Maura Johnston is about to find out just how much influence she has in the writing world. Johnston, a widely respected journalist who was laid off from the Village Voice in September, is launching an iOS app magazine titled Maura Magazine tomorrow, and the hope is that enough people trust her editorial judgement to keep it afloat.

Columbia Journalism Review reports that for “$0.99 weekly, $2.99 monthly, or $29.99 annually, readers will get about five cultural stories every week automatically delivered to their iPhones and iPads.” Articles that “massage the part of your brain that goes into a coma” will be penned by the likes of Johnston, Jolie Kerr and J. Pablo.

We’re excited to check out Maura Magazine, and our collective fingers are crossed that it works out. If nothing else, you have to admire Johnston for having the courage to try something new that — at least at first — depends almost entirely on her own name.

Mere days after the Village Voice lost editor-in-chief Tony Ortega and music editor Maura Johnston was fired, the paper has named a successor for the latter. According to The New York Times, Brian McManus will be the Voice’s new music editor.

McManus’ work has appeared in Philadelphia Weekly, Houston Press, The Chicago Reader, SF Weekly and more. He has also written one book.

A replacement for Ortega has not been named yet.

It’s almost the weekend, and you’ve been invited to your roommate’s band’s show tonight. If the cheap beer isn’t a good enough incentive, maybe a byline at the Village Voice is.

As the most open section of the Voice, the music section is vibing for offbeat culture stories with a humorous yet hard-hitting tone. Music editor Maura Johnston wants to know what is happening around New York: an artist with an interesting backstory and NYC ties who’s releasing an album, a micro-scene coalescing, and so on.

For more on word count and editor contact info, check out How To Pitch: Village Voice.

Yesterday Jane Pratt launched her new website, xojane.com, and just as we expected, the beginning was a little rough around the edges. As Maura Johnston at the Village Voice points out, there was a piece longing for more female singer-songwriters, even though there’s actually plenty of those on the radio if one actually listens. Johnston rattles off a few names of artists in her criticism of the xojane article, but her reply to a commenter sums it up well:

This bit of dreck kind of reminds me of a piece I recently read that was all, ‘WHERE ARE THE DARIAS ON TV NOW?’ that should have really been titled ‘Nobody is telling me about the snarky smart women on tv and I can’t exactly be arsed to go FIND them.’ Just lazy lazy lazy, especially when you have, I don’t know, the WHOLE INTERNET in front of you. And no, Jane, your edits don’t help. They only call attention to the amateurism.

Boom!

Johnston and Choire Sicha at The Awl came right out and nailed xojane, but The Hairpin – one of xojane’s competitors – posted a flimsy welcome to at least act like it was excited about the content on the new site. But shockingly enough, the commentors on The Hairpin weren’t too pleased with xojane either.

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The Village Voice has named Maura Johnston as their new Music Editor. Rob Harvilla, the paper’s current music editor, posted that he would be leaving the Voice to take an editorial position at Rhapsody, in San Francisco.

Johnston has built quite the career for herself, having written for The Awl, Idolator and at the Village Voice.

Harvilla had this to say about leaving the paper:

This has been a dream job, and though it’s time to move on, it’s awfully hard to leave, and I’m grateful to you all for reading, writing, re-Tweeting, detracting, and however else you chose to react.