The `Village Voice' Alternative Media Monopoly's Hidden History--Part 9

(Most of the following article originally appeared in the October 9, 1996 issue of Downtown/Aquarian Weekly. See below for parts 1-8.)

To pick up another $5 million in 1970s money quickly, in June 1974 then-Village Voice owner Carter Burden and his Wall Street lawyer business partner, Bartle Bull, peddled the Voice off to the then-owner of the previously-competing New York magazine, Clay Felker—for about $2 million more than what Burden had paid to gain control of the Voice in 1970.

In exchange for agreeing to sell the Voice to New York magazine during the 1970s, Burden and Bull also received some New York Magazine/Village Voice Company stock.

Clay Felker and his New York magazine had been launched in the late 1960s by Felker with the financial backing of Aeneid Equities and super-rich folks like Seagram’s then-chairman of the board, Edgar Bronfman, and an investment banker named John Loeb. In 1968, New York magazine had lost $2 million, but by 1973 it had 400,000 readers and an annual profit that exceeded $400,000 in 1970s money. After Felker and the New York magazine corporate board decided it wanted to gobble up the previously-competing Voice, Felker appointed then-New York City powerbroker and Lazard Freres investment banker Felix Rohatyn to arrange the purchase of the Voice’s stable of writers and other properties from Burden.

A few months after merging the Voice and New York magazine, Felker hiked the Voice’s price from 25 cents to 35 cents in Manhattan in August 1974. Not satisfied with one price hike per year, Felker again increased the cost of the Voice to its readers to 50 cents in December 1974. Felker apparently also began to control the Voice’s editorial emphasis in an overt way, named himself the Voice Executive Editor-in-Chief and brought in former liberal New York City Mayor Lindsay’s press secretary (and former U.S. Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller’s son-in-law)—Tom Morgan—to be the Voice editor for awhile.

(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 10/9/96)

Next: The Village Voice Alternative Media Monopoly’s Hidden History—Part 10

The `Village Voice' Alternative Media Monopoly's Hidden History--Part 8

(Most of the following article originally appeared in the October 9, 1996 issue of Downtown/Aquarian Weekly. See below for parts 1-7.)

As early as January 1970, the Voice was already controlled by the husband of the CBS media conglomerate board chairman’s stepdaughter--who was also the nephew of a Columbia University trustee and CBS, Lockheed and Pentagon weapons research think-tank director—and by a Wall Street lawyer. And during the Carter Burden Era of the early 1970s, the Voice moved its then-corporate headquarters to University Place and 11th Street in Manhattan and began to operate in a much more corporate-oriented way. As The Great American Newspaper recalled:

“In March of 1970, the paper raised its price to 20 cents an issue. That was only the start of a new profit drive ordered by its absentee owner…The drive continued—the price went up to 25 cents in May 1973…The rates for ads increased…and…so did the number of them…The audience they had was capable of being milked far more than it already was in support of the Voice, overhead was low…and profits actually reached a high of 14 cents on the dollar in 1973…”

Although Burden paid one of the Voice’s founding owners, Dan Wolf, a $72,000 (in early 1970s money) salary to continue to be the newspaper’s editor, Voice writers were initially not paid much more under Burden’s ownership than they had been under the Voice’s original owners. Voice columnists, for instance, were paid less than $95 a week at a time when the Voice’s market value already exceeded $3 million in early 1970s money. This caused some Voice staff people to start grumbling and Voice staff salaries were finally increased somewhat near the end of the Carter Burden Era. Yet as late as March 20, 1974, Voice staff photographer Fred McDarrah made the following complaint in a letter to a Voice manager:

“First of all it is clear to me that the Voice can afford to give me more money because it is the largest paid weekly in the country and there is no two ways about it, it is profitable to somebody…The paper grows in circulation, advertising, income and future profits but I as an individual employee do not benefit by this…It is a poor excuse and a deception to say the Voice can’t pay more…”

The “somebody” to whom the Voice was extremely profitable during the Carter Burden Era was, of course, its then-owner: Carter Burden. By early 1974 it was discovered that he “was dipping into the paper’s cash reserves to liquidate his bank obligations,” according to The Great American Newspaper. The same book also described the reason the super-rich Voice owner suddenly needed to use the Voice’s surplus cash to pay off his personal debts, instead of to finance more investigative reporting:

“His level of annual income was more than handsome enough to suit all but a handful of people in the United States of America for the rest of their lives, but Carter Burden considered himself to be in financial trouble…To the existing credit crunch of his bank loans had been added, in recent months, the extra burden of heavy alimony for his now-divorced wife Amanda, and the decline of his stock portfolio…”

(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 10/9/96)

Next: The Village Voice Alternative Media Monopoly’s Hidden History—Part 9

The `Village Voice' Alternative Media Monopoly's Hidden History--Part 7

(Most of the following article originally appeared in the October 9, 1996 issue of Downtown/Aquarian Weekly. See below for parts 1-6.)

By 1968, Mailer had sold 5 percent of his Voice stock to the then-owner of Manhattan’s WMCA radio station, Peter Straus (who later became the director of the U.S. government’s propaganda agency, Voice of America, in 1977). But it wasn’t until 1970 that the three founding owners of the Voice sold control of the publication to super-rich members of the U.S. Establishment and to outside corporate interests.

In 1968 students at Columbia University had occupied university buildings for a week in support of six demands, before New York City’s “liberal” mayor at the time, [the now-deceased] John Lindsay, ordered his cops to clear both Columbia’s buildings and its campus of students, in what turned out to be a bloody police rampage. One of the six demands made was that then-Columbia University Trustee William Burden—who also then sat on the corporate boards of CBS, Lockheed and American Metal Climax—resign his position as then-chairman of the executive committee of the Pentagon’s university-sponsored weapons research think-tank: the Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA].

http://www.ida.org/

IDA’s then-executive committee chairman, Burden, was the uncle of 19th Century U.S. robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt’s great-grandson, Carter Burden.

[The now-deceased] Carter Burden was also then married to the stepdaughter of the then-CBS Chairman of the Board, [the now-deceased] William Paley. CBS Board Chairman Paley, like Carter Burden’s uncle, was also a Columbia University Trustee. After the Voice printed a few articles which were very critical of the Columbia University Administration’s handling of its 1968 student revolt, Carter Burden apparently became interested in buying the Voice. Burden also apparently decided it might help his political career in 1969 if he started negotiating with then-Voice owner-editor Wolf about purchasing the Voice.

Just before Burden started a 1969 primary campaign for a NYC council seat, “a profile of him and his [then] wife Amanda…appeared” in the Voice, “followed by an editorial endorsement from Dan Wolf (in which Wolf revealed to the readers of the Village Voice that Burden was…`the best representative of the new politics running in the primary’…but not the fact that he was a prospective buyer of the newspaper they were reading),” according to The Great American Newspaper. Then, in January 1970, Burden turned both Wolf and Fancher into millionaires overnight by paying them $3 million for 56 percent of the 70 percent of Voice stock which Wolf and Fancher had come to own by that time. Burden also acquired an additional 24 percent of Voice stock by buying most of Norman Mailer and Mailer’s lawyer’s remaining Voice stock, as well as WMCA radio station owner’s Straus’ Voice stock. A Wall Street lawyer who was Burden’s business partner in his Voice acquisition, Bartle Bull, also obtained Voice stock at this time.

(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 10/9/96)

Next: The Village Voice Alternative Media Monopoly’s Hidden History—Part 8

The `Village Voice' Alternative Media Monopoly's Hidden History--Part 6

(Most of the following article originally appeared in the October 9, 1996 issue of Downtown/Aquarian Weekly. See below for parts 1-5.)

By the end of the 1960s, according to The Underground Press In America by Robert Glessing, “most underground editors, particularly the political radicals,” now found “the Voice timid, if not downright traitorous to their cause.” Jeff Shero, the then-editor of the now-defunct Rat newspaper (another Lower East Side-based counter-cultural newspaper of the late 1960s and early 1970s) told the now-defunct Evergreen Review in 1969, for instance, the following:

“I don’t think it’s sins of commission so much as sins of omission that’s the trouble with the Voice. Like the 21 Panthers now in jail on these trumped up charges. The Voice hasn’t said a word about it, not one word.”

Lesbian and gay male activists were also dissatisfied with the Voice’s coverage of the Gay Liberation Movement, when the Lindsay Administration’s cops in New York City raided the Stonewall gay bar and provoked the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28, 1969. In November 1969, about twenty-four Gay Liberation Movement activists picketed the Voice’s editorial office and representatives went inside to speak with then-Voice publisher Fancher. The gay liberation activists “told Fancher…that they wanted free ad space in his paper, a gay community news section, a gay editorial slant, and gay writers hired on staff” but “to none of this would Fancher give in,” according to The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall Of The `Village Voice’.

(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 10/9/96)

Next: The Village Voice Alternative Media Monopoly’s Hidden History—Part 7

The `Village Voice' Alternative Media Monopoly's Hidden History--Part 5

(Most of the following article originally appeared in the October 9, 1996 issue of Downtown/Aquarian Weekly. See below for parts 1-4.)

Ironically, despite the big profits their newspaper took in during the Viet Nam War Era by marketing counter-cultural ideas and descriptions of street protests to its new antiwar readers, neither then-Voice co-owner Wolf nor then-Voice co-owner Fancher “ever marched in a civil rights or antiwar demonstration,” according to The Great American Newspaper. The then-Voice owners were also apparently not very eager to recruit many African-American editors or staff writers during the 1960s era of African-American mass rebellion. As Kevin McAuliffe noted in The Great American Newspaper, “for all the public hand-wringing over White Guilt and Black Power” the Voice “never had a black editor or a black staff writer” during the 1960s.

To attempt to give people in Manhattan a genuinely alternative newspaper during the Viet Nam War Era, Walter Bowart and Allen Katzman scraped together about $5,000 in 1960s money to launch the now-defunct East Village Other (EVO) alternative newspaper from an office at 10th Street and Avenue A, on October 1, 1965. Within three months, its paid-circulation had increased from 2,500 to 7,000 and it was being published on a regular bi-weekly basis.

The Voice apparently felt a competing Lower East Side-based alternative newspaper threatened its profitability. When Voice publisher Fancher heard that Voice news editor-turned-Voice columnist John Wilcock was “going around the Village telling people that the Voice was a dying newspaper and that EVO was `the voice of the future,’ he called him into his office and told him he could not stay at the Voice,” according to The Great American Newspaper. But despite the Voice’s attempt to discourage alternative journalists in the neighborhood from offering Manhattan readers a genuinely counter-cultural newspaper to choose from every other week, by 1969 the East Village Other’s paid circulation had jumped to 45,000 and it looked like its paid circulation would eventually exceed the Voice’s paid circulation.

(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 10/9/96)

Next: The Village Voice Alternative Media Monopoly’s Hidden History—Part 6

The `Village Voice' Alternative Media Monopoly's Hidden History--Part 4

(Most of the following article originally appeared in the October 9, 1996 issue of Downtown/Aquarian Weekly. See below for parts 1-3.)

Its lack of hipness, however, did enable the Voice to suddenly attract a large group of culturally-straight New York Times junkies, who were desperate to read any newspaper, after Manhattan’s newspaper strike began on December 7, 1962. By the time the strike ended on April 1, 1963, the Voice’s weekly circulation had jumped from 17,000 to 40,000, it had begun to corner the West Village and Lower East Side market for printing classified ads, and it was on its way to becoming a big money-making machine for its owners—especially since it wasn’t very generous about paying much money to its regular writers. And as U.S. military intervention in Viet Nam escalated during the 1960s—thus creating a much larger antiwar, counter-cultural market for alternative antiwar newspapers—the Voice’s circulation jumped from 41,000 in 1965 to 138,000 in 1969.

After 1969, however, the number of Voice readers failed to increase very much, although its classified ad printing business guaranteed [until the impact of Craig’s list was felt] that it always remained profitable—even when its editorial contents didn’t excite many West Village and Lower East Side residents in Manhattan.

An additional reason the Voice’s circulation increased during the 1960s was that it apparently was helped by the Establishment-oriented Hearst media conglomerate. As The Great American Newspaper revealed, “Dick Deems, an officer in the Hearst publishing organization…eventually interceded on the paper’s behalf when it was having distributor problems” and “when that happened, the Voice got on more newsstands everywhere, which boosted its growth.” Not surprisingly, the Voice was never very eager to publish many exposes’ of the Hearst Dynasty’s media conglomerate.

By 1968, about 18 percent of the Voice’s income was coming from its classified ad sales and about 62 percent from its display ad sales—which sold for about $1,100 per full-page in 1960s money. The number of ad inches printed per issue during the Viet Nam War Era rose from about 1,200 in 1965 to about 3,300 in 1970, as the war escalated. Like the New York Times, about two-thirds of the newspaper was devoted to publishing commercial ads, although the Voice still claimed to be a counter-cultural publication.

Yet despite its many ads and post-1962 newspaper strike profitability, the Voice’s owners did not begin distributing it for free until the late 1990s and, instead increased its newsstand price to 15 cents in 1966 money in May 1966. By 1969, Voice owners were making a profit that exceeded $260,000 per year in 1960s money from their originally money-losing weekly newspaper.

(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 10/9/96)

Next: The Village Voice Alternative Media Monopoly’s Hidden History—Part 5

The 'Village Voice' Alternative Media Monopoly's Hidden History--Part 3

(Most of the following article originally appeared in the October 9, 1996 issue of Downtown/Aquarian Weekly. See below for parts 1-2.)

Even in its early days, the Voice was not considered hip enough by some people in Manhattan. Initially, Voice co-founder Mailer wrote a column for the newspaper which he owned. But, as J. Kirk Sale noted in a December 1969 article in the now-defunct counter-cultural Evergreen Review magazine:

“Norman Mailer quit after 13 columns because `the Voice was square, not hip.’…Mailer was…right. The Voice was square, patriotic, safe, liberal, and middle class. Still is…”

The Voice’s initial news editor, John Wilcock, also told Evergreen Review the following in 1969:

“The Voice was never far out. I was on to things before they heard of them, and they wouldn’t touch them till they became legitimized somehow, someone else picked them up and said they were OK…It’s become really, a part of the `establishment.’”

(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 10/9/96)

Next: The Village Voice Alternative Media Monopoly’s Hidden History—Part 4