The Village Voice in the 1960s/70s and blogging in the early 2000s

I read this interesting review by Vivian Gornick of a book about the Village Voice. Vivian Gornick is almost 90 years old! This reminds me of our discussion, What’s the best novel ever written by an 85-year-old?, where I wrote:

Old authors can write excellent essays—they’re practiced in putting words together, and writing an essay is like noodling around on the piano for an experienced musician: they know how to structure their ideas and make them go down smoothly. But a novel, that’s another story. Updike’s novels were disintegrating for decades even while he kept up the quality of his stories and essays—and he didn’t even reach 80.

I haven’t read enough of Gornick’s earlier writing to say anything about her literary trajectory, so I’ll just say that I enjoyed this review she wrote about “The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of the ‘Village Voice,’ the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture,” by Tricia Romano.

Beyond all the fun stories—an impressive number of fun stories for a review that’s only two pages long—, Gornick conveys a sense of how open the Voice was:

The Village Voice went to press with an invitation to its readers to become its contributors. Forget about being professional writers or journalists, the editors announced. Send us what you find interesting. Write it up persuasively and we’ll publish it. Soon, the Voice became the place where a steadily increasing readership could see its own concerns written about in the kind of language actually being used at work, on the street, on the subway. . . .

The freedom (if that’s the word) given to staff writers and freelancers alike was extraordinary. Once a piece had been accepted, you were allowed to write whatever you wanted, at the length you wanted. There was no real editing. Writers taught themselves on the job. Some did it well, others badly. The result was a noisy mixture of pieces that nailed and pieces that flailed, sometimes informed and brilliant, sometimes garrulous and absurd, all of it either on the money or over the top but never less than alive to the touch. . . .

There was personal journalism and there was advocacy journalism; at the Village Voice the two were often indistinguishable. . . . Piece after piece after piece, every one of them as long as I wanted, as polemical as I wanted, as pugnacious as I wanted.

This reminds me of . . . blogging!

OK, there are some differences, perhaps the main one being that bloggers are doing it for free, and I think the Voice journalists were getting paid. Even if they weren’t being paid a lot, back in the 1960s and 70s you didn’t need a lot of money to live on . . . I don’t know the full story of the economics here, but I guess that this writing could go a ways toward paying the bills.

But the range of authors, the low barriers to entry, the ability to publish things that fell outside the usual journalistic formulas, indeed the opportunity to invent entirely new templates, and the ability to reach a wide audience, that sounds a lot like the early years of blogging.

Other than the economic structure (the Voice being supported by advertising; blogging being supported by people with other full-time jobs who are willing to write for free), the biggest difference I see between the Village Voice and blogs is political. The Voice was (and seems to still be) left-wing. Blogs are left, right, and center. To the extent that there was a “left blogosphere” and a “right blogosphere,” each was kind of the equivalent (or mirror image) of the Voice, but the analogy doesn’t quite work because there wasn’t really a right-wing equivalent of the Village Voice. Sure, there were conservative magazines like The American Spectator or whatever, but they did not reach a broad audience the way the Voice did. It took awhile for the conservative swing among voters and political elites to reach mass audiences. Now I guess it’s the opposite: there are many visible right-wing media sources, from Fox News on down, while the alternative press, which was mostly left-wing, has pretty much disappeared.