“New York is back, The Voice is back, I’m back.” “It all makes sense,” said the longtime Voice columnist Michael Musto, who has a byline in the return issue. The new issue, which came out on Saturday, is the first print incarnation of the storied independent publication since August 2017, when its previous owner, Peter D. Barbey, took it digital-only a year before shutting it down. Brian Calle, the publisher of LA Weekly, bought The Voice in December and revived its dormant website in January. “It really makes the relaunch of The Village Voice real in a way it wasn’t before.” “For us, putting a print issue out was a stake in the ground,” Mr. A nice spring surprise to see a print today! /B4hksqRJLk He plans to publish a print issue about four times a year, he added, meaning that a famed alt-weekly is now an alt-quarterly. The comeback issue includes an article by the former Voice reporter Ross Barkan on the New York mayoral race, and one by Eileen Markey that revives the paper’s tradition of shaming the city’s landlords. He was laid off in 2013, brought back in 2015 and sent packing once more, along with his colleagues, at the time of the 2018 shutdown. Calle said he had not appointed an editor in chief, but was having conversations with people as he rebuilt the newsroom. Baker, a longtime Voice writer, has taken the role of senior editor.Īfter The New York Times reported the sale of The Voice last year, some journalists expressed concerns about Mr. Calle as the proprietor of the downtown paper, which was founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher and Norman Mailer. Calle was previously an opinion editor at The Orange County Register in California and a vice president of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, and his tenure at LA Weekly has been marked by boycotts led by former writers for the publication and a lawsuit filed by an investor. Calle was a fan of the paper’s old spirit. Last week, for the first time since 2018, I had a story of mine appear in the Village Voice.“The new issue, to me, looks very Village Voice-y.” “He wants The Village Voice in all of its old, spunky, lefty history,” he said. I wrote about the 2021 NYC mayoral race, which will hold its Democratic primary on June 22nd, and I’ll be contributing to the Voice regularly, writing specifically on this very important municipal contest. Many people probably missed the news in December that the Voice, which its owner shut down in 2018, was sold to another owner who intends to bring it all the way back. ![]() I’ve been told a quartlerly print issue is coming, with the first one due sometime at the end of March. Print is good! I am always wary about news like this because this industry is so precarious and too dependent on the whims of rich individuals. Growing up in NYC, the Voice for me was my platonic ideal of a newspaper. It did the investigative journalism that mattered. Its coverage of arts and culture-books, galleries, plays, cinema-was unrivaled. It was a proudly left newspaper that, at the same time, was unafraid of heterodox voices, that could feature Nat Hentoff and Stanley Crouch and Colson Whitehead and Vivian Gornick and so many other fascinating writers.Īfter I quit the New York Observer in 2016, I went to write for the Voice, among other publications. ![]() It was, without question, the most fun I’ve had as a journalist and writer. ![]() I contributed investigative political pieces, commentary, and book reviews, thrilled to see my byline in a publication of such renown. I hope Village Voice 2.0 can bring back what it is New York has missed so much. The website is again posting original stories. It’s a bit of good news at a time that is still, for many, so dark. None of this, by the way, will change my approach to this Substack, Political Currents.
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