End of an era at the Village Voice
News broke out today that two of the city’s greatest investigative journalists, Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins, are leaving the Village Voice. Wayne was let go for budget reasons, Tom quit because, as he put it, “I’m going out with the guy who brought me to the dance.”
I had the privilege of interning for Wayne as in the Fall of 2009. He sparked my interest in political journalism, and it’s something I continue to be passionate about. His knowledge, skill and dedication are inspiring, and I wish him the best.
Wayne is moving to the Nation Institute, a media nonprofit connected to “The Nation” magazine. Whether it’s articles for the institute, or a book, or whatever, I’m looking forward to a masterpiece soon.
This paragraph in Wayne’s farewell blog post pretty much sums it up:
The greatest prize I’ve ever won for the work I’ve done in these pages was when Al D’Amato called me a “viper” in his memoir. Chuck Schumer, who ended D’Amato’s reign after 18 years, ascribed his victory in a 2007 memoir to a story I’d written a decade earlier that devastated the incumbent Republican. What Schumer didn’t say was that as soon as Hank Morris, Schumer’s media guru, went up with an ad based on my revelations about D’Amato, Arthur Finkelstein, who was running D’Amato’s 1998 campaign, aired a commercial about Schumer’s near-indictment and flashed my nearly two-decade-old clips breaking that scandal on the screen as well. I was the maestro of a commercial duel.
Read the rest of it here.
Good luck, Wayne and Tom!
