Nat Hentoff, who has worked for the Village Voice since 1958, writes a paean to the personal as part of the Voice's 50th anniversary special.

Some excerpts:

I arrived at The Village Voice in 1958 in urgent need of a wide-ranging forum because for years I had been typed by editors as only knowing about jazz. No pay was offered me then, but I was promised that I could write about anything I wanted to. Soon I was immersed in a "newspaper culture" I'd never experienced before. Many of the "assignments" were self-propelled, and the writing had to be in your own voice if you could find it. (This came to be known later as "personal journalism.")

Jack Newfield, who first became known through The Village Voice , used to say that co-founder and first editor in chief Dan Wolf "orchestrated the obsessions of his writers." We were indeed a passionately opinionated motley lot. Dan Wolf prided himself on not hiring anyone with experience as a professional journalist. He wanted writers who hadn't been conditioned to the rules and restraints of the conventional press.

There was no party line at the Voice. Dan Wolf hardly ever wrote an editorial. And members of the staff continually differed with one another, not only in the small confines of the office but continually in its pages...

Furthermore, back then there was no line between "objective" reporting and being part of the story you were writing about. That was especially true during the Vietnam War, when some of us were active participants in marches, teach-ins, and even civil disobedience. I was in a crowd trying to obstruct an induction center.

One morning, I got a call from a young reporter, one of our best, Don McNeill, who was covering an anti-war demonstration at Grand Central Terminal that the police tried to break up by force, including smashing heads. Our reporter, who had been clubbed, said hurriedly to me on the phone, "Should I put in the story that I've got blood on my shirt, or is that putting myself too much into the story?"

"That's your lead," I told him. I doubt that anyone on the New York Times news desk ever got such a call from a reporter in the field.

Not long ago, I saw Rupert Murdoch at a book party for Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News at its New York studios. I reminded Murdoch that I'd once worked for him. He groaned and said, without missing a beat, "Oh, the Voice, the bane of my existence!"

During his regime here, the Voice was, to my knowledge, the only one of his properties that openly and directly criticized him from time to time. At one point, he was so furious at one of our columnists, Alexander Cockburn, that he called the then editor in chief, David Schneiderman, and ordered him to fire Cockburn. Schneiderman did not. Murdoch called him again and threatened, "If you don't fire him, I'll sell the Voice to someone worse than I am!" Schneiderman took the chance.

That was, and is, the spirit of the Voice. And that's why I've stayed here all these years.