Substack is great and this is also my lament; if there were some way to collate all of this talent, it'd rival the old Voice for sure. A lot of smart and interesting people on here. It's the first internet development that's been a net positive for writers.
What I want more out of Substack is reviews. I bang this drum a lot but I wish someone would just review books regularly on Substack, someone would regularly review new music, fill those kinds of functions the Voice and other alternative papers did.
Substack needs to have an aggregate subscription model so that I could, say, subscribe to a dozen writers at once. Al La carte subs do not work for the reader: s/he have to pock and choose.
Joe Rogan made a good point when he was speaking with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster recently that the more feasible model would be something like The Free Press, where you have multiple writers under one bannerhead, and charge a monthly subscription for the house writers. Not sure how pay and free-lancing would work, but I’d be down to sumbit something weekly or bi-monthly on reviews around psych and self-help books to a bannerhead publication. Hard to know where to start and whom to gather, since you really would need an editor to set deadlines and keep people on track.
I think the tricky thing for so many would-be new publications is what you say at the end, about hiring for talent. You have to be able to spot the talent, which most people can't really do; have the resources and/or the charisma to recruit and pay them well enough, which most people don't have; and be ruthless enough, which most people aren't, to exclude writers who are friends and allies who don't quite meet the talent bar.
If you could pull all that off consistently, I wholly agree with you that a neo-Voice could succeed.
Spotting the talent is less hard now that there's Substack. Recruiting and keeping is tougher, but I'd say a lot of the most interesting Substack writers now are not the bestsellers, the people doing 50k+ subscriptions. In fact, a fair number of them have gotten pretty repetitive. That's my knock on Taibbi, for example, and why I'd never poach someone like him for the neo-Voice: too predictable! Surprise me!
I wonder if the answer is some version of, say, Persuasion, except with less editorial intervention (ie editors basically pick the writers and try to guide choice of topics in some fashion but don't do any line editing), more idiosyncrasy, and the payment is just driving people to subscribe to the individual writers' newsletters. Something more like an editorial collective, maybe.
It would be hard to overstate the import of The Voice in NYC's music and art scene during the 70s and 80s. Musicians and artists once crammed below 14th Street. It was much more than an annual music festival, or apartments for rent space. Clubs, galleries and what we now call pop ups were regularly reviewed or listed. The tabloids were indifferent, the Times ignored life below Gramercy Park. The Voice was culturally a hybrid version of Art News and Variety for middle and low brows. Whether it was jazz, glam rock, art or drag that interested you, it was in the Voice.
Generally I detest nostalgia, but I do think it's fair to say the gentrification of Tribeca, Soho, the East Village and later Brooklyn played as big a role in killing the Voice as any factor. Once upon a time whole neighborhoods of NYC were given over to singers, dancers, artists, musicians and writers. The streets teemed with venues to perform, or galleries to display work. It was centralized. Now? Blue Bottle coffee and bougie pizza parlors on every corner. That's a real step down in my opinion.
Even so, I absolutely believe there's a real thirst in NYC for the type of cultural and political news the Voice once provided. Nobody ever came to NYC to stay at home and binge-watch HBO.
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.
I never got to experience the Village Voice in its publication but I often end up in its archives. My mom's uncle was on the first iteration of the independent state watchdog committee called SIC in the 60s, which was repeatedly defunded by the own govt it was meant to investigate (not at all a shock). Over several years the committee investigated various state and NYC govt agencies/depts, including t the housing/buildings dept. and the Mitchell-Lama projects. There is a quote of my mom's uncle about Fred Trump, "Isn't there anyway we can stop such a grasping and greedy individual from getting more licenses?" - more or less - and obviously we all know that in NYS, no, we cannot. Despite years of proceedings and investigations, the SIC was unable, as far as i can tell, to make a dent in the public awareness of the major corruption and unsafety infesting our govt and our housing and on and on. HOWEVER, the Village Voice - specifically the great Wayne Barret - published a two-part feature on Fred and Donald Trump, which Barrett republished before he passed in 2017 (as mentioned in this post and which I only noticed AFTER posting this - link below). I would argue the Village Voice and reporters like Barrett are unquestionably more effective than any investigatory committee at keeping these power-hungry scumbags in line. (https://www.villagevoice.com/how-a-young-donald-trump-forced-his-way-from-avenue-z-to-manhattan/)
Another thing I miss, that nearly all the big city alt-weeklies provided, is a sense of what's going on culturally during any given week. I live in Atlanta and we have "Creative Loafing" which is just a shell of a paper. They a have a "5 things to do today" electronic newsletter, but it's terrible. Nobody puts effort into it. I'm curious: do other big cities have this problem?
PS I think the late-90s in NYC was a heyday for alt-weeklies because we also had the "NY Press," which I think was a genuinely great paper. Back then the Voice and the NY Press came out on Tuesday nights, but they wouldn't hit the vending boxes in my Upper West Side neighborhood till Wednesday morning. I loved both papers so much, sometimes I'd take the train to lower Manhattan (back then I could even take the "9") to pick up my copies.
There will never be another Voice because people don’t read newspapers anymore. The Voice was something you waited for once a week for news, columns, classifieds, music and the calendar. It was the one place for all of that and you gladly paid for it at the newsstand or in the mail. We live in a different media world now, much more diffuse and segmented.
I happen to like newspapers because they are like an adventure. You never know what’s going to be on the next page. Today, most people just read things online that they are already interested in.
Since I like papers I do publish one, the Red Hook Star-Revue, but mostly for my writers, who get a kick out of seeing themselves in actual print.
A new version of the Voice would never, in a million years, hire someone like Hentoff. Libertarian? Anti abortion? In today's media world? No way, and that's why it's pure fantasy to even imagine a 'new' Voice. Too bad. I miss it a lot.
The homogeniety and corporate oversight about not pissing off advertisers got me, and the cutthroat dismissiveness of other reporters wasn’t fun either. Never read The Village Voice, but it sounds like it was a great paper in its heyday.
Now everything small gets bought up and diced piecemeal for the sake of profits and bottomlines. Add on a shrinking staff and putting too many jobs onto one person (you have to take video, know social media, and do your own photos, as well as write, edit, and lay the page out) was a lot of work.
People are profoundly disconnected and don’t seem to notice the lack of local reporting. Not sure what’s going to change that.
I would love for substack to fuse all these smart and delightful voices together. The Voice, flinty, fearless, smart, controversial, etc benefited from that wonderful and most human talent -editorial curation.
Substack needs to have an aggregate subscription model so that I could, say, subscribe to a dozen writers at once. Al La carte subs do not work for the reader: s/he have to pick and choose. NOT an ideal situation.
I moved into the top 7th floor in the front of that building (technically in NoHo) in March of 1976. Back then, they were giving loft spaces away. I was in my senior year at The Cooper Union, about to graduate. The East Village back then was a place for poets, novelists, musicians, composers, journalists, sculptors, painters (me), public art installation artists (also me), photographers, dancers, actors, playwrights, and all manner of other grungy fringy types. And yes, for my first three years at Cooper, I’d line up on Wednesday morning to be among the first to get at the apartment listings! In 2016, a men’s clothing store opened up around the corner on Lafayette, with sports jackets starting at $2,700. By then, most all of my favorite bars, clubs, restaurants had closed (only the Nuyorican Poets - where I met my wife and got married) remains. Gone was the creative vibe, and the affordability that nurtured creative talent. It was a place where you could afford to fail, make mistakes. It became a place where when you went to a bar, you ran into futures traders instead, who were happy to let landlords cram five of them into apartments meant for one. It was time to go, and in September of 2017, my wife and I gave up that loft (pleading Leonard to no end), and moved to Newburgh, which - for the moment - has that old East Village feel.
Leonard Stern (the Stern School of Business, Hartz Mountain Industries), the owner of 36 Cooper (his dad founded Hartz there after he arrived from the Harz Mountains in Germany in the mid 1920s) bought the Voice in 1986 as his daughter Andrea was graduating from Columbia Journalism School (yes, the rich are different) and put her to work there. Leonard eventually created the Long Island Voice (where his daughter I believe was eventually assigned), and bought and/or created about 7 or 8 other similar weeklies across the U.S.
It was so much fun living there for those first couple decades with the Voice as my neighbor. 9/11 was the beginning of the end, as a saw it: by the end of the 00s, it was so dependent on escort ads that my stepdaughter did a music video about it:
I say to my wife all the time that every column I write on Substack could have run in the Voice when I was there. You are so right about Substack.
Substack is great and this is also my lament; if there were some way to collate all of this talent, it'd rival the old Voice for sure. A lot of smart and interesting people on here. It's the first internet development that's been a net positive for writers.
What I want more out of Substack is reviews. I bang this drum a lot but I wish someone would just review books regularly on Substack, someone would regularly review new music, fill those kinds of functions the Voice and other alternative papers did.
Substack needs to have an aggregate subscription model so that I could, say, subscribe to a dozen writers at once. Al La carte subs do not work for the reader: s/he have to pock and choose.
Joe Rogan made a good point when he was speaking with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster recently that the more feasible model would be something like The Free Press, where you have multiple writers under one bannerhead, and charge a monthly subscription for the house writers. Not sure how pay and free-lancing would work, but I’d be down to sumbit something weekly or bi-monthly on reviews around psych and self-help books to a bannerhead publication. Hard to know where to start and whom to gather, since you really would need an editor to set deadlines and keep people on track.
I think the tricky thing for so many would-be new publications is what you say at the end, about hiring for talent. You have to be able to spot the talent, which most people can't really do; have the resources and/or the charisma to recruit and pay them well enough, which most people don't have; and be ruthless enough, which most people aren't, to exclude writers who are friends and allies who don't quite meet the talent bar.
If you could pull all that off consistently, I wholly agree with you that a neo-Voice could succeed.
Spotting the talent is less hard now that there's Substack. Recruiting and keeping is tougher, but I'd say a lot of the most interesting Substack writers now are not the bestsellers, the people doing 50k+ subscriptions. In fact, a fair number of them have gotten pretty repetitive. That's my knock on Taibbi, for example, and why I'd never poach someone like him for the neo-Voice: too predictable! Surprise me!
I wonder if the answer is some version of, say, Persuasion, except with less editorial intervention (ie editors basically pick the writers and try to guide choice of topics in some fashion but don't do any line editing), more idiosyncrasy, and the payment is just driving people to subscribe to the individual writers' newsletters. Something more like an editorial collective, maybe.
It would be hard to overstate the import of The Voice in NYC's music and art scene during the 70s and 80s. Musicians and artists once crammed below 14th Street. It was much more than an annual music festival, or apartments for rent space. Clubs, galleries and what we now call pop ups were regularly reviewed or listed. The tabloids were indifferent, the Times ignored life below Gramercy Park. The Voice was culturally a hybrid version of Art News and Variety for middle and low brows. Whether it was jazz, glam rock, art or drag that interested you, it was in the Voice.
Generally I detest nostalgia, but I do think it's fair to say the gentrification of Tribeca, Soho, the East Village and later Brooklyn played as big a role in killing the Voice as any factor. Once upon a time whole neighborhoods of NYC were given over to singers, dancers, artists, musicians and writers. The streets teemed with venues to perform, or galleries to display work. It was centralized. Now? Blue Bottle coffee and bougie pizza parlors on every corner. That's a real step down in my opinion.
Even so, I absolutely believe there's a real thirst in NYC for the type of cultural and political news the Voice once provided. Nobody ever came to NYC to stay at home and binge-watch HBO.
“Nobody ever came to NYC to stay at home and binge-watch HBO.”
I’m going to borrow that.
This is great, Ross should be given a column in the NYT. Wouldnt this content resonate with most of the readers?
Here here. Thanks for the mention.
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.
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.
I never got to experience the Village Voice in its publication but I often end up in its archives. My mom's uncle was on the first iteration of the independent state watchdog committee called SIC in the 60s, which was repeatedly defunded by the own govt it was meant to investigate (not at all a shock). Over several years the committee investigated various state and NYC govt agencies/depts, including t the housing/buildings dept. and the Mitchell-Lama projects. There is a quote of my mom's uncle about Fred Trump, "Isn't there anyway we can stop such a grasping and greedy individual from getting more licenses?" - more or less - and obviously we all know that in NYS, no, we cannot. Despite years of proceedings and investigations, the SIC was unable, as far as i can tell, to make a dent in the public awareness of the major corruption and unsafety infesting our govt and our housing and on and on. HOWEVER, the Village Voice - specifically the great Wayne Barret - published a two-part feature on Fred and Donald Trump, which Barrett republished before he passed in 2017 (as mentioned in this post and which I only noticed AFTER posting this - link below). I would argue the Village Voice and reporters like Barrett are unquestionably more effective than any investigatory committee at keeping these power-hungry scumbags in line. (https://www.villagevoice.com/how-a-young-donald-trump-forced-his-way-from-avenue-z-to-manhattan/)
Another thing I miss, that nearly all the big city alt-weeklies provided, is a sense of what's going on culturally during any given week. I live in Atlanta and we have "Creative Loafing" which is just a shell of a paper. They a have a "5 things to do today" electronic newsletter, but it's terrible. Nobody puts effort into it. I'm curious: do other big cities have this problem?
PS I think the late-90s in NYC was a heyday for alt-weeklies because we also had the "NY Press," which I think was a genuinely great paper. Back then the Voice and the NY Press came out on Tuesday nights, but they wouldn't hit the vending boxes in my Upper West Side neighborhood till Wednesday morning. I loved both papers so much, sometimes I'd take the train to lower Manhattan (back then I could even take the "9") to pick up my copies.
There will never be another Voice because people don’t read newspapers anymore. The Voice was something you waited for once a week for news, columns, classifieds, music and the calendar. It was the one place for all of that and you gladly paid for it at the newsstand or in the mail. We live in a different media world now, much more diffuse and segmented.
I happen to like newspapers because they are like an adventure. You never know what’s going to be on the next page. Today, most people just read things online that they are already interested in.
Since I like papers I do publish one, the Red Hook Star-Revue, but mostly for my writers, who get a kick out of seeing themselves in actual print.
A new version of the Voice would never, in a million years, hire someone like Hentoff. Libertarian? Anti abortion? In today's media world? No way, and that's why it's pure fantasy to even imagine a 'new' Voice. Too bad. I miss it a lot.
The homogeniety and corporate oversight about not pissing off advertisers got me, and the cutthroat dismissiveness of other reporters wasn’t fun either. Never read The Village Voice, but it sounds like it was a great paper in its heyday.
Now everything small gets bought up and diced piecemeal for the sake of profits and bottomlines. Add on a shrinking staff and putting too many jobs onto one person (you have to take video, know social media, and do your own photos, as well as write, edit, and lay the page out) was a lot of work.
People are profoundly disconnected and don’t seem to notice the lack of local reporting. Not sure what’s going to change that.
I would love for substack to fuse all these smart and delightful voices together. The Voice, flinty, fearless, smart, controversial, etc benefited from that wonderful and most human talent -editorial curation.
Follow Medium Rare for on the ground reporting from your local meme dealer!!!
Substack needs to have an aggregate subscription model so that I could, say, subscribe to a dozen writers at once. Al La carte subs do not work for the reader: s/he have to pick and choose. NOT an ideal situation.
My old home! Literally!
I moved into the top 7th floor in the front of that building (technically in NoHo) in March of 1976. Back then, they were giving loft spaces away. I was in my senior year at The Cooper Union, about to graduate. The East Village back then was a place for poets, novelists, musicians, composers, journalists, sculptors, painters (me), public art installation artists (also me), photographers, dancers, actors, playwrights, and all manner of other grungy fringy types. And yes, for my first three years at Cooper, I’d line up on Wednesday morning to be among the first to get at the apartment listings! In 2016, a men’s clothing store opened up around the corner on Lafayette, with sports jackets starting at $2,700. By then, most all of my favorite bars, clubs, restaurants had closed (only the Nuyorican Poets - where I met my wife and got married) remains. Gone was the creative vibe, and the affordability that nurtured creative talent. It was a place where you could afford to fail, make mistakes. It became a place where when you went to a bar, you ran into futures traders instead, who were happy to let landlords cram five of them into apartments meant for one. It was time to go, and in September of 2017, my wife and I gave up that loft (pleading Leonard to no end), and moved to Newburgh, which - for the moment - has that old East Village feel.
Leonard Stern (the Stern School of Business, Hartz Mountain Industries), the owner of 36 Cooper (his dad founded Hartz there after he arrived from the Harz Mountains in Germany in the mid 1920s) bought the Voice in 1986 as his daughter Andrea was graduating from Columbia Journalism School (yes, the rich are different) and put her to work there. Leonard eventually created the Long Island Voice (where his daughter I believe was eventually assigned), and bought and/or created about 7 or 8 other similar weeklies across the U.S.
It was so much fun living there for those first couple decades with the Voice as my neighbor. 9/11 was the beginning of the end, as a saw it: by the end of the 00s, it was so dependent on escort ads that my stepdaughter did a music video about it:
https://youtu.be/kxAvGNXpBAQ?si=3BhRtecarVTvodUi
I really miss those days. I’m still in touch with Richard Goldstein. He just sent me a copy of his new memoir. It’s not out yet.
Correction: Richard says it is out.
Didn't Robert Sietsema, inexhaustible chronicler of New York's restaurant culture, get rolling there?