David Schneiderman, an editor turned publisher turned chief executive of The Village Voice, the granddaddy of alternative newspapers, whose 28-year tenure ran from its era of downtown-bestriding indispensability to a long, slow fade in the internet era, died on Friday in Edmonds, Wash., near Seattle. He was 77.
His daughter, Kate Schneiderman, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was pneumonia brought on by chronic lymphocytic leukemia, with which he was diagnosed two years ago. He lived in Woodway, Wash.
After being named editor in chief in 1978, Mr. Schneiderman elevated The Voice’s journalistic game, diversified a newsroom that was nearly all white and all male, and reckoned with an increasingly competitive landscape in which traditional newspapers and magazines imitated The Voice’s cutting-edge cultural and media coverage, as well as its insouciant tone.
His own hiring by Rupert Murdoch, who bought The Voice in 1977, added a chapter to the paper’s famous anti-establishment culture.
The staff vowed in a statement to refuse to work “for any new editor imposed on us in secret and without warning by the management.” Mr. Schneiderman could not take up his job for months until his predecessor’s contract expired. The staff backed down from its threat.
He entered the faction-ridden newsroom on 11th Street and University Place, where journalists defended their right to inject opinion into their copy and to refuse editing, as a coat-and-tie-wearing former editor of The New York Times, a favorite Voice foil.
He brought an easygoing, slightly bemused temperament that defused tensions; more important, he had a commitment to strong journalism.
“People fairly quickly found out that he was not what we had sort of stereotypically assumed he’d be, coming from The Times, and that he actually had a lot of good ideas and was a serious person and really good journalist,” Joe Conason, a Voice investigative reporter in the 1980s, said in an interview.
Mr. Schneiderman enhanced The Voice’s commitment to reporting. He hired Wayne Barrett, who investigated a real estate developer few took seriously, Donald J. Trump, and Teresa Carpenter, a crime reporter who in 1981 won The Voice its first Pulitzer Prize. He also fended off Mr. Murdoch, who wanted Mr. Conason’s wings clipped for writing critically and regularly about him.
“There was a layer of professionalism that got brought into The Voice that some of the people from the ’60s and ’70s didn’t like,” Tricia Romano, a former Voice writer who last year published an oral history of the paper, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” said in an interview.
“He was very good at just connecting with people and navigating all the craziness,” she added.
Mr. Schneiderman’s agenda included diversifying The Voice. He named women as senior editors and made the paper a launchpad for young Black writers: He supported giving the music and culture critic Stanley Crouch a column and hired the writer Thulani Davis (later an opera librettist). Under him, the paper printed its first gay pride issue in 1979.
Mr. Schneiderman also fired Alexander Cockburn, a strong critic of Israel, for accepting $10,000 from the Institute of Arab Studies, a research group, for a book on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Mr. Cockburn, he said, had “damaged the credibility” of The Voice.
Under a new owner, Leonard N. Stern, a pet food and real estate mogul who bought The Voice in 1985, Mr. Schneiderman ascended to the job of publisher. He appointed Karen Durbin, a former arts editor, as the paper’s second woman editor in chief in 1994, a decision that aggravated the divide between hard-news reporters and cultural writers. Mr. Barrett, according to the oral history, wore a dress to the office the week Ms. Durbin took over.
Mr. Schneiderman pushed the paper to grow beyond its countercultural heritage and strident left-wing politics as its core readership grew older and more prosperous. Many on the staff — influential critics and columnists, who embraced the view that inmates should run the asylum — pulled in the opposite direction, fearful that The Voice would lose its edge.
In 1988 Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. Stern launched a tabloid weekly, 7 Days, an uptown alter ego to The Voice, with entertainment listings and deftly written takes on New York trends and scenes. It was a buzzy success, but two years later it ended its run for lack of advertising.
Competition from other New York weeklies with entertainment listings, including Time Out New York, ate into The Voice’s circulation even as traditional publications, including The Times’s arts and style sections, swiped pieces of its downtown DNA.
Moribund circulation and revenues at The Voice led to a once-unthinkable move: The $1.25 newsstand price was eliminated, and the paper became free in 1996.
“One of the negative aspects of The Voice over the past few years is that it has sort of self-ghettoized itself and lost a generation of readers,” Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who contributed to the paper beginning in the 1950s, told The Times in 1996.
Moving to a giveaway model was a boon to circulation, which had more than doubled to 250,000 by 1999, and the paper said the increased advertising more than made up for lost revenue.
Mr. Stern — with input from Mr. Schneiderman, who was named president of Mr. Stern’s VV Publishing Corporation in 1988 — acquired other alternative papers, first L.A. Weekly in 1994 and later papers in Seattle, Nashville and the Twin Cities.
But with the advent of Craigslist, the free online portal for classified ads — the source of half The Voice’s revenue — Mr. Stern saw the writing on the wall and abruptly decided to sell.
“The minute Craigslist came to the city, literally within a few weeks, our ads — it was slow. Then it stopped growing and it never grew again,” Mr. Schneiderman told Ms. Romano for her oral history.
In 2000, the seven-paper chain, including the flagship Voice, was bought by a group of investors. They installed Mr. Schneiderman as chief executive, with a small equity stake, in a new company, Village Voice Media.
The company merged in 2005 with the New Times Group, a rival chain of alt-weeklies that Mr. Schneiderman had once disparaged for slashing staff at papers it acquired. Mr. Schneiderman was put in charge of exploring online opportunities for New Times. But he resigned a year later.
“I remember sitting in a meeting in my conference room, and I was suddenly inconsequential,” he was quoted as saying in the oral history. “I was like a potted plant.”
David Abbot Schneiderman was born on April 14, 1947, in Manhattan, the younger of two sons of Robert D. Schneiderman and Mary (Torres) Schneiderman. His father was a children’s wear salesman who later retired from the Izod company. His mother was an executive assistant at J.C. Penney. David grew up in the Long Island suburbs of Hewlett and Roslyn.
He received a bachelor’s degree in 1969 and a master’s degree in international studies in 1970 from Johns Hopkins University.
He was hired by The Times that year as an assistant editor on the newly created Op-Ed page, a collection of opinion columns that ran opposite the editorials.
His marriage to Peggy Rosenthal ended in divorce. In 2006 he married Dana Faust, the managing director of advertising for The Times at its Seattle sales office.
She and Ms. Schneiderman, his daughter from his first marriage, survive him, as do a stepson, Benjamin Drachler; a stepdaughter, Madeline Drachler; four grandchildren; and his brother, Stuart Schneiderman.
After resigning from The Voice, Mr. Schneiderman commuted from his home near Seattle to San Francisco, where he was an executive of a corporate communications firm, Abernathy MacGregor Group (now H/Advisors Abernathy). He retired in 2016.
Two years later, The Voice, which had ceased publishing in print and appeared only online, went out of business in its 63rd year. Its full-time staff by that time had shrunk to a mere 18 people.
“Newmark did destroy newspapers,” Mr. Schneiderman said of Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, in the oral history. “There’s no two ways about it.”