I’m no media critic — though I’m a media worker, and I’m insanely critical — but I’m going to play one on the web for a minute.
Louis Menand’s Jan. 8 New Yorker story about the Village Voice is ostensibly about a newspaper and a now-dated idea about what journalism wasn’t yet but could be and in fact became and to some degree isn’t anymore, but to another degree certainly is.
Unless it’s been badly misframed, it’s not a story about the drawer of the dancer, though it does linger suspiciously overlong on artist Jules Feiffer, who maybe was the original hook last summer, when he released a collection of years of his Voice cartoons. Maybe the Feiffer story got sideswiped by current events and Louis Menand just couldn’t be bothered to keep up with the news. Of the last 20 years.
I don’t have any kind if content beef with what Menand wrote. I never worked at the Voice, never lived in New York, don’t have a dog in that hunt. But I’m interested because I’ve spent a good chunk of days writing for weekly newspapers of the sort that the Village Voice inspired and presaged and, in the end, turned out to be just like. Which I’d think is precisely the interesting story, but which is exactly, exhaustively, what Menand left out.
Here’s Menand’s very last word on “the alternative press”: that “after 1970,” it “died out.”
If you define “alternative press” the way Menand seems to want to — as one of thousands of mimeographed, weed-reeking 3-issue handouts that ceased “distribution” prior to 1970, then sure, okay, for what it’s worth. Dead and gone.
(Unless you count the web. Which you have to. I get the strong sense that Louis Menand wouldn’t know Gawker if it bit him in the ass, which it probably will or, shit, ALREADY DID.)
But if you define the alternative press, as makes about a thousand times more sense, as the hundreds of more or less going commercial newspaper concerns that followed the Voice model, journalistically and economically, those hardly died out in 1970 (as Russ Smith, who well knows, POINTED OUT YESTERDAY). Most big American cities have one, sometimes two alt-weeklies, and a lot of culturally engaged little towns have them too.
You could argue that those papers’ ideals have died or burned out, or that they’ve become stylistic/journalistic/political parodies of their once-proud selves, or that they’ve become over-commercialized shells, or, alternately but not mutually exclusively, that the recession is even as we speak slapping them into obsolescence, like the rest of print media, hard. You could make the easy and true-enough and over-generalized but not-necessarily-for-the-worse case that they just aren’t what they used to be.
(Menand, by the way, doesn’t make any of these arguments. He correctifies the Voice mythology here and there and draws some mean context, but his only real point seems to be that the Voice changed journalism (per the subhed: “How the Voice changed journalism.”). It’s a point significantly undermined by the author’s failure to betray any awareness whatsoever of the most obvious ongoing results of that change.)
You can make whatever sort of argument about the “alternative” press you want to, and you’re welcome to it, but you cannot, with any semblance of accuracy, say that the alternative press inspired by the Village Voice died out after 1970.
Not when there’s an entirely active trade organization of well over 100 similarly niched newspapers called the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (Menand could have had an assistant look em up on the Google; the Voice, natch, is a member).
Not with upendings in the alt-business model and alt-corporate consolidation and alt-bankruptcy regularly making the mainstream business press.
Not when the current media critics of the New York Times and Slate are former alt-weekly editors.
Not when The New Yorker‘s own hothouse flower Susan Orlean worked her way up through Portland’s Willamette Week and the Boston Phoenix.
And for fucksake not when the largest chain of papers in the alternative newsweekly world, a chain built up from an alternative weekly launched in Phoenix in the early 1970s, recently bought the very friggin Village Voice (founded 1955) to which Louis Menand is writing his fond if inexplicable farewells. Bought it and made some changes. Bought it and, by appearances, is struggling. Not a WORD of it in Menand’s piece. Like it isn’t even happening.
I’m not here to defend New Times, the chain that bought the Voice and then changed its own name to Village Voice Media. I’ve worked for them, and they can defend themselves. And I can well imagine Menand replying that the New Times takeover was not the story he wanted to tell. I can even sympathize with what I imagine may have been his desire to avoid an appearance of blaming New Times for the Voice‘s decline, which a lot of people find sad, but which would have hardly been fair under the industry-wide circumstances anyhow. That story is a little too inside-baseball for The New Yorker, I agree.
But it boggles the mind that a man as smart as Menand and a magazine as thorough as The New Yorker could choose to address these essentially narrative issues by simply erasing all memory of almost four decades of a distinctive (if frequently just as shitty) form of journalism that thrived for much of that time, that in a very direct way IS the embodied influence of the Voice, recent convulsions in which are arguably the only reason to write a piece about the Voice right now in the first place.
Seriously: The rise and fall of the Village Voice, including neither news nor mention of the paper’s almost literal offspring, which just happened to recently slouch wombward after 40 years in the desert to fire all the columnists and piss in the potted plants. Or so one hears.
Here’s Menand’s either chickenshit or ignorant last sentence:
Until its own success made it irresistable to buyers who imagined that they could do better with a business plan than its founders had done from desperation and instinct, it [the Voice] had the courage to live by its wits.
What owners is he talking about? Who the hell knows. All of them, I guess. Menand’s list, which immediately precedes his conclusion, stops at Rupert Murdoch — heard of him? — who bought the Voice in ninetheenseventygoddamnseven. You know, seven years after the alternative press died out in this country? Maybe the unnamed Mike Lacy knows which owners Menand is talking about. Talk about yer inside baseball.
If Louis Menand has a reason to eulogize the Voice at this particular juncture in the history of journalism, I wish he’d clue me in. If he’s got a problem with new management — and what writer, anywhere, ever, doesn’t? — maybe he could tell us what he really thinks. That might be fun.
Seems like that’s what the Voice — or at least someone there — would have done.
You tell it, brother.
It’s hard to think of any point of failure you didn’t cover here, so….um….that’s all I have to say.
To me, another failing of Menand’s piece is that it glossed over the details of exactly how the Voice “changed journalism.” It mentioned very few of the writers and stories that defined those early, game-changing years. But we get a needlessly thorough taxonomy of the origins of Mailer’s attitude. Whatever, Louie.
I assume that with the died-out-after-1970 comment, Menand was trying to say that, however self-identified as “alternative,” those weeklies had become adjuncts of the mainstream, with “alternative” just another label identifying a profitable niche. I disagree, and maybe I’m giving him too much credit, but that’s how I took his comment.
Nice post, Mr. Tyer.
Thanks, Mr. Dickensheets.
You know I too wondered if that might be Menand’s argument, alts-are-just-adjuncts-to-the-mainstream, but it seems entirely too arguable a point for Menand to safely presume, without any discussion at all, and would seem to run counter to the one interesting point I thought he did make about the Voice, which was that even from its beginnings it was a self-consciously commercial venture (what with commercialism being the likely main plank of any alts-are-just-adjuncts-to-the-mainstream argument). Maybe Malcolm Gladwell can write a followup piece about how, counterintuitively, the main influence of the Village Voice was on the subsequent widespread commercial exploitation of the counterculture as an emerging market niche. And then the niche dried up. Ha!
Ah well.
Cheers.