While sidewalk chatting with Joan McAllister, the publisher of a 26 year old newsletter for homeless families, I caught with the corner of my eye a deliveryman accompanied by a shopping cart filled with copies of The Villager with a brand new logo. Wow!
As the publisher of WestView News, approaching our 10th anniversary, I was intrigued why The Villager, nearing its 80th, was changing its well-recognized quaint logo and type faces. Furthermore, I wondered why The Villager was reverting to door-to-door, vestibule-to-vestibule delivery.
We all know that print media is in trouble. However, we read that community papers are doing just fine. When I visit my son’s family, I am awed by the size of the East Williston Times; it is filled with ads which are the only way local businesses believe they can reach their customers. However, here, in the sophisticated West Village, we believe in the internet and not in paid print advertising.
A new West Village restaurant pays a PR firm $5,000 a month to secure “free” publicity and would not think of paying $250 for a quarter page ad (when you ask them, they refer you to their PR agency where you are put through to the voicemail of a recent graduate who never calls you back).
The Villager’s 80th anniversary edition does contain a history of the publication which is something I have never seen before. I learned that for the first 40 years or so, it was in the hands of one family, that of Walter Bryan who started in Kansas City as a delivery boy and worked his way up the business side of newspapers ending here in New York joining Hearst, becoming the publisher of New York American and starting The Villager on April 13, 1933.
Bryan worked with his sister Isabel and on her death in 1957, another sister, Merle Bryan Williamson, took over at 83. Finally, Royce Rowe of ABC took over in 1973 followed by Bob Trentlyon the then publisher of Chelsea Clinton News.
The account becomes choppy after that with Michael Armstrong, publisher of Brooklyn Phoenix reporting that when “I bought it from Royce Rowe, it had about five owners in the 1970s before I came in.”
In 1992, the paper, losing money, closed but six months later was bought (couldn’t have been too expensive) by retired Times editor Tom Butson and his wife Elizabeth Margaritis Butson who ran it for seven years.
I started to do Op-Ed pieces for The Villager at that time and Elizabeth, being Greek, was invited to dinner at 69 Charles. Tom was a classic newspaperman. He never edited my articles, so I had to be careful and get it right the first time.
What I did not know and learned from The Villager account was that the Butsons bought Downtown Express covering Tribeca and Lower Manhattan. Tom became ill and the papers were sold to John Sutter who had sold a chain of Long Island papers. In 2002, Sutter bought a paper that was to become Gay City News and in 2006, Chelsea Now.
This brings us to Jennifer Goodstein who bought all the papers in August 2012. The talk then was that Jennifer’s husband, Les Goodstein, 54, who had for some seven years been running a group of community papers in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx for the News Corporation had had (according to John Catsimatidis) a fight with his boss and quit in July 2013 (which is only a year after Jennifer bought The Villager); and as the trade press reflected, “would seem to provide a pretty soft landing.”
I emailed The Villager editor Lincoln Anderson for comment. He checked with Jennifer who suggested I read her anniversary article.
I had a call from former owner John Sutter who began with, “You must be getting pretty tired.” He offered to give me a weekly column and 20% of all of my advertising that I could deliver if I would terminate WestView News. He repeated at least three times that Jennifer “doesn’t know anything about this.” I offered that I had just received a $500 check from a leading novelist who thought WestView terrific and was not ready to give up.
So, congratulations The Villager on your 80th anniversary and may we all make just one more year.
