After five and a half years as editor of The Village Voice, Tony Ortega announced in a blog post that he would be stepping down to work on a book about Scientology. The music editor, Maura Johnston, took to Twitter to say she was leaving the newspaper as well.
Mr. Ortega said that he would leave next week and that staff members were available to handle the transition. No successor has been named, but Mr. Ortega said Christine Brennan, executive managing editor of the newspaper’s parent company, Village Voice Media, was looking to hire in New York — a fact he said “should please all the writers out there.”
That was a reference to the fact that Mr. Ortega, who came to The Voice from South Florida, led the publication through several rounds of layoffs as it confronted the headwinds buffeting newspapers of all kinds.
Michael Lacey, executive editor of the newspaper chain, credited Mr. Ortega with guiding The Voice through a tumultuous time.
“Tony Ortega did a great job for us and managed a difficult transition in a miserable economy,” he wrote in an e-mail. “During that time he became the single most informed reporter on Scientology. No one is better positioned to write the book on that organization.”
Mr. Lacey added, “His departure creates an opening for one of the most compelling jobs in journalism.”
Mr. Ortega said he was leaving because the increased profile of Scientology — including the release of “The Master,” a Paul Thomas Anderson movie about a Scientology-like sect, and a cover article about Scientology in Vanity Fair — made it a good time to shop a book on the topic. Mr. Ortega, who always wrote in addition to his editing duties, has published hundreds of blog posts on the religion in the last 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.”
Ms. Johnston, the music editor, said in an interview on Friday that, in her case, “the decision to leave was not mine.”
Ms. Johnston, who began her career in music blogs, 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 paper’s music coverage and blog items by a stable of freelance and staff writers.
But she also embodied The Voice’s tradition of thoughtful cultural criticism, and resisted the kinds of light, easily consumable items, like Top 10 lists and photo compilations, that tend to draw the most traffic online.
Giving in to “the Darwinistic page-view coverage of anything,” she said, “is damaging to culture as a whole.”
It was unclear on Friday who would take her place. Last week, Village Voice Media appointed Ben Westhoff, the music editor of LA Weekly, to oversee music coverage for the company’s weekly newspapers, and Ms. Johnston’s dismissal was widely seen as a result of a power struggle over the direction of that coverage.
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