[4] Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, The Voice began as a platform for the creative community of New York City.

The Village Voice hosted a variety of writers and artists, including writer Ezra Pound, cartoonist Lynda Barry, artist Greg Tate, music critic Robert Christgau, and film critics Andrew Sarris, Jonas Mekas, and J. Hoberman.

[7] After halting print publication in 2017, The Voice provided daily coverage through its website until August 31, 2018, when it announced it was ceasing production of new editorial content.

[8] On December 23, 2020, editor R. C. Baker announced that the paper would resume publishing new articles both online and in a quarterly print edition.

Other prominent regulars have included Peter Schjeldahl, Ellen Willis, Jill Johnston, Tom Carson, and Richard Goldstein.

[15] For more than 40 years, Wayne Barrett was the newspaper's muckraker, covering New York real estate developers and politicians, including Donald Trump.

Writers and cartoonists for The Voice have received three Pulitzer Prizes: in 1981 (Teresa Carpenter, for feature writing),[16] 1986 (Jules Feiffer, for editorial cartooning)[17] and 2000 (Mark Schoofs, for international reporting).

The event moved to the lower tip of Manhattan in 2011, and was re-christened the "4knots Music Festival", a reference to the speed of the East River's current.

Previous owners of The Village Voice or of Village Voice Media have included co-founders Fancher[28] and Wolf,[12] New York City Councilman Carter Burden,[12] New York magazine founder Clay Felker, Rupert Murdoch, and Leonard Stern of the Hartz Mountain empire.

Following Bourne's and Lustig's departure, Village Media Group management fired three of The Voice's longest-serving contributors: gossip and nightlife columnist Michael Musto, restaurant critic Robert Sietsema, and theater critic Michael Feingold, all of whom had been writing for the paper for decades.

[38] Michael Musto was also rehired in 2016 and wrote cover stories regarding subjects like Oscar scandals and Madonna's body of work.

Barbey serves as president and CEO of the Reading Eagle Company, and holds the same roles at The Village Voice.

After taking over ownership of The Voice, Barbey named Joe Levy, formerly of Rolling Stone, as interim editor in chief,[42] and Suzan Gursoy, formerly of Ad Week, as publisher.

[8] Two weeks after the Village Voice ceased operations on September 13, co-founder John Wilcock died in California at the age of 91.

[4] The Voice has published columns and works by writers such as Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Barbara Garson, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, E.E.

Cummings, Nat Hentoff, staff writer and author Ted Hoagland, Colson Whitehead, Tom Stoppard, Paul Lukas, Lorraine Hansberry, Lester Bangs, Allen Ginsberg and Joshua Clover.

In addition to mainstay Jules Feiffer, whose cartoon ran for decades in the paper until its cancellation in 1996, well-known cartoonists featured in the paper have included R. Crumb, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Stan Mack, Mark Alan Stamaty, Ted Rall, Tom Tomorrow, Ward Sutton, Ruben Bolling and M. Wartella.

In 2012, Nicholas Kristof wrote an article in The New York Times detailing a young woman's account of being sold on Backpage.

In this rebuttal, he not only justified his original timeline, but expressed sadness "to see Village Voice Media become a major player in sex trafficking, and to see it use its journalists as attack dogs for those who threaten its corporate interests", noting another instance of The Village Voice attacking journalists reporting on Backpage's role in sex trafficking.