From One Village to Another

New Zealand journalist Thomas Butson began his career in copy at New Zealand’s Truth, followed by positions at The Toronto Star and from 1968 at The New York Times. In 1992 Butson and his wife bought the ailing 59-year-old Greenwich Village paper The Villager and resumed publishing, saving it from vanishing from existence. In the next seven years, the Butsons transformed a moribund paper into a thriving community weekly, he as editor and Elizabeth as publisher. His New York Times obituary opines: “Butson brought journalistic ambition to a paper that had previously been more of a shopper.” He also wrote the first English-language biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, which was published on the day Gorbachev assumed power in 1985. Butson died in Brooklyn, New York in 2000, aged 68.