It was an open paper, as Fancher later told me by phone, in that you could pretty much write about whatever you wanted-not so unlike social media today. When it started, the Voice was a kind of weekly criticism of the sponsored journalism that dominated both the tabloid and the broadsheet newspapers (there once were so many!) in the city. “I’m really glad we’re doing this,” former managing editor Dave Herndon shouted from a stage, as he and other formers took turns reading the names of the 130 Voice people who had died-“because we’re all going to be on this list some day! And we’ll be lucky to be on this motherfucking list!” But, if this makes sense, it was a good mortality. Maybe it’s true of all reunions, but inevitably the theme was mortality-of the old Voice, of print journalism, of ourselves. But after the deaths, last January, of two Voice pillars, Nat Hentoff and Wayne Barrett, there was a new urgency to get together before, frankly, more of us died. In fact, the former Voice writer Mike Tomasky had been batting around the idea of a reunion with some of us other ex- Voice-ers for a few years. But the party was planned long before the news of the paper’s folding. In August, when Voice owner Peter Barbey announced that the storied newspaper would henceforth publish only online, he was greeted with headlines like “ The Village Voice As We Knew Her Is Dead (For Real This Time).” The death knells only grew louder with the news, about a week later, that Barbey-a very wealthy liberal who was regarded as the Voice’s savior when he purchased the paper in 2015-would lay off 13 of the remaining 17 Voice union members, effectively busting the union.Īnd so when 300 former (and a few current) Voice staffers and freelancers gathered for the first-ever Village Voice reunion in early September, it did at times feel like a wake.
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