Karen Durbin, a fierce feminist who championed sexual liberation and fulfillment as a journalist, served as the second female editor in chief of The Village Voice and then went on to become a virtuoso film critic for The New York Times and other publications, died on April 15 in Brooklyn. She was 80.
Her death, in a health care facility, was caused by complications of dementia, her friend and former colleague Cynthia Carr said.
Appointed in 1994 as The Voice’s editor in chief — she was only the second in the paper’s history, and the first in nearly two decades — Ms. Durbin waged a fervent campaign to attract young readers. Part of that effort involved tilting toward often incendiary coverage of feminism, gay rights and avant-garde culture, and away from muckraking about corrupt and incompetent landlords, judges and politicians.
Not that she abandoned covering corruption and crime: In 1996, she overruled the paper’s lawyers and published an article that all but accused the nightclub promoter Michael Alig of “A Murder in Clubhand,” as the headline proclaimed, after the reporter, Frank Owen, produced an on-the-record source. (Mr. Alig later pleaded guilty to manslaughter.)
But even before she was editor in chief, she had set a tone that outraged traditionalists, mostly the older, white male staffers — or “the boys club,” as she put it. When she was the senior arts editor, they took issue with some of her editorial choices, including an assignment she made in 1986: Ms. Carr’s profile of the performance artist Karen Finley, whose act included the sexually explicit use of canned yams as part of a sendup of female objectification.
“She convinced me that I could write,” Ms. Carr recalled in an interview. “She had the great editor’s gift of seeing what you were trying to do, then helping you do it. I sometimes ventured into terra incognita, and I knew she had my back. She was fearless.”
Ms. Durbin talked Ms. Carr’s article onto the cover of The Voice. Robert Friedman, who was then the editor in chief, said that cost him his job.
When she was first named editor, Ms. Durbin told The New York Times: “I think The Voice should reflect the whole lives of the people who put it out. And the reality of those people is that they work hard, they play with exuberance, they wear clothes that give them pleasure. They buy books and records and all that stuff. They live in the material world.”
The Voice had “retreated into a dark and angry corner,” Ms. Durbin concluded. Her goal, she said, was for the paper to remain true to its leftist roots, but to be less predictable and shrill: “There has to, on some level, be a joy in it and not just rage.”
Richard Goldstein, a former executive editor at the paper, recalled in an interview: “In the years before she arrived, The Voice was mired in an old-school sensibility that privileged straight white male attitudes — although that thinking was so pervasive in journalism back then that most of its adherents had no idea that they possessed those attitudes.”
During Ms. Durbin’s first week as editor, Wayne Barrett, an acclaimed investigative reporter, came to work wearing a dress to mock her stated intent of providing more coverage of feminist, gay and lesbian issues.
“Karen navigated those very stormy waters, and she ushered the paper into what can only be called modern times,” Mr. Goldstein said. “She was a brilliant line editor, a fearless writer and a pioneer of the diverse world that is journalism today.”
During much of The Voice’s existence, outsiders judged it by conventional journalistic standards of objectivity — and it often fell short. But Ms. Durbin likened the paper’s vibe to that of “a funky bar” in Greenwich Village and defended its liberal bias.
“Advocacy journalism is not biased,” she was quoted as saying in “The Freaks Came Out to Write” (2024), an oral history of The Voice by Tricia Romano. “It’s the most honest kind of journalism, because you know where the writer is coming from.”
Both before and after being appointed as editor, Ms. Durbin was an accomplished writer.
In 1975, after touring with the Rolling Stones, she began her cover article for The Voice this way: “Two a.m. in a motel room in Wisconsin. The room is thick with dope and cigarette smoke. People of various sexes crowd the room, among them the Stones. No one looks healthy. Keith Richard, as usual, looks moribund, wasted, and vaguely dangerous.” (The Stones’ Keith Richards was calling himself Keith Richard in those days.)
The article ran with the cover line “Can the Stones Still Cut it?” (Fifty years later, the band is still performing.)
The next year, after the end of her relationship with her fellow journalist Hendrik Hertzberg, she wrote an anguished front-page essay titled “On Being a Woman Alone.”
“‘We’ had been the source of my gravity, the axis on which my universe turned,” she wrote.
Recalling a conversation with a friend, Ms. Durbin lamented: “In a sense we did give up men. No longer trusting them, we stopped depending on them and started depending on ourselves. We chose to become alone, literally, sometimes, and continually inside our heads.”
After leaving The Voice, Ms. Durbin covered movies and the arts for The New York Times, Mirabella, Mademoiselle and Elle, until about a decade ago.
Karen Lee Durbin was born on Aug. 28, 1944, in Cincinnati, to Charles and Violet (Lewis) Durbin. Her father ran a dry-cleaning service.
No immediate family members survive. Two brothers, Terry and Timothy, died earlier.
When Karen was 12, the family moved to Indianapolis, where she attended high school. She later attended Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, while working summers as an intern at The Indianapolis Times.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1966, she was hired as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker and began attending meetings of the feminist collective Redstockings. She later served as a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, but her interest in journalism remained.
“I remember standing at a newsstand and picking up one paper after another, because I just wanted to see what they were like,” she said in “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,” David L. Lewis’s 2013 documentary about the longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff.
In 1972, she showed some passages from her journal to a friend who recommended that she expand them into an article.
As the journalist Ellen Willis recalled in “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” Ms. Durbin asked, “But who would publish such a thing?”
The friend replied, “The Village Voice might.”
After a stint at Mademoiselle magazine, Ms. Durbin joined The Voice full time in 1974. She was a writer and assistant editor before being named senior arts editor in 1979; she held that position there until 1989, when she left again, to become the arts and entertainment editor at Mirabella.
In 1994, at age 49, she was hired by David Schneiderman, the publisher of The Voice, and Leonard N. Stern, the paper’s owner, as the editor in chief, replacing Jonathan Z. Larsen. She was the first woman to hold that position since Marianne Partridge in the late 1970s.
In her new role, Ms. Durbin not only attempted to rescue the paper from what she called a midlife crisis; she also scrapped the sports section and cut the staff, as Craigslist and other competitors eroded the paper’s classified advertising base. She quit in 1996 over differences with Mr. Schneiderman related to the paper’s budget and editorial strategy.
“She was blazingly intelligent, charming but unafraid to roll up her sleeves during the rolling succession of internal Voice dust-ups, and unswerving in her belief in the power of art to change lives,” said Martin Gottlieb, a former Times reporter and editor who was the editor of The Voice from 1986 to 1988.
Ms. Durbin’s very first article for The Voice, in 1972, was a critique of the certitude of feminism, “Casualties of the Sex War.”
As a professed pro-sex feminist, she never shied away from writing about sex in any publication, even (or perhaps especially) in Mademoiselle, where she wrote a column called “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex.”
Once, asked how she viewed the phenomenon of increasing nudity at public beaches, she replied, “Avidly, with binoculars.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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