Voice

Jerry Saltz was one of the three nominated finalists in the Criticism category for his "fresh, down-to-earth pieces on the visual arts and other cultural topics," the Pulitzer Board announced today. Robin Givhan, fashion editor of the Washington Post, won the category.

R.J. Smith, senior editor at Los Angeles magazine, tells stories of bickering and battling at the Village Voice in an interview with rockcritics.com. Smith, who was a music critic for the Voice until he left in 1990, calls Robert Christgau "the most helpful and complicated editor I've ever had," someone who was so obsessive that when he received a baggie full of semen from a member of the Swans protesting a bad review, he just told his assistant "to file it under S for Swans. Order had to be maintained." Other edit staffers were not so serene, Smith says, so "every week there was some new line being drawn, one week it was the old city hall lefties versus the fresh radical feminists, the next week it was the folks who thought the performance artist who stuffed yams up her ass was the bomb scuffling with those who had their knickers bunched."

The NY-gossip blog Gawker tweaked the Village Voice this morning for posting a home-page link on villagevoice.com to a six-year old story on "Online Celeb Torture" written by Peter Braunstein, who was charged last year with brutalizing a woman in her Manhattan apartment. The Voice quickly removed the link and posted an editor's note, admitting that the employee responsible for the link "should have known better" and that Gawker's ridicule was well-placed.