seem to remember he did an Eddie Money cover that night. I saw most of the Siren and later 4Knots fests. Fun era.)
"The beauty of the Village Voice is that it was free ..." Not so, it was only free from the mid-1990s onwards -- which was a sign that its business model was weakening. Prior to that, you paid for it. I sold subscriptions to the Voice to college students from New York City in the dorms at SUNY Buffalo in 1971.
You're right, it became free in 1996. That seemed to become standard for alt-weeklies at that time, but maybe that was just how the business went.
(I did read it — and especially peruse the music/movie listings — as a kid/teen in the '80s and '90s — but those were my dad's copies that were always on the kitchen table.)
I should add that I think Barkan's mostly right about Substack approximating the alternative newsweekly, and my inbox is now way, way overfilled with voices from all over the spectrum.
People should get paid for their work, and the idea of people paying for a subscription to a neo- Voice type service would be amazing, but most of the remaining legacy newspapers making money with a subscription model (and NY Times is one of the only ones doing it successfully) became more about planning to a crowd and reinforcing priors, which the Times has clearly done in the Trump era (though they still have a lot of great writing and reporting). My fear is that a new Village Voice would be run like any of the newer online New York newsletters Barkan mentions: Hell Gate, Gothamist, etc., which only present news and opinion from one very specific place. And that Brooklyn-based cohort would run a new Voice exactly like that — and they currently do online, to no readers likely! These are the people who ultimately destroyed the American countercultures and independent arts; I don't think they can revive it.
Hmm, other (admittedly far far thinner, both page count and content) alt weeklies like the Chicago Reader and Seattle Stranger were free from at least the early 80s when I first became aware of them. But the local advertising market was different, and local, back then (plus, all the dinosaurs roaming about).
I wonder:
1) In the 70s and 80s, what fraction of the Voice's revenue came from subscriptions?
2) What fraction of the subscriptions were non-local? I recall a few people in San Francisco in the 70s/early 80s having mail subscriptions.
There's a New York Times piece here (https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/08/nyregion/village-voice-circulation-down-to-be-free-to-manhattan-readers.html) that says that the Voice was giving away a fourth of its (dwindling) circulation on college campuses before going free in 1996, due to poor readership.
I recall my dad telling me that the Voice was free in Manhattan well before 1996, so it's quite likely he — and many others — picked up a copy around the NYU campus and bringing it to our outer borough home instead of buying one at a newsstand.
Every city worth its salt, and more than 100,000 residents, had its own free alt-weekly by 1996, so I'd imagine that cut into the Voice's out-of-town subscriptions.
Don’t forget the short lived Seven Days magazine, another publication that my landlord Leonard Stern started. It was on the sixth floor below me. It went nowhere.
As someone who was there (living upstairs on the 7th floor) watching it happen, and personally knowing staff in circulation and finance, I know that the free era was instigated due to dwindling circulation. A decision was made to prop up circulation with making it free while making up the income through increased advertising. For a period, the paper got bulky. With the net, that model weakened. Finally, few good writers were left: they got fired one by one. I remember running into writers in the elevator after they got the news: it was heartbreaking.
When much of the paper was being subsidized by escort ads, I knew that the end was near.
My memory is that it went free to compete with the upstart NY Press, which was the first major NYC free weekly.
The decline started before that.
Is the NY Press still around? I don’t know that it was ever a threat: they are very different.
Something else that remains seemingly unsaid in this discussion is the change in the Overton Window: in the 50s - 60s - 70s - 80s, much of The Village Voice was sorta inside of it. By the 90s, it was mostly out. The reading propensities of the city’s demographics was well on its way to being filled by the professional classes, a process that was accelerated under Bloomberg.