Remembering When the 'Village Voice' Was Great

It's a little hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the Village Voice cast a long shadow on American journalism. Writing in The New Yorker, Louis Menand makes some grand claims for its influence, crediting the 53-year-old weekly with, among other things, setting the tone for the new media age:

[M]ore than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere -- whose motto might be "Every man his own Norman Mailer -- and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium. It opened up an insecure and defensively self-important profession.

Oh, yeah, and it also made piles of money, avoided the pitfalls of ideological rigidity, inspired big metropolitan dailies to start covering "youth culture," and single-handedly invented what's known as the New Journalism. You thought Clay Felker had something to do with that last bit? Nope, says Menand: "The Voice was the original for everything that Felker had tried to do."

(The link to the New Yorker article goes to an abstract; registration is required to see the full text.)