ink-stained wretches

Wayne Barrett, Tom Robbins Out at Village Voice

Despite the many leadership changes at the Village Voice, and a fair amount of content change, certain things have remained the same about the weekly rag over the past few decades. Two of them were Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins, investigative reporters who helped define the paper’s countercultural and anti-establishment tone. According to Times media reporter Jeremy Peters, Barrett was fired and Robbins quit in protest. But editor Tony Ortega says the departures are unrelated, and Barrett himself, in a lengthy farewell column, seems wistful more than angry. “I am 65 and a half now, and it is time for something new,” he writes, mentioning his reluctance to get into the faster pace of blogging. “If I didn’t see that, others did.” For a refresher on how Barrett served as a persistent gadfly to the city’s political leaders, read the column or peruse his reporter’s archive, which records the most recent twelve years of his three-decade-deep archive.

Wayne Barrett, Tom Robbins Out at Village Voice