At Village Voice, Editor and Music Editor Depart and Weekly Will Have a New Address

By DAVID CARR and BEN SISARIO

After five-and-half-years as editor of The Village Voice, Tony Ortega announced in a by-the-way blog post that he will be leaving to work on a book about Scientology while music editor Maura Johnston took to Twitter to say she was leaving the paper as well.

In a phone call, Mr. Ortega said the two events were not related. Also seemingly unrelated? According to a post in The Local, The Voice is leaving its Cooper Square offices, where it has been since 1991, when its lease expires next year.

Mr. Ortega said that he will be done next week and that there is staff on hand to handle the transition. No successor has been named, but Mr. Ortega said that Christine Brennan, executive managing editor of the company, was looking to hire in New York, a fact he said, “should please all the writers out there.”

It was a wan reference to the fact that Mr. Ortega, who came from South Florida, has a b it of bumpy ride when he started. That bumpy ride continued as the newspaper, owned by a chain of now struggling weeklies, confronted headwinds that had buffeted newspapers of all kinds. Mr.Ortega led The Voice through several rounds of layoffs.

In an e-mail, Michael Lacey, the executive editor of the newspaper chain, credited Mr. Ortega with managing through a very tumultuous time in the industry.

“Tony Ortega did a great job for us and managed a difficult transition in a miserable economy,” he said. “During that time he became the single most informed reporter on Scientology. No one is better positioned to write the book on that organization.”

He added that “his departure creates an opening for one of the most compelling jobs in journalism.”

Apart from trends in print publishing, The Voice faces increased competition from the Web, with sites like Gawker and Captital New York, who are vying for similar audien ce and attention.

Mr. Ortega said he was leaving because the increased profile of Scientology - including the release of “The Master,” the Paul Thomas Anderson movie about a Scientology-like cult, and a cover story about Scientology in Vanity Fair - made it a good time to shop a book about the topic. Mr. Ortega, always an editor who also wrote, has published hundreds of blog posts on the religion in the past two years.

“I've been an editor in chief of The Village Voice for five years and this seemed like a good time to try something else,” he said. “I think we did a good job of focusing the paper back on New York stories and I helped turn a weekly newspaper with a Web site into a digital enterprise. And because I asked my writers to contribute every day, it only made sense that I do the same thing.”

He remains fascinated by Scientology because “this is religion that considers all of us to be their dupes,” adding, “They've been able to fend off all kind of government investigations by claiming to be a religion and have managed to hide behind the Constitutional rights that Americans treasure.”

Ms. Johnston, the music editor, said in an interview on Friday that “the decision to leave was not mine.”

Ms. Johnston began her career in music blogs and is perhaps the most hyper-digital figure in the small circle of pop music critics. She churned out a constant stream of Twitter messages and Tumblr posts each day in addition to her work at The Voice, which included editing the music coverage in the paper as well as blog items by a stable of freelance and staff writers.

But she also embodied the Voice tradition of thoughtful cultural criticism, and resisted the kind of light, easily-consumable items - like Top 10 lists and photo compilations - that tend to draw the most traffic online.

While she said she was interested in what engages the online public - and why - she is less interested in generating that kind of “clickbait.”

“I prefer to analyze the ways that people migrate to certain pieces of content rather than engaging it myself,” Ms. Johnston said. “I guess doing it gets more traffic than looking at it from a critical point of view.”

Giving in to “the Darwinistic pageview coverage of anything,” she added, “is damaging to culture as a whole.”

It was unclear who would be taking her place.

Last week, Village Voice Media appointed Ben Westhoff, the music editor of LA Weekly, to oversee music coverage for the company's chain of weeklies, and Ms. Johnston's dismissal was widely seen as the result of a power struggle over the direction of music coverage at the chain.

Many have suggested that the weekly lost relevance some time ago, but Mr. Ortega's history as a serious reporter was evident even as the newspaper shrunk in pages and staff. This week, The Voice has an amazing tale about how the video collection of Mondo Kim's, the storied meagstore in the East Village, ended up shipped off to a town in Sicily.