David Schneiderman, an editor turned publisher turned CEO of The Village Voice, the granddaddy of alternative newspapers whose 28-year tenure spanned the era of downtown indispensability to a long, slow fade in the Internet age, died Friday in Edmonds, Washington, near Seattle. He was 77.
His daughter, Kate Schneiderman, said the cause of death at a hospital was pneumonia caused by chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which he was diagnosed with two years ago. He lived in Woodway, Washington.
After being named editor-in-chief in 1978, Mr. Schneiderman elevated The Voice's journalistic game, diversifying a newsroom that was almost all-white and all-male, and reckoning with an increasingly competitive landscape in which traditional newspapers and magazines imitated the groundbreaking cultural developments of The Voice. and media coverage, as well as its carefree tone.
His own hiring by Rupert Murdoch, who bought The Voice in 1977, added a chapter to the paper's famously anti-establishment culture.
The staff pledged in a statement to refuse to work “for any new editor imposed on us secretly and without warning from management.” Mr. Schneiderman was unable to take his job for months until his predecessor's contract expired. The staff backed away from his threat.
He entered the faction-ridden newsroom at 11th Street and University Place, where journalists defended their right to inject their opinions into their copy and refuse editing, as a former editor of The New York Times, a favorite voice in coat and tie. foil.
He brought with him an easy-going, somewhat bemused temperament that eased tensions; More importantly, he had a commitment to strong journalism.
“People found out pretty quickly that he wasn't what we stereotypically thought he would be, coming from The Times, and that he actually had a lot of good ideas and was a serious person and a very good journalist,” Joe Conason, said one investigative journalist from Voice in the 1980s in an interview.
Mr. Schneiderman strengthened The Voice's commitment to reporting. He hired Wayne Barrett, who investigated a real estate developer few took seriously, Donald J. Trump, and Teresa Carpenter, a crime reporter who won The Voice's first Pulitzer Prize in 1981. He also fended off Mr. Murdoch, who wanted Mr. Conason's wings clipped for writing critically and regularly about him.
“There was a layer of professionalism brought to The Voice that some people from the '60s and '70s didn't like,” says Tricia Romano, a former Voice writer who last year published an oral history of the newspaper, “ The Freaks Came Out to Write,” he said in an interview.
“He was really good at connecting with people and navigating all the craziness,” she added.
Mr. Schneiderman's agenda included diversifying The Voice. He appointed women as editors-in-chief and turned the paper into a springboard for young black writers: he supported giving a column to music and culture critic Stanley Crouch and hired the writer Thulani Davis (later an opera librettist). Under him, the newspaper printed its first gay pride issue in 1979.
Mr. Schneiderman also fired Alexander Cockburn, a strong critic of Israel, for accepting $10,000 from the Institute of Arab Studies, a research group, for a book on Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Mr Cockburn, he said, had “damaged the credibility of The Voice”.
Under a new owner, Leonard N. Stern, a pet food and real estate magnate who bought The Voice in 1985, Mr. Schneiderman rose to publisher. He appointed Karen Durbin, a former arts editor, as the paper's second female editor-in-chief in 1994, a decision that exacerbated the divide between hard news reporters and cultural writers. According to oral history, Mr. Barrett wore a dress to the office the week Ms. Durbin took over.
Mr. Schneiderman grew the paper beyond its countercultural heritage and strident left-wing politics as its core audience grew older and more affluent. Many on the staff—influential critics and columnists who embraced the view that inmates should run the asylum—went in the opposite direction, worried that The Voice would lose its edge.
In 1988, Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. Stern launched a tabloid weekly, 7 Days, an uptown alter ego of The Voice, offering entertainment digests and deftly written takes on New York trends and scenes. It was a great success, but two years later the series was ended due to lack of advertising.
Competition from other New York entertainment weekly magazines, including Time Out New York, ate away at The Voice's circulation, while traditional publications, including The Times' arts and style sections, wiped out chunks of downtown's DNA.
The Voice's moribund circulation and revenues led to a once-unthinkable move: the $1.25 newsstand price was abolished and the paper became free in 1996.
“One of the negative aspects of The Voice in recent years is that it has undergone a kind of self-ghettoization and has lost a generation of readers,” says Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who worked at the paper since the 1950s. has cooperated. , told The Times in 1996.
The move to a giveaway model was a boon to circulation, which more than doubled to 250,000 by 1999, and the newspaper said increased advertising more than offset lost revenue.
Mr. Stern — with input from Mr. Schneiderman, who was named president of Mr. Stern's VV Publishing Corporation in 1988 — acquired other alternative newspapers, first LA Weekly in 1994 and later papers in Seattle, Nashville and the Twin Cities.
But with the advent of Craigslist, the free online classifieds portal — the source of half of The Voice's revenue — Mr. Stern saw the writing on the wall and abruptly decided to sell.
“From the moment Craigslist, literally within a few weeks, brought our ads to town, things were slow. Then it stopped growing and never grew again,” Mr. Schneiderman told Ms. Romano for her oral history.
In 2000, the chain with seven papers, including the flagship Voice, was bought by a group of investors. They installed Mr. Schneiderman as CEO, with a small equity stake, in a new company, Village Voice Media.
The company merged in 2005 with the New Times Group, a rival chain of alt-weeklies that Mr. Schneiderman once discredited for cutting back on the papers he acquired. Mr. Schneiderman was put in charge of exploring online opportunities for New Times. But a year later he resigned.
“I remember being in a meeting in my conference room and suddenly I was doing nothing,” he said in the oral history. “I was like a potted plant.”
David Abbot Schneiderman was born on April 14, 1947 in Manhattan, the younger of two sons of Robert D. Schneiderman and Mary (Torres) Schneiderman. His father was a children's clothing salesman who later retired from the Izod company. His mother was an executive assistant at JC Penney. David grew up in the Long Island suburbs of Hewlett and Roslyn.
He received a bachelor's degree in 1969 and a master's degree in international studies in 1970 from Johns Hopkins University.
He was hired by The Times that year as an assistant editor for its newly created Op-Ed page, a collection of opinion columns that sat opposite the editorials.
His marriage to Peggy Rosenthal ended in divorce. In 2006, he married Dana Faust, The Times' advertising director in the Seattle sales office.
She and Mrs. Schneiderman, his daughter by his first marriage, survive him, as do a stepson, Benjamin Drachler; a stepdaughter, Madeline Drachler; four grandchildren; and his brother, Stuart Schneiderman.
After resigning from The Voice, Mr. Schneiderman commuted from his home near Seattle to San Francisco, where he was a director of a corporate communications firm, Abernathy MacGregor Group (now H/Advisors Abernathy). He retired in 2016.
Two years later, The Voice, which had stopped publishing in print and appeared only online, went bankrupt in its 63rd year. The full-time workforce had dwindled to just 18 people by then.
“Newmark destroyed newspapers,” Mr. Schneiderman said of Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, in the oral history. “There are no two ways about it.”
