THE FREAKS CAME OUT TO WRITE

A chronicle of a famed publication.

Journalist Romano makes a zesty book debut with a polyphonic oral history of the iconic Village Voice. Drawing from more than 200 interviews with writers, editors, photographers, proofreaders, interns, critics, artists, and activists, the author tells the story of the feisty newspaper, founded in 1955 by journalist Dan Wolf, psychologist Ed Fancher, and novelist Norman Mailer, to offer a forum for independent reporting. “Our philosophy,” said Richard Goldstein, who served as editor, “was you do not hire an expert; you hire someone who is living through the phenomenon worth covering.” Poets were hired as poetry critics, dancers as dance critics; Jules Feiffer became the resident cartoonist. From the outset, the Voice celebrated and encouraged personal journalism on issues that mattered to Greenwich Village and beyond, including civil rights, off-Broadway theater, jazz clubs, hip-hop, AIDS, gay activism, the women’s movement, and independent films. Former editor Joe Levy notes that it “that took things seriously—small things, developing things, emerging things—that other places didn’t.” As Yippies co-founder Jim Fouratt comments, “At its very peak—the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s—the Village Voice was the go-to place to find out what was happening in music, film, local politics, national politics, books, what was happening in the art world. The Voice had the cultural elite.” Romano’s interviewees reveal internal squabbles and rivalries, as well as changes resulting from a succession of owners: wealthy man-about-town Carter Burden, New York magazine founder Clay Felker, irascible mogul Rupert Murdoch, New Times Media, and billionaire Peter Barbey. “The Village Voice is an apocalyptic publication,” one writer opined; “every four or five years they have another apocalypse.” Now only an online publication, the Voice, Romano asserts, is evidence of a void in journalism created by “greedy, imperious, and/or incompetent and negligent management.”

Eyewitness testimony makes for a vibrant media history.