• Podcast
  • Blog
  • FAQ
  • How to Podcast
  • Newsletter
  • Take a Survey

It's All Journalism

The broccoli of media-focused podcasts.

  • Podcast
  • Blog
  • FAQ
  • How to Podcast
  • Newsletter
  • Take a Survey

#241 – Andy Warhol, the Village Voice and the alt-press pioneer

February 23, 2017 by ItsAllJournalism

“I guess I was always a newspaperman, even before I grew up.”

John Wilcock arrived in New York City as a young man who hadn’t finished high school and found his new home missing a crucial element: small newspapers aimed at younger people, in their teens and early 20s, not bogged down with current events but interested more in what was hip and of the moment.

John Wilcock

John Wilcock

“There were nine papers in New York City, nearly all dailies or weeklies, fairly big papers,” recounts Wilcock, now living in southern California. “I’d worked through papers with a million, 2 million, 3 million circulation. I’d always been very interested in little papers. Although there were plenty of little papers in England, or were then, there were hardly any of that type of journalism here.”

An ambitious man, Wilcock and a group of four friends founded the Village Voice, a legendary publication read religiously by the trendy, the counterculture, the artists and the young in New York. It is also considered the first alternative newsweekly in the country.

“We weren’t much interested in daily news but we were interested in people and what they did,” Wilcock recalls. “We had everything in [the paper] — sports, every type of thing except current events.”

While the entire team viewed themselves as equals, Wilcock quickly became the paper’s columnist. According to legend, the late Leonard Cohen, among many other notables, read Wilcock’s columns without fail.

John Wilcock’s friends have set up a GoFundMe account to help pay for his living expenses. He is currently living in assisted care in Southern California.

The Village Voice not only attracted the type of young, free-spirited following like the papers of Wilcock’s native England, it introduced him and the other staffers to the luminaries and characters of the city as well, including Andy Warhol.

“His photographer, Jonas Mekas told me about Andy. He said, ‘Come along, we’ll make one of his films.’ We went to one of the early movies Andy was making,” Wilcock said. “He just fascinated me, the way he put together these little bits and pieces.”

The two became friends and collaborators, traveling around the country, working together on the magazine Interview. Wilcock also wrote Warhol’s biography, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol.

“I was a useful person to have around and someone who didn’t cause a lot of trouble,” Wilcock said. “It got so I could talk to Andy. Very few people could talk to Andy. You could never get a proper answer out of him.”

Within a short time, Wilcock was going to Warhol’s Factory on a daily basis, joining his group as they moved around New York City. Warhol had a singular sense of humor, he said: One night, as the group arrived for a film premiere, the theater’s owner made an honest mistake, greeting the first person out of the vehicle as though he were Andy Warhol. “It wasn’t Andy, he hadn’t gotten out of the car then. The guy who owned the movie theater welcomed him as Andy and nobody told him any different. Andy loved things like that.”

When Warhol got frustrated that people weren’t paying enough attention to him and his work, Wilcock suggested Warhol start his own publication. “All my friends start papers,” he says. “By that time there were half a dozen underground papers. Most were in touch with each other. It was new to him,” but that suggestion turned into Interview.

As the ‘60s turned into the ‘70s, the underground press Wilcock helped to pioneer in the U.S. grew. But after 1972, the publications that might’ve been considered “underground” a few years prior had changed mindset.

“They might’ve called themselves the underground press but it was different,” he says. “They were grown-ups who acted in a very civilized way and didn’t play around. We were very serious but we weren’t tied down like the straight press, doesn’t say certain things, can’t say things in a certain way. We were totally free and easy, we printed anything that appealed to us.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism, host Michael O’Connell talks to alt-press legend John Wilcock about his long career, including helping to launch the Village Voice in the 1950s and hanging out with Andy Warhol in the 1960s. John is currently living in assisted care in Southern California. His friends have set up a GoFundMe account to help pay for John’s expenses.

#236 – It’s the moment alt papers were made for

Share Button
If you like this post, please share it along:

Previous Post


Farewell and thank you, Steve Buttry

Next Post

Sachin Kamdar is CEO of Parse.ly.
#242 – Data is a lens for you to understand your users

Leave a Reply Cancel reply




Related Posts

  • Lisa Khoury pursues a story about suicides among young Syrian refugees in Lebanon.#322 — Syrian child brides: Pursuing a story that needed telling
  • Grant Moise is senior vice president, business development and niche products at The Dallas Morning News#105 – At Speakeasy, the content goes down smooth
  • #71 – Rob Pegoraro: Making a living as a freelance writer
  • Melanie Deziel#119 — Branded Content: The New York Times finds new life in old business model

Learn How To Podcast

Turn Up the Volume equips journalism students, professionals, and others interested in producing audio content with the know-how necessary to launch a podcast for the first time. It addresses the unique challenges beginner podcasters face in producing professional level audio for online distribution. Beginners can learn how to handle the technical and conceptual challenges of launching, editing, and posting a podcast.

Order this new book by It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell.

Take a Survey, Earn Some Swag

If you haven’t heard, we created a five-question online survey to help us assemble a toolbox for journalists that we’ll share on our podcast and website. Please take a few minutes to share the tools that help make your job easier.

We’ve also just launched a new survey on how to improve our podcast. Let us know how we could do better.

To those people who complete one of our the surveys, we’ll be sending out a limited number of It’s All Journalism coffee mugs while supplies last. Show your support for good journalism by taking the survey and get a reward in return.

Help Support Our Podcast

Promoting good journalism is essential in a democracy. By donating to the It’s All Journalism Patreon page, you will help ensure that we continue producing the weekly podcast that focuses on good journalism. You’ll also help to boost us to the next level with live events and exclusive content. Donate here.

Sign Up for Our Weekly Newsletter

Latest Posts

  • 444. How Documented uses WhatsApp to reach its audience
  • Better News: Use Slack to host cultural conversations in your newsroom
  • 443. Tucson newspaper proves to be a vital source for the Latinx community
  • Top 10 podcast episodes of 2020
  • 442. 2020 Lookback: America from Canada’s perspective

Copyright © 2021 · Pintercast Child Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in