“I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time.” – Norman Mailer
In 1955, three friends – novelist Norman Mailer, psychologist Ed Fancher, and New School student Dan Wolf – decided to take a little sojourn into the world of journalism. They scraped together $10,000, set up an office at 22 Greenwich Avenue, and the Village Voice was born.
There’s a reason they named it the Village “Voice” rather than “Times” or “Post” or “Gazette”; the Voice didn’t blandly and objectively report the news from the Village. Its founders had true passion for the Village, it was their adopted home, and they breathed the unique spirit and indomitable personality of the Village into every issue of the Voice.
At the time, the Village Voice was a truly revolutionary idea – it represented a completely new form of journalism. The quote by Norman Mailer at the top of this page is a mission statement of sorts for the Voice: it was a paper that was totally driven by the personalities of its writers. The Voice was “of the Village” because the voices were “of the Village.”
If there’s one sentiment that Villagers all seem to share, it’s that they all take enormous pride in the fact that they are “of the Village,” and that pride is reflected in every page. The sense of community among Villagers is rarely found in a city as large as New York, and the Voice gave this unique community just that – a voice.
– Cassie Youngstrom
This is an excerpt from a longer paper. For more information, contact the author at cyoungst@hunter.cuny.edu.
