Top Editors Abruptly Leave Village Voice

Will Bourne, who became editor in chief of The Village Voice in November, and Jessica Lustig, the deputy editor since January, are leaving the weekly publication.

They met with the staff at 11 p.m. on Thursday and said that Christine Brennan, executive editor of Voice Media Group, had instructed them to cut five positions from the 20-person staff. Rather than carrying out the cuts, they resigned and left immediately.

The tumult at The Village Voice has been something of a pattern as the weekly and its ownership have struggled to come to grips with declining revenue and increased competition for readers and advertisers on the Web.

“We are both leaving because I was summoned to a meeting and asked to get rid of five people and we are on a short string already,” said Mr. Bourne, who had worked at Fast Company and Inc. magazine before coming to the Voice. “When I was brought in here, I was explicitly told that the bloodletting had come to an end. I have enormous respect for the staff here and the work they have been doing and I am not going to preside over further layoffs.”

Ms. Lustig said she was leaving at the same time - the weekly is in the middle of closing its issue for Monday -- because she shared Mr. Bourne’s belief that that the paper could not absorb further cuts.

After running into controversy for Backpage.com, a classified site that has hosted escort ads, the newspaper chain of 13 weeklies was separated from the classified service and sold to a group of the company’s editors and publishers last September. The Village Voice, founded in 1955 by Norman Mailer, along with others, has won three Pulitzer prizes and published the work of Henry Miller, Tom Stoppard and Nat Hentoff.