So I think about it, but take my time replying as my wife strongly encourages me not to go back to the Voice, let alone on this clown’s watch. Then he tells me about meeting George Soros’ kid at some high-end Manhattan dinner party, and that being the sort of reader and place he wants the Village Voice to speak to.Ī week later they offer me $170,000 to write a column once a week. He repeats nearly verbatim the quotes he’d given The New York Times a few months before about how “One of the biggest problems in media today is lack of attention to content… Many publications have stripped their content.” He then continues monologuing about how the Voice is a brand that meant a lot to him as a college kid. Barbey looks me in the eyes and says “yes” to both. I tell Barbey I have no interest in an editing job, since he seems to be feeling me out for Tom’s job - and with Tom sitting there! - and that I won’t consider the columnist thing unless there's a commitment of cash and editorial stability. There’s a suggestion that this would pay very well-I mean, the owner’s a member of one of America’s 50 wealthiest families, out to buy a name for himself-so I ended up at a Manhattan diner for a couple hours in November of 2015 with Finkel and Barbey, who was in town shopping for a starter apartment here, which I knew before seeing him since the New Yorker wrote a piece about it. Jump ahead a few years and stories and jobs, and now I’m on staff at the News, on the editorial board and writing a column, when Peter Barbey of the Timberland family fortune buys the Voice and then-Editor-in-Chief Tom Finkel, a holdover from New Times, reaches out to me about maybe being its New York columnist again.
#The village returns its voicey trial#
The Daily News ended up running the piece I’d reported for the Voice and that ended up making national news, and the UAW had my back so my wife and I ended up with coverage through the delivery but those New Times bastards-now standing trial for alleged sex trafficking related crimes-were this close to bankrupting my family. I got four weeks health insurance as my wife was 30 weeks pregnant. I was let go on the spot (just after I’d filed a few thousand words worth of Best of New York pieces, including their cover story and I’ll pause here to offer a passing fuck you to my former Brooklyn neighbor and acclaimed author Joseph O’Neill). Then I got called to the office from Zuccotti Park, where I'd pretty moved in as a reporter, rather than an Occupier.
#The village returns its voicey series#
He didn’t, but he and his bosses did keep running the paper into the ground, willy-nilly bullying and firing ridiculously talented people who were there because they loved the place and running an utterly conflicted and mortifying cover series about how great and aboveboard Backpage was. I told my new boss I wouldn’t cross the line if there was one, and he threatened to fire me then and there since I was, supposedly, still some sort of probationary employee. Bad reporter that I am, I didn’t realize until I’d started that our contract was coming up and the staff was preparing for a strike. I’d asked Wayne (who I later ended up editing at the Daily News and the Daily Beast, which became his two main outlets after his home for 37 years abruptly let him go) before taking the job, and Tom was a mensch to me after I got there as he helped with our strike preparations. I was right about the failing place with no idea what it was doing, but not so much about what that being an opportunity to do good work. I figured a failing place with no idea what it was doing would leave me alone to do the sort of writing I could use to make a name for myself after a career spent mostly as an editor. It was right after they’d fired Wayne, with Tom following him out the door in solidarity. So in the New Times era-when the libertarian journalists who owned used some of the fortune they'd made middle-manning sex sales to buy the Voice-I turned down a job at a much healthier and better regarded outlet at twice the salary to sign on as its City Hall guy. Everything I saw glimpses of or just figured was really happening here, it turned out was really happening-and being reported on, too. There was Feiffer and Stamaty and the classifieds and the whole thing an index of the real city that even the tabloids, let alone the New York Times, mostly left alone. I grew up reading the Village Voice: Cotts and Hentoff and Crouch and Barrett and Robbins and all these incredible writers and reporters and voices blowing the lid off of things.
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