New York
David Schneiderman, Village Voice Editor and Publisher, Dies at 77
David Schneiderman, an editor turned publisher turned chief executive of The Village Voice, the granddaddy of alternative newspapers, whose 28-year tenure ran from its era of downtown-bestriding indispensability to a long, slow fade in the internet era, died on Friday in Edmonds, Wash., near Seattle. He was 77.
His daughter, Kate Schneiderman, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was pneumonia brought on by chronic lymphocytic leukemia, with which he was diagnosed two years ago. He lived in Woodway, Wash.
After being named editor in chief in 1978, Mr. Schneiderman elevated The Voice’s journalistic game, diversified a newsroom that was nearly all white and all male, and reckoned with an increasingly competitive landscape in which traditional newspapers and magazines imitated The Voice’s cutting-edge cultural and media coverage, as well as its insouciant tone.
His own hiring by Rupert Murdoch, who bought The Voice in 1977, added a chapter to the paper’s famous anti-establishment culture.
The staff vowed in a statement to refuse to work “for any new editor imposed on us in secret and without warning by the management.” Mr. Schneiderman could not take up his job for months until his predecessor’s contract expired. The staff backed down from its threat.
He entered the faction-ridden newsroom on 11th Street and University Place, where journalists defended their right to inject opinion into their copy and to refuse editing, as a coat-and-tie-wearing former editor of The New York Times, a favorite Voice foil.
He brought an easygoing, slightly bemused temperament that defused tensions; more important, he had a commitment to strong journalism.
“People fairly quickly found out that he was not what we had sort of stereotypically assumed he’d be, coming from The Times, and that he actually had a lot of good ideas and was a serious person and really good journalist,” Joe Conason, a Voice investigative reporter in the 1980s, said in an interview.
Mr. Schneiderman enhanced 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 in 1981 won The Voice its first Pulitzer Prize. 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 that got brought into The Voice that some of the people from the ’60s and ’70s didn’t like,” Tricia Romano, a former Voice writer who last year published an oral history of the paper, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” said in an interview.
“He was very good at just connecting with people and navigating all the craziness,” she added.
Mr. Schneiderman’s agenda included diversifying The Voice. He named women as senior editors and made the paper a launchpad for young Black writers: He supported giving the music and culture critic Stanley Crouch a column and hired the writer Thulani Davis (later an opera librettist). Under him, the paper 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 the Israeli 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 mogul who bought The Voice in 1985, Mr. Schneiderman ascended to the job of publisher. He appointed Karen Durbin, a former arts editor, as the paper’s second woman editor in chief in 1994, a decision that aggravated the divide between hard-news reporters and cultural writers. Mr. Barrett, according to the oral history, wore a dress to the office the week Ms. Durbin took over.
Mr. Schneiderman pushed the paper to grow beyond its countercultural heritage and strident left-wing politics as its core readership grew older and more prosperous. Many on the staff — influential critics and columnists, who embraced the view that inmates should run the asylum — pulled in the opposite direction, fearful that The Voice would lose its edge.
In 1988 Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. Stern launched a tabloid weekly, 7 Days, an uptown alter ego to The Voice, with entertainment listings and deftly written takes on New York trends and scenes. It was a buzzy success, but two years later it ended its run for lack of advertising.
Competition from other New York weeklies with entertainment listings, including Time Out New York, ate into The Voice’s circulation even as traditional publications, including The Times’s arts and style sections, swiped pieces of its downtown DNA.
Moribund circulation and revenues at The Voice led to a once-unthinkable move: The $1.25 newsstand price was eliminated, and the paper became free in 1996.
“One of the negative aspects of The Voice over the past few years is that it has sort of self-ghettoized itself and lost a generation of readers,” Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who contributed to the paper beginning in the 1950s, told The Times in 1996.
Moving to a giveaway model was a boon to circulation, which had more than doubled to 250,000 by 1999, and the paper said the increased advertising more than made up for 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 papers, first L.A. Weekly in 1994 and later papers in Seattle, Nashville and the Twin Cities.
But with the advent of Craigslist, the free online portal for classified ads — the source of half The Voice’s revenue — Mr. Stern saw the writing on the wall and abruptly decided to sell.
“The minute Craigslist came to the city, literally within a few weeks, our ads — it was slow. Then it stopped growing and it never grew again,” Mr. Schneiderman told Ms. Romano for her oral history.
In 2000, the seven-paper chain, including the flagship Voice, was bought by a group of investors. They installed Mr. Schneiderman as chief executive, 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 had once disparaged for slashing staff at papers it acquired. Mr. Schneiderman was put in charge of exploring online opportunities for New Times. But he resigned a year later.
“I remember sitting in a meeting in my conference room, and I was suddenly inconsequential,” he was quoted as saying 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 wear salesman who later retired from the Izod company. His mother was an executive assistant at J.C. 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 on the newly created Op-Ed page, a collection of opinion columns that ran opposite the editorials.
His marriage to Peggy Rosenthal ended in divorce. In 2006 he married Dana Faust, the managing director of advertising for The Times at its Seattle sales office.
She and Ms. Schneiderman, his daughter from 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 an executive of a corporate communications firm, Abernathy MacGregor Group (now H/Advisors Abernathy). He retired in 2016.
Two years later, The Voice, which had ceased publishing in print and appeared only online, went out of business in its 63rd year. Its full-time staff by that time had shrunk to a mere 18 people.
“Newmark did destroy newspapers,” Mr. Schneiderman said of Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, in the oral history. “There’s no two ways about it.”
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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