The Village Voice

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The Village Voice is a weekly newspaper in New York City featuring investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts reviews and events listings for New York City.

It was the first and is arguably the best known of the arts-oriented tabloids that have come to be known as alternative weeklies. The turbulent times its writers have covered has often been matched by the intrigue in its own offices, but the weekly has survived to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Its spirit can be captured in its 1980s advertising slogan: "Some people swear by us...other people swear AT us."

The Voice was launched by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer on October 26, 1955, from a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, its initial coverage area, expanding to other parts of the city by the 1960s. The offices in the 1960s were located at Sheridan Square; they are now at Cooper Square in the East Village.

The Voice has published groundbreaking investigations of New York City politics, as well as reporting on local and national politics, with arts, culture, music, dance, film, and theater reviews. The Voice has received three Pulitzer Prizes, in 1981 (Teresa Carpenter), 1986 (Jules Feiffer) and 2000 (Mark Schoofs). Almost since its inception the paper has recognized alternative theater in New York through its Obie Awards. Since the early 1970s music critic Robert Christgau has run a highly influential music poll known as "Pazz & Jop" every February from the "top ten" lists submitted by music critics from around the country. In 1999, film critic J. Hoberman and film section editor Dennis Lim began a similar Village Voice Film Poll for the year's movies. In 2001 the paper sponsored its first Siren Festival indie rock festival, a free annual event every summer held at Coney Island.

The Voice has published many well-known writers, including Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, e. e. cummings, Nat Hentoff, Ted Hoagland, Tom Stoppard, Lorraine Hansberry, Jerry Tallmer, Allen Ginsberg, Murray Kempton, I.F. Stone, Pete Hamill, and Roger Wilkins.

Former editors have included Dan Wolf, Clay Felker, Tom Morgan, Marianne Partridge, David Schneiderman, Robert Friedman, Marty Gottlieb, Jonathan Larson, and Karen Durbin. Early columnists of the 1950s and 1960s included Jonas Mekas, who explored the underground film movement in his "Film Journal" column, Linda Solomon, who reviewed the Village club scene in the "Riffs" column, and Sam Julty, who wrote a popular column on car ownership and maintenance. Another regular from that period was the cartoonist Kin Platt, who did weekly theatrical caricatures. Other prominent regular writers from the magazine over its history include Andrew Sarris, Peter Schjeldahl, Ellen Willis, Leslie Savan, Michael Musto, C. Carr, Simon Firth, Tom Carson, Mim Udovitch, and Ross Wetzsteon.

The newspaper has also been a host to promising underground cartoonists. In addition to mainstay Jules Feiffer, whose cartoon ran for decades in the paper until its cancellation in 1996, well-known cartoonists featured in the paper include Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Stan Mack, Mark Alan Stamaty, Ted Rall, Tom Tomorrow, Ward Sutton, and Ruben Bolling. The voice is also recognized for its 18+ content usually in the back of the magazine and is the only newspaper to do so.

The Voice's competitors in New York City include the New York Press, New York Observer and Time Out New York. After decades of carrying a cover price, the Voice responded to competition from the free New York Press by itself becoming free of charge on newsstands in the five boroughs -- in 1996. (It still carries a charge for home/mail delivery and for newsstands outside the city limits, such as on Long Island.) Its circulation as of 2004 was 260,000. [1]

The Voice’s web site is a past winner of both the National Press Foundation’s Online Journalism Award and the Editor and Publisher EPPY Award for Best Overall US Weekly Newspaper Online.

Seventeen alternative weeklies around the United States are owned by the Voice's parent company New Times Media. In 2005, the Phoenix alternative weekly chain purchased a majority stake in Village Voice Media. The move grew out of the anti-trust conviction of New Times Media and Village Voice Media; they had secretly agreed not to compete against each other. Now, with all the papers under one roof, they can control competition among their subidiaries legally. Previous owners of Village Voice Media have included Felker, Rupert Murdoch, and Leonard Stern of the Hartz Mountain empire. Template:Seealso

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