The Village Voice is dead. Not just the print operation, which died in 2017 and was immortalized then by Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz. Well and fully dead this time. Good. If you ever loved The Voice, which you did even if you also hated it, an obligation for us partisans of its competition, New York Press; but if you ever loved it, you’ve got to be happy it’s been put out of its misery. A once great, adversarial voice, The Voice as everyone called it, had been reduced by successive corporate masters to the kind of generic postgrad piffle that deserves the name “content.” It wasn’t good for much other than swaddling injured pigeons these last few years but at one time it was really something and how many publications can say that?
Here’s to Hentoff, Willis, Musto, Barrett, Savage, Siegel, Barry, Tom Tomorrow and all the rest.
See ya when I see ya.
Jacob Siegel is a Tablet contributing editor. He is writing a book for Henry Holt about the rise of the Information State that will be published in 2025. He co-hosts the Manifesto! podcast with the novelist Phil Klay.