Hey it's Michael Loneser, you're listening to the on the media midweek podcast.

The big show this week is all about the rise and fall of the Alt Weekly, the type of

offbeat fearless publication that once upon a time you could pick up on a street

corner in cities across the country. I interviewed Tricia Romano, the author of a new oral history

titled The Freaks came out to write the definitive

history of the village voice the radical paper that changed American culture.

Our conversation about this legendary New York publication was

wide-ranging and too long for the radio and too profane for the radio, so we're

bringing you a longer uncensored version here.

Don't listen to this one with kids.

Tricia, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

The book begins with the very scrappy origins of the village voice in 1955.

It was founded by editor Dan Wolf, a psychologist and publisher Ed Fancher, and the writer Norman Mailer, who used money from his

1948 debut novel The Naked in the Dead to get the paper off the ground.

Jerry Talmer and John Wilcox were two early key editors and writers.

What kind of paper did they set out to create?

They wanted to create a paper that reflected the Greenwich Village that they knew and loved,

Beatnik culture and jazz and writers like James Baldwin.

They didn't see anything that reflected that

in the media landscape at all.

They wanted to put out something they wanted to read.

...