Karen Durbin, journalist who led Village Voice in '90s, dies at 80

Boston Globe

20-04-2025

Her byline, however, disappeared for stretches as she battled chronic writer's block. During one period, spanning nearly an entire decade, she turned to editing as the senior arts chief at the Village Voice from 1979 to 1989 — spanning an era when rising rents and shifting tastes began to chip away at the vestiges of Manhattan's counterculture scene.
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She had first made her mark at the Voice with a dose of ennui. A personal discourse, 'Casualties of the Sex War,' appeared in April 1972 declaring that her righteous fire from the 1960s — the antiwar movement, women's marches, and other causes — was now just embers. In a blast of cynicism, Ms. Durbin foreshadowed the self-indulgence and political malaise of the years ahead.
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'We're all feeling adrift politically,' she wrote. 'Politics of any kind, straight or raving radical, seems empty right now. The counterculture is a media dream, the revolution a counterculture fantasy.'
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Hedonism and detachment, she said, were now her guides: 'I'm hard pressed to come up with a single friend who loves anyone, who is loved, who remembers what the word means. Sex, yes. Lots of sex, more than ever.'
Her manifesto, just months before Gloria Steinem helped launch Ms. magazine as a flagship for feminism, was seen by some readers as cowardly surrender and by others as a bold declaration of female individualism. The buzz caught the attention of the editorial board at Mademoiselle, which offered Ms. Durbin a beat covering the women's movement as a maverick.
She also took over the 'The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Sex' column, adding a cheeky and rebellious touch that dovetailed with emerging attention to female sexual empowerment, with books such as 'Sexual Politics' by Kate Millett (1970) and Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' (1970).
Ms. Durbin returned to the Village Voice in 1974 as a staff writer and assistant editor during a golden age at the publication, which was plump with advertising (Bruce Springsteen found his drummer, Max Weinberg, in the Voice classifieds) and had a stable of journalistic talent including Norman Mailer, Nat Hentoff, and cartoonist and illustrator Jules Feiffer.
Yet Ms. Durbin railed against what she called a 'boy's club' atmosphere that she said left female staffers battling for attention. She once recalled Village Voice columnist Jack Newfield complaining that women's issues had pushed civil rights 'off the table.'
'And I said, 'Who designed that table?' I mean, I was pissed,' she was quoted as saying in a 2013 book on Hentoff's career, 'The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,' by David L. Lewis.
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At the Voice, Ms. Durbin found a niche exploring cultural touchstones. She went on tour in 1975 with the Rolling Stones, writing a piece rich with mockery of the fawning and idolatry of the rock and roll entourage but also noting how she was starstruck just being there.
A recurring joke at the Village Voice in the 1990s was her wistful closing section of the piece. She wondered how many years the Stones would have left as rock and rollers. (The band was still touring then and still is now.)
In 1976, she finished a cover story that became a defining meditation. She had ended a relationship with journalist Hendrik Hertzberg and was looking back on her emergence from couplehood. ''We' had been the source of my gravity, the axis on which my universe turned,' she wrote in 'On Being a Woman Alone.'
The essay was quickly one of the most-discussed pieces in Village Voice history and established Ms. Durbin as a symbol of feminism on her own terms. In one section, Ms. Durbin recalled a conversation with a female friend about reclaiming their identities, separate from the men they dated.
'In a sense we did give up men,' she wrote. 'No longer trusting them, we stopped depending on them and started depending on ourselves. We chose to become alone, literally, sometimes, and continually inside our heads.'
Ms. Durbin took over as arts and entertainment editor of the lifestyle magazine Mirabella in 1990. Five years later, she was named the Village Voice editor in chief, replacing Jonathan Z. Larsen, at a time when the weekly was looking to regain some of its earlier serendipity and what Ms. Durbin called 'unassignable' stories.
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'Articles that no editor can think up in advance because they only spring from the heart of a writer's imagination and passion,' she said.
As she took over, Ms. Durbin said the Voice had 'retreated into a dark and angry corner' since the Reagan era. She saw her role as keeping the leftist banner flying but without becoming shrill and predictable. 'There has to, on some level, be a joy in it and not just rage,' she told The New York Times.
She oversaw a redesign of the Voice and the initial reporting on a significant scoop, the killing and dismemberment of a well-known figure on the New York club and drug scenes, Andre 'Angel' Melendez. A club promoter, Michael Alig, and another man were convicted in the March 1996 slaying.
Ms. Durbin's tenure was relatively brief, however. She resigned in September 1996 amid reported disputes with the publisher, David Schneiderman, over cost-cutting steps and the direction of the Voice.
In April 1996, the paper switched to free distribution in Manhattan, a move that boosted its circulation but was criticized by some media writers as a blow to the Voice's image as a newsstand mainstay since 1955. The Voice went fully online in 2017 and halted publication the following year. It was relaunched in 2021.
Karen Durbin was born in Cincinnati on Aug. 28, 1944, into a farming family and spent her teen years in Indianapolis.
She was a summer intern at the Indianapolis Times while studying at Bryn Mawr College, where she received a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. She took a job as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker and began attending meetings at the feminist collective Redstockings. In 1970, she joined the media office of New York City's environmental agency under Mayor John V. Lindsay.
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'I remember standing at a newsstand and picking up one paper after another, because I just wanted to see what they were like,' she was quoted as saying in Lewis's book. 'And then there was this thing called the Village Voice, and it wasn't like anything I'd seen.'
After leaving the Village Voice in 1996, Ms. Durbin contributed film reviews for The New York Times and other outlets such as O, founded by Oprah Winfrey. In one piece for O, she listed her 50 greatest 'chick flicks' of all time.
Some of her selections were not the typical fare. On her list was the 1986 sci-fi sequel thriller 'Aliens,' starring Sigourney Weaver battling super-predator life forms. 'One of the great movie heroines of all time,' Ms. Durbin wrote.
Ms. Durbin had no immediate survivors, Carr said.
She often described the Village Voice in its prime as akin to a lively bar in its namesake Greenwich Village.
'And everybody's sitting at the bar, and having whatever they're having, and talking about everything under the sun,' she said. 'And sometimes an argument and, you know, sometimes a chorus. And I thought the Voice was like that.'