![]() What he would like to do, in your normal everyday-business alchemy, is convert his local advertising to national advertising, which has much higher margins than a futon store’s eighth of a page. But because of issues of separation and fathers and such things, he got trapped here with his worst enemies, the other people who couldn’t (for reasons of talent, politics, social graces, and their own separation anxieties) exit the Voice. The drift being that he, not the long list of Voice alumni so dominant in the wider media world, was the one who was supposed to go on to bigger and better things. Instead, Schneiderman is much more critically psychoanalyzed within the Voice community – and by that measure, his career is a study in disturbing pathology. While Schneiderman’s career, in any man’s business terms, is a great success – he’s kept the shareholders happy, dramatically expanded the Voice enterprise, and achieved substantial wealth for himself (tens of millions of dollars, certainly) – that sort of analysis gets short shrift at the Voice. With his six city papers including the Voice, he’s done what Bill Gates, Barry Diller, and assorted other moguls failed to do – make a business out of local advertising (the $4 trillion worth of miscellaneous movie, restaurant, dry-cleaner, podiatrist, futon-store, employment, real-estate, and personal ads). It’s part of Schneiderman’s genius, or revenge, that he has turned the Voice into an exciting business proposition – like turning Coke into fine wine, or Russia into a smoothly running market economy. On the other hand, a big part of the tragicomic aspect of the Voice, and the subtext of its revival, is that the Voice has become a business story – about “creating a national footprint for local advertising,” in Schneiderman’s words – and that’s a story that no Voice lifer or alum worth his or her salt has any interest in. Of course, you can’t tell the Schneiderman story, or begin to make sense of it, without touching on the tragicomic story of the Voice, which gets you back into the quagmire. Instead it’s about one of its least likely employees, David Schneiderman, its former editor and publisher and the current CEO of Village Voice Media LLC, who, after 23 years of hard and mostly unappreciated labor, has become the Voice, for better or worse. Calle said anyone concerned about the latest iteration should read it and “judge for themselves.This is not, strictly speaking, about The Village Voice, which is a quagmire of journalistic recrimination and lost youth – and you don’t want to get into that. “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. Calle was a fan of the paper’s old spirit. 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 as the proprietor of the downtown paper, which was founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher and Norman Mailer. 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 said he had not appointed an editor in chief, but was having conversations with people as he rebuilt the newsroom. ![]() 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. ![]() 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. 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. ![]() “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. Brian Calle, the publisher of LA Weekly, bought The Voice in December and revived its dormant website in January. Barbey, took it digital-only a year before shutting it down. 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. “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. New Yorkers may have noticed something strange in the last few days: copies of The Village Voice, fresh off the press and still free, on newsstands and in street boxes.
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