Over the past 15 years, give or take, the media business has come to feel like a never-ending bloodbath. Newspapers and magazines—at least the ones that continue to exist—have been forced, time and again, to cut themselves to something resembling stability. Websites that had set sail with all the promise of a journalistic Noah’s ark now litter the bottom of the internet seas. Another grim phenomenon of the modern media economy has been the advent of the zombie publication—an entity that exists in a state so diminished, in some cases so utterly unrecognizable from its previous existence, that you can’t help but wish someone had just put it out of its misery. 

The Village Voice falls into the zombie category, and yet you can still see vestiges of the creature it used to be. The current editor in chief is R.C. Baker, a Voice veteran whose institutional memory stretches back to his original start date in 1987. The home page—which actually looks pretty decent?—includes vintage articles from the paper’s glory days, amid a smattering of fresh content on politics, culture, and the arts. Michael Musto had a byline as recently as October, and the Voice even returned to print in 2021. (It looks like that experiment may have come to an end with the July 2022 edition.) Still, the current iteration is a far cry from The Village Voice of yore—the one that rolled off presses every Wednesday, for more than half a century, with the distinction of being America’s counterculture paper of record. 

Good news though: The old Village Voice—the Voice of Norman Mailer, Jonas Mekas, and Ellen Willis; of Nat Hentoff, Robert Christgau, and Lynn Yaeger; of Stonewall and Cooper Square, Pulitzers and Polks, “Pazz & Jop” and the Obie Awards—has been resurrected in a new oral history by Tricia Romano, a former staff writer whose name will be recognizable to any Voice reader of the early to mid aughts, when Romano wrote the scene-y Fly Life column.  

Romano’s book, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, will hit shelves Tuesday with a gust of critical acclaim in its sails, including a Dwight Garner review that called it “a well-made disco ball of a book,” and possibly “the best history of a journalistic enterprise I’ve ever read…. Humiliations are recalled; toes are trod upon; old hostilities have been kept warm, as if on little Sterno cans of pique. Nostalgia remains at arm’s length. Yet the tone is familial and warm. Discontent was part of The Voice’s DNA. For nearly every staffer, working there was the best thing they ever did.” 

The idea came to Romano in 2017, when she attended a reunion of Voice alumni near the paper’s erstwhile longtime headquarters. Sitting there among dozens of former employees from across the decades—including Mekas, the Voice’s first film critic, and cofounder Ed Fancher, both still living at the time—Romano looked upon the gathering’s esteemed attendees and thought, “We must capture these voices before they are gone forever.” 

The result is a 600-plus-page behemoth that traces the Voice from its maiden voyage on October 26, 1955, to its tortured demise in the digital age. (Check out the excerpt we recently published about the late Voice legend Wayne Barrett’s unparalleled early coverage of Donald Trump.) 

“The Voice,” explains ’90s-era music editor Joe Levy in one poignant passage, “is a place that took things seriously—small things, developing things, emerging things—that other places didn’t. That’s what it always did.”

For Romano’s part, she arrived at the Voice—first as an intern in 1997, and then for real a couple years later—just in time to witness the beginning of the end. Those were the good old days when you could make a decent salary writing an 800-word weekly column. “I’ve only had one stable moment in my career, and that was at the Voice,” says Romano, who subsequently worked as a reporter for The Seattle Times and editor in chief of Seattle’s long-running alt-weekly, The Stranger. “I would have a feature outside of the column going on in the background. It gave you time to actually go out into the world and find stuff to write about.”

Things began to go south in 2005, just as Craigslist was beginning to really decimate classified advertising. That’s also the year the Voice was acquired by the Phoenix-based alt-weekly conglomerate New Times Media, which proceeded to systematically pick off most of the paper’s beloved old guard. (Romano got her pink slip in 2007.) If you were a reader of Gawker or The New York Observer back then—talk about zombie publications—you’ll remember what a shit show the whole thing was. The last few chapters of Romano’s book, which deal with the New Times takeover, confirm it was even more of a shit show than you thought. (Chapter 81: “They Had Complete Contempt for the Paper”; Chapter 84: “They Love Firing People.”)

“Rupert Murdoch is in my book, and he’s not the villain,” says Romano. (Murdoch owned the Voice from 1977 to 1985.) “The analogy I like to make is, you are a third-rate soda, and you want to beat Pepsi and become Coke. And you go around and you buy up a bunch of soda makers and consolidate so you can finally get Coke. And then you get Coke, and you change the formula so it no longer tastes like Coke. All you really wanted was the logo and the name, but that’s meaningless now.”

The Freaks Came Out to Write is the product of four years of research and more than 200 interviews; voices of the deceased leap off the page via archival material. When I caught up with Romano a few weeks ago, I asked her to rattle off some of the most significant moments from the Voice’s illustrious history.

“I mean, certainly the Stonewall coverage, as flawed as it was, put gay rights on the map in a different way than other papers,” she told me. “I would also say the feminist movement really took over the Voice for a while—they gave huge spreads to it, pages and pages. AIDS coverage was flawed but still very important; it grew and changed over the years to the point where it started off not being very good, and then, by the end, it won a Pulitzer. And of course Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani and all of that stuff. Wayne Barrett had everybody’s number way before the rest of the media.” 

What about areas that warrant a bit of critical self-reflection on the Voice’s part? “I mean, there were basically no Black people there until the late ’70s. It’s crazy to even contemplate now. They were very anti-racist, and they were very pro civil rights, writing about Black issues. But they weren’t employing Black people for a while. And so, in the ’80s, there was a big influx of Black writers, and that was critical.”

I also wondered whether, in some alternate universe, if the right owner had come along, things might’ve turned out differently—or if the brutal economics of the industry would have wrought destruction no matter what. Romano told me she thinks about that a lot. 

“The issue is, a lot of what made the Voice special in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, even the ’90s, is that it had a hold on political and cultural movements that other publications didn’t. You want to learn about this weird punk bar CBGB? There’s only a handful of places to read about that. Part of the Voice’s cachet was, like, I’m holding this guide to your entire life, written by all the best people who know their shit and can tell you what to do, where to go, give you insight on political wheelings and dealings that you’re not going to get elsewhere. Now, I feel like you can find all those things” in other places. Changes in the media landscape aside: “I do think COVID would’ve killed whatever was left of the Voice.”

Which brings this article back to where it started: Is it better for the Voice to exist in a zombie state, or to not exist at all? “What I really wish,” says Romano, “is that they would put money into putting the archives up in a searchable, viewable way, because that’s an important document of history. If the Voice exists, it should be a serious archive. I’d rather see that than whatever it is now.”