Ryan Bray
Ryan Bray
Aug 27, 2017 · 5 min read

The Village Voice is going out of print, and it matters

For as long as I knew I wanted to write about music and the arts, I‘ve known about the Village Voice. It was impossible not to for a kid who devoured music and film and the media coverage that followed it. For those with their ear to the ground (or wanted to have their ear to the ground), the Voice was sacred. It was cool, smart, and outside the box. It took a deeper, more brazen approach to covering its subjects than other pubs, both in its native New York and nationwide.

So last week’s bombshell news that the legendary alt-weekly plans to soon cease its print operations matters, even if today’s media climate might suggest it shouldn’t. In 2017, the web is king. More and more people are getting their news online, a trend so old that it barely warrants mentioning. More and more papers are falling by the wayside as print media continues to struggle to keep pace with the 24/7 demand that blogs and online media are built to accommodate, so what’s one more paper meeting its end?

Fortunately the Voice will continue to keep a daily online presence, but to many, that’s a distant second to holding the real thing in their hands. The Village Voice wasn’t just a neighborhood rag, it was something that held very real importance to its readers. Its relevance to New Yorkers is pretty self explanatory. Every week, The Voice kept them in touch with the people, businesses, and issues that collectively made up their lives. For aspiring writers like myself, it was a trailblazing outlet that played a huge part in setting the tone for alternative weeklies all around the country that sprung up after it. It was a paper that dared to be better than everyone else at what it did. More often than not, it succeeded.

I used to read Robert Christgau a lot. He called himself “The Dean of American Rock Critics”, which sounds insanely arrogant except for the fact that he was, in fact, that good. His Consumer Guide reviews were short, sharp, and to the point. They didn’t pull punches, and his writing snapped with purpose. He might have been an outside observer, but to many who read the legendary Voice critic, he was as much the attraction as the acts he covered. Guys like Christgau and Lester Bangs spoke to me in my teenage years, because they in large part created the rules of rock journalism by breaking them. They made criticism an art in and of itself. Everything else felt kind of starched by comparison. As someone who loved music and writing, I wanted to be a part of that.

Years later, I’m proud to say that I am. I’ve been fortunate to get my byline in a number of publications and outlets that directly inspired me to write about music. Boston’s Weekly Dig (now DigBoston) and the AV Club were papers that I admired from afar before I had the pleasure of actually working for them. But even in that kind of company, getting my foot in the door at the Village Voice was a special kind of honor. It was a relatively quick run, but I walked away with some of my favorite stories I’ve ever written. I talked to Rick Springfield. Jonathan Richman responded to an interview request by writing me a handwritten letter that hangs framed above my desk. And while most of my Voice work ran online, a story on the Beastie Boys’ Oscilloscope Laboratories made its way into the pages of the weekly edition (all thanks due to Hilary Hughes). I swelled with pride at the thought of joining the ranks of great writers past and present whose names have graced the Voice’s pages. If my music journo days ended today, I’d have that much, and I’d be thrilled.

I’m just one person, but there’s a long line of current and former Voice freelancers and staff that owe so much more to the paper than I do, and are similarly feeling its loss. NPR ran a great piece this week in which those closest to the paper talk about why its physical discontinuance matters. Ann Powers recounts how the paper represented her New York. Andrew W.K. talks about finding his first job in New York through the Voice’s classifieds section. The bottom line is that people, in various ways and forms, made concrete, personal connections to this paper.

I’ll take some solace in the fact that the Voice will live on in some form, but it’s hard to discount what’s being lost. There are obvious benefits to a web-only operation, namely lower overhead costs, an unlimited news hole, and the flexibility to publish whenever. But those pragmatic considerations don’t make up for the history and tradition that’s being lost here. The simple fact of the matter is online news, while convenient, diminishes the personal connection that people once had with the media. People used to depend on newspapers, and it’s hard to imagine any website or blog having the kind of meaningful impact on people that the Voice’s print edition has had for the past 60 years.

If the Voice’s owners feel it in the company’s best interest to move forward as an online-only operation, so be it. Maybe it will find a way to carve out a new, unique niche for itself on the web, but for now it’s hard to think about much more than what’s being left behind.

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Ryan Bray

Written by

Ryan Bray

Thoughts and opinions are mine. You can’t have them.

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