Hentoff's description of the "culture" around the Voice in the early days--the indifference to journalistic conventions and pedigrees, the lively (sometimes pugnacious) exchanges among the writers themselves, and the annoyed reaction from bastions of conventional journalism--sounds a lot like blog culture today.
Many of the "assignments" were self-propelled, and the writing had to be in your own voice if you could find it. (This came to be known later as "personal journalism.")It's a good read. This story stuck with me the most:
Jack Newfield, who first became known through The Village Voice, used to say that co-founder and first editor in chief Dan Wolf "orchestrated the obsessions of his writers." We were indeed a passionately opinionated motley lot. Dan Wolf prided himself on not hiring anyone with experience as a professional journalist. He wanted writers who hadn't been conditioned to the rules and restraints of the conventional press.
There was no party line at the Voice. Dan Wolf hardly ever wrote an editorial. And members of the staff continually differed with one another, not only in the small confines of the office but continually in its pages.
[ . . . ] Around that time, I was invited to speak at Harvard to the Nieman fellows, highly regarded professional journalists chosen to spend a year in Cambridge, where they could take any courses they wanted. During my talk, a professor auditing the session said to me in exasperation: "What I can't stand about the Voice is that I have no idea of what its editorial policy is. There's no clean line."
"That," I told him, "is the Voice's policy—to have no party line."
[ . . . ] The part of the Voice "culture" in those years that encouraged its regular writers to assault one another in the paper was often infuriating to the targets. I'm surprised, in retrospect, there were no fistfights—that I knew of. But this internecine warfare seemed to delight readers, who could take sides, like in a boxing match.
Moreover, readers who actually wanted to get into the ring with us were invited, through a regular Voice feature, Press of Freedom—which I dearly wish was back in the paper. Anyone, known or unknown, could send in a response, in that section, either to Voice writers or to contributors to Press of Freedom.
One morning, I got a call from a young reporter, one of our best, Don McNeill, who was covering an anti-war demonstration at Grand Central Terminal that the police tried to break up by force, including smashing heads. Our reporter, who had been clubbed, said hurriedly to me on the phone, "Should I put in the story that I've got blood on my shirt, or is that putting myself too much into the story?"There's also an interesting gallery of noteworthy cover pages from the last 50 years.
"That's your lead," I told him. I doubt that anyone on the New York Times news desk ever got such a call from a reporter in the field.
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