Mr. Barbey has said little about his plans other than that he is committed to great writing. While that might sound hopelessly naïve, it was what made The Voice so essential at a time when New Yorkers still had many more newspapers at their disposal. The Voice had an institutional sensibility (though not without its inconsistencies), but it did not deploy the tone and language of a collective mind. Writers stood out for the singularity of their prose, for their particular offenses and defenses, obsessions and hatreds, and as veterans are eager to tell you, they were given license to express themselves as they saw fit.
Blanche McCrary Boyd, who wrote for The Voice beginning in the late 1970s, recalled in an interview that she had once turned in a piece about stock car racing in South Carolina that was quite long. Her editor called, she continued, and told her, “ ‘I think you wrote something really remarkable but we’ll have to cut it by 30 percent.’ Later, she said, ‘We’ll have to cut it by 10 percent.’ And then, in the end, she cut 5.” When Ms. Boyd was offered a chance to write for The Atlantic, she said, and was told that she couldn’t use some of the verbiage she had used in The Voice, she told them she had no interest.
In a sense, The Voice championed the personal brand long before personal branding, however vulgar the term, began to seem crucial to one’s success as a writer. The Voice set careers on courses that could not be mistaken for one another, at a time when bylines in many conventional publications were virtually interchangeable.
If it can recreate the formula of turning lively, brilliant, chaotic minds upon the subjects that fascinate them, and give those writers the time to produce pieces that the dictates of web journalism can’t provide, then it may be well suited to a digital-era renaissance. As Leslie Savan, the longtime advertising critic at The Voice put it to me: “The Voice was my best voice as a writer. I never found that voice again.”
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/131425400167
