Get Featured in The Village Voice

The Village Voice covers New York City’s arts, music, film, theater, nightlife and politics with a critic’s eye. Coverage from a pitch alone tends to go to work with an established reputation downtown, such as a major opening, a noted company or an artist critics already follow. With a guaranteed placement, the outlet is confirmed first, you approve every word, and the article publishes on villagevoice.com inside the window written into your scope, usually one day. It is a real article on the site that you can put in a proposal, a deck or a profile.

What The Village Voice covers

The Village Voice is the publication that defined the American alternative weekly. Born in Greenwich Village, it built its name on arts criticism, investigative reporting and a willingness to cover what larger papers ignored. It writes today about music, film, theater, dance, books, art, photography, food, nightlife and city politics, and it created the Obie Awards, which honor Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theater.

The voice is opinionated, literate and unmistakably New York. The Village Voice has always taken subcultures seriously, so it suits an Off-Broadway production, an independent film with a city premiere, a musician with a downtown residency, a gallery or performance space, a bookstore or small press, a neighborhood organization, or a business that has become part of the life of its block.

Who reads The Village Voice

Village Voice readers are New Yorkers across the five boroughs with strong opinions about culture: theatergoers, filmgoers, musicians, writers, artists, students, activists and longtime residents who grew up reading it. It is also read by curators, programmers, critics, bookers and arts funders, and by people far from the city who follow New York’s creative life.

A Village Voice feature tells the New York arts world that the work is worth attention. That matters to presenters, venue bookers, festival programmers, grant panels, gallery directors and audiences choosing among hundreds of options on a given night. The piece belongs in a grant application, a press kit, a lobby display, a program note or a season announcement.

The Village Voice rewards work that has something to say. A feature holds up when it explains what the piece, the place or the project is about, where it sits in the city’s cultural history, and why a New Yorker with limited evenings should choose it. Specifics, including neighborhoods, venues and dates, carry more weight than praise.

The list below shows the angles we test first. Artists frequently overlook the neighborhood itself, which so often gives a Voice story much of its character.

What weakens a pitch

• Tourist-brochure New York. Readers live here, so skyline clichés and “the city that never sleeps” work against you from the first line.
• Praise without substance. Calling a show “stunning” is not criticism, and everything we write about it must be true.
• No point of view. The Voice was built on argument, so work that stands for nothing is hard to write about.
• A national brand message. Without a New York address, date or community, the story belongs in a different publication.