Voice Change

The story of Leonard Stern sounds like something out of Capitalist Times. Son of the founder of Hartz Mountain Industries, Stern, 47, is the chairman of the world's largest purveyor of pet products. Intense and blunt-spoken, he may be worth as much as $1 billion, but only his accountant knows for sure: Stern's company is privately owned and he rarely talks to reporters. Now he will have trouble avoiding them. Last week Stern bought the Village Voice, the crusading, leftish weekly whose brand of political and cultural journalism shaped a generation of underground newspapers.

Stern paid slightly more than $55 million in cash for the Manhattan-based paper, approximately what Press Baron Rupert Murdoch had been asking. Murdoch, who acquired the Voice, New York magazine and New West in 1977 for $16 million, decided to sell the 30-year-old weekly two months ago. The paper (circ. 150,000) made about $5 million profit before taxes last year.

Many of the paper's 150 staffers worry about Stern's vague politics ("I have not been politically active," he says. "I guess I'm a liberal"), and his company's reputation. In 1978 federal officials ordered Hartz to rehire employees who had been fired during a union-organizing drive, and last year the firm pleaded guilty to perjury and obstruction of justice in an antitrust suit. But veteran Voicers take comfort from the Murdoch reign. Says Columnist Jack Newfield: "I thought Murdoch, on paper, was going to turn out to be a monster, but he gave us complete freedom." The new boss promises the same, at least for now. "I respect the niche of the Voice, and I'm going to give them total independence, which is the only way they can flourish," Stern told TIME. Columnist Nat Hentoff nonetheless reserves judgment. "Sooner or later, there is going to be an article that goes against one of his cherished beliefs -- we don't know what they are yet -- and we'll see."