Tony Ortega is the new editor of The Village Voice

The editor of the Village Voice got fired on Friday and the owners didn’t waste much time plucking the most fearless, muckrakingest maverick newspaper editor in America to replace him. Tabloid Baby's pal Tony Ortega at the Voice-affiliated New Times Broward-Palm Beach got the call to head north and takes over a week after they banned the last guy from the building.

We first followed Tony’s work years ago when he was a reporter for the New Times LA and most recently have linked to and pointed out a number of Tony’s stories from the humid fertile tabloid territory of South Florida-- including the first expose of the man between the arrest of supposed JonBenet killer John Mark Karr, and the one about the multimillionaire who married his daughter.

That leaves hard-boiled, literary Bob Norman, the best investigative reporter in South Florida and a few other places, holding down the fort.

Tony will have his work cut out for him at The Voice, which has a literary and reporting tradition most people don’t even remember (is Mark Jacobsen still around?). It was a long, long time ago that Tabloid Baby's author moved to New York City expecting a job at the Voice, but wound up in TV news (showing that the Voice launched writers in more than one way), and even then it was riding on memories of the past. He's already getting a skeptical reception, being an LA native with no New York experience and the fifth Voice editor in year, so he may as well have fun with it. Once he gets settled, we’ll have to introduce him to Dunleavy.

And check out Bob Norman’s great newssite, The Daily Pulp and his killer book, Florida Pulp Nonfiction.

Read Bob Norman on Tony Ortega here.