The SoHo Weekly News (SWN) was a weekly alternative newspaper founded by American music publicist Michael Goldstein and published in New York City from 1973 to 1982. Goldstein positioned the paper as a competitor to The Village Voice, an established alternative newspaper, but it struggled financially. SWN was acquired by Associated Newspaper Group in 1979 and ceased publication three years later after the company was unable to make it profitable.
The paper was known for its coverage of Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood as the area was becoming gentrified. Although the official editorial stance was anti-gentrification, one retrospective argued that its coverage of local culture and business contributed to the upward trend in property values. Its coverage of emerging music acts in local venues was particularly strong, including one of the first newspaper interviews with the punk rock band the Ramones.
Many of the staff went on to have distinguished careers after the paper shut down. Annie Flanders founded Details magazine while Kim Hastreiter and David Hershkovits started Paper. Bill Cunningham spent decades as a photojournalist for The New York Times, Allan Tannenbaum became known for his coverage of rock musicians, and Bruce Weber got his start photographing male fashion models with an influential SWN photo story showing an underwear-clad male model in erotic poses.
Background The SoHo Weekly News (SWN) was an alternative newspaper founded in 1973 by American music publicist Michael Goldstein and published in New York City until 1982. The paper competed with The Village Voice which over the previous two decades had established itself as the city's largest newsweekly.
Although the term alternative newspaper is not well defined, it generally refers to papers which cater to a distinct community or social group, often promoting a particular political point of view. The 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of many of these, usually short-lived, in New York and elsewhere. Following the establishment of the Voice in 1955, Walter Bowart's counter-culture East Village Other (EVO) started in 1965, running until 1972. On the heels of EVO, with many of the same staff, was the New York Ace debuting in 1971 and lasting only about a year. Rat Subterranean News was published from 1968 to 1970. Elsewhere in the US, similar publications of the era included the Los Angeles Free Press (1964–1971), the San Francisco Oracle (1966–1968), Milwaukee's Kaleidoscope (1967–1971), the Chicago Seed (1967–1974), and Seattle's Helix (1967–1970).
Startup and operation
Goldstein put out the first issue of the SoHo Weekly News on October 11, 1973, using the last $800 () of his savings. The paper's offices were at 111 Spring Street, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, although the earliest issues were produced out of Goldstein's apartment on nearby Broome Street. Initially 8 pages, SWN eventually expanded to more than 100.
In his 2003 book SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony, Richard Kostelanetz asserted that SWN "was founded ... in part to exploit the success of the Voice, with a similar size and similarly weekly publication schedule". SWN art editor Gerald Marzorati, however, had a vision for the paper which set it apart from its other predecessors, saying he wanted to "avoid the pitfalls of underground journalism – like self-indulgent, first-person writing".
In January 1976, Goldstein told The New York Times that SWN was the second-largest English-language weekly in the city and was sold at 400 newsstands with a circulation of about 28,000. He described the paper's audience as 22-to-35 years old: people who had come of age attending rock concerts in the 1960s. He conceded, however, that his market research consisted of seeing who was buying the paper at newsstands. Five years later, after the paper had undergone a change of ownership and was struggling to survive, one unidentified SWN writer complained that the paper had never been able to pin down exactly who its audience was and another noted that historically it had appealed to "art workers, musicians, women and gays".
Hank Weintraub of advertising agency DienerHauser-Greenthal stated that the paper's circulation and effectiveness were unproven, that it had not shown itself to be as much competition for The Village Voice as its management claimed, and that he would only place advertisements there when specifically requested by clients. Stephen M. Blacker, associate publisher of The Village Voice, saw a need for more newspapers but did not regard SWN as a serious competitor.
In a 2020 interview, fashion editor Kim Hastreiter spoke with Paper magazine editor Mickey Boardman and described the impact SWN had:
Staff
Many SWN staff had notable careers before or after their association with the paper. The editorial team was led by founder Goldstein, who previously had been a successful music publicist. Among his clients were Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and the Grateful Dead; 17 of the acts he represented were eventually inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Goldstein recruited Jaakov Kohn, former editor of East Village Other, to serve as editor of SWN. Dan Rattiner, who had also worked at EVO, joined the paper as a columnist. The editorial staff also included Doug Ireland.
In 1976, Al Ellenberg was brought on as editor-in-chief. Ellenberg had previously been assistant managing editor at the New York Post, leaving there after Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. In addition to his editorial duties at SWN, Ellenberg also wrote Big Al, a column about horse racing.
Gerald Marzorati, SWN art editor and author of its Artful Dodger column, was reportedly the first journalist to write a major story about graphic artist Keith Haring. Dramaturgy scholar Elinor Fuchs contributed as a freelancer. John Perreault was senior art critic from 1975 to 1982, earning a 1979 fellowship in art criticism from the National Endowment for the Arts. Edward Gorey wrote movie reviews under the byline Wardore Edgy; in a 1991 interview, he said that if The Village Voice was Off-Broadway, then SWN was Off-Off-Broadway. Joan La Barbara reviewed lesser-known jazz and experimental musicians from 1974 to 1975. Sally Banes edited dance and performance art from 1976 to 1980. Banes also had a major role in a failed attempt to unionize SWN.
In 1976 freelancers made up 80 percent of the staff. In 2003, Richard Kostelanetz contrasted the residency of the staff at The Village Voice with SWN, noting that the Voice had been founded by people who lived in Greenwich Village with the goal of providing fellow residents community news. Kostelanetz considered Goldstein to be an outsider and said that despite having its offices in SoHo, most of SWN's editors (and, he believed, most of its writers) did not live in the neighborhood. In 2015, Kostelanetz wrote that he did not consider SWN to be a "true SoHo publication", contrasting it with other contemporary small SoHo-based papers such as Art-Rite and Art Workers News, the latter being where Marzorati started his career as an art writer.
Follow-ons By the end of 1979 Goldstein had sold his stake in SWN, been replaced as editor-in-chief, and announced plans to start a new paper. The Wall Street Final began publishing in June 1980 but ceased publication after only two months.
Annie Flanders joined SWN in 1976, where she worked as a style columnist and later as fashion editor. Very shortly after SWN closed, she organized a meeting of ex-staffers including Ronnie Cooke, Stephen Saban, Lesley Vinson, Megan Haungs, and Bill Cunningham to found Details magazine, which ran from 1982 to 2015. Kim Hastreiter succeeded Flanders as fashion editor; she and news reporter David Hershkovits went on to found Paper magazine. Marzorati went on to work at The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and eventually The New York Times, where he edited The New York Times Magazine. Staffers Margo Jefferson (theater critic) and Tim Page (classical music editor) both went on to win Pulitzer Prizes at other publications.
In a 1985 review, publisher Bonnie Marranca wrote of her efforts in 1975 to get Performing Arts Journal started. At the time, she was writing for SWN, which she described as "renegade" and "a fledgling publication, with no pretense to paying writers". She had lined up printing services but was facing the even larger expense of typesetting; SWN's publisher (unnamed but presumably Goldstein) knew of Marranca's plans and offered to provide her typesetting services for the first three issues at no cost in exchange for another year of her writing for free, which she accepted. Marranca again wrote about SWN in 1995, reflecting on her experiences as a theater critic there during 1975–1977. She described the paper as "one of the respected, opinion-shaping newspapers at that time, featuring extensive coverage of the burgeoning downtown arts scene".
Photography
The photography staff included Allan Tannenbaum, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Bruce Weber, Bill Cunningham, and Marcia Resnick. Cunningham, who had been recruited by Annie Flanders, wrote a style feature called Bill Cunningham's Sunday. He then went on to a long career at The New York Times as a photojournalist, producing his famous On the Street and Evening Hours columns. Tannenbaum was known for his coverage of rock music, having photographed David Bowie, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and the Rolling Stones. Greenfield-Sanders has work on display at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Portrait Gallery, and was featured in American Master: The Boomer List on PBS. Resnick's portraits of well-known people ran regularly. She also produced a photo-satire column, pairing mysterious photos with inventive stories; originally titled "Resnick’s Believe-it-or-Not", it was renamed to "Resnick’s Believe It" after a complaint from Ripley's Believe It or Not!.
Bruce Weber's controversial 1978 series of photos featuring model Jeff Aquilon clad only in high-priced underwear from Saks Fifth Avenue was described years later in The New York Times as "flagrantly erotic" by Herbert Muschamp and as having "become legend" by John Duka. Katya Foreman of the BBC labeled it as "iconic ... [defining] a new ideal for male models". The 2020 independent film Rise of the Male Supermodel described the story as "an intimate portrayal of a young athletic man", saying that "the male form as a sexualized object was historically the focus of gay porn, not mass media" but that Weber had "[legitimized] the notion for the mainstream".
Interviewed a few months after SWN shut down, Weber spoke about the shoot. Assigned by Annie Flanders to do a men's underwear feature, Weber wanted to present the subject "with voluptuousness", the same way women were traditionally photographed. After the piece ran, Saks cancelled its advertising due to the erotic nature of the photos; this announcement was greeted with a round of applause from the staff because, as SWN fashion director Paul Cavaco put it, "it was all about, at that moment, how far can we push things, how far can we go against the norm of what fashion is supposed to be, of what people think of male models, of what male beauty is, of what is acceptable for men to show."
Editorial stance on gentrification
Originally a manufacturing district, the blocks between Houston and Canal Streets and between Lafayette Street and West Broadway started to attract artists in the late 1950s. Seeking room to work and low rents, they (often illegally) occupied factory lofts with wide open spaces and good lighting. The area gained a neighborhood identity when urban planner Chester Rapkin coined the name SoHo (South of Houston) in 1962.