“The new issue, to me, looks very Village Voice-y.” “He wants The Village Voice in all of its old, spunky, lefty history,” he said. Calle was a fan of the paper’s old spirit. Calle was previously an opinion editor at The Orange County Register in California and a vice president of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, and his tenure at LA Weekly has been marked by boycotts led by former writers for the publication and a lawsuit filed by an investor. Calle as the proprietor of the downtown paper, which was founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher and Norman Mailer. Baker, a longtime Voice writer, has taken the role of senior editor.Īfter The New York Times reported the sale of The Voice last year, some journalists expressed concerns about Mr. Calle said he had not appointed an editor in chief, but was having conversations with people as he rebuilt the newsroom. He was laid off in 2013, brought back in 2015 and sent packing once more, along with his colleagues, at the time of the 2018 shutdown. The comeback issue includes an article by the former Voice reporter Ross Barkan on the New York mayoral race, and one by Eileen Markey that revives the paper’s tradition of shaming the city’s landlords. A nice spring surprise to see a print today! /B4hksqRJLk He plans to publish a print issue about four times a year, he added, meaning that a famed alt-weekly is now an alt-quarterly. “It really makes the relaunch of The Village Voice real in a way it wasn’t before.” “For us, putting a print issue out was a stake in the ground,” Mr. Brian Calle, the publisher of LA Weekly, bought The Voice in December and revived its dormant website in January. Barbey, took it digital-only a year before shutting it down. The new issue, which came out on Saturday, is the first print incarnation of the storied independent publication since August 2017, when its previous owner, Peter D. “New York is back, The Voice is back, I’m back.” “It all makes sense,” said the longtime Voice columnist Michael Musto, who has a byline in the return issue. New Yorkers may have noticed something strange in the last few days: copies of The Village Voice, fresh off the press and still free, on newsstands and in street boxes.