'Village Voice' Names David Blum New Editor-in-Chief

By: E&P Staff David Blum, a Queens native and longtime New York-based writer and editor, has been named editor-in-chief of the Village Voice.

Blum began his career a Wall Street Journal staff writer covering urban affairs and has worked as well at New York, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. He has also written features for Vanity Fair and the New Republic, and since 2002 has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. For the past four years, he has also served as the television critic for the New York Sun. He has also written two books.

"I believe in the limitless possibilities of weeklies, and in the power of narrative journalism to change the way people think and feel," said Blum in a statement. "I'm honored to lead an institution as vibrant and as essential to New York City life as the Voice. I want New Yorkers to read the Voice, and to be moved, entertained, amused, confronted and compelled by what it has to say."

Blum will be the fifth editor to be assigned the top position at the New York City alternative weekly paper this year. Longtime editor Don Forst resigned last December when the paper was officially taken over by alt-weekly chain New Times, leaving the reins to managing editor Doug Simmons, who was acting editor for only a few months before being fired in the wake of a fabricated-article scandal at the paper. Ward Harkavy took over as interim editor after Simmons left, until it was announced in june that the paper had hired Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple. Wemple announced after only two weeks that he had reconsidered and decided to remain in Washington.