According to CNN,
“The Village Voice, the country’s first alternative newsweekly which offered New Yorkers local news and classified ads for decades, will cease production and lay off approximately half its staff, the newspaper’s owner announced Friday.”
If you thought The Village Voice was already dead, Friday was the final nail in the coffin. VV owner Peter Barbey said,
“This is a sad day for The Village Voice and for millions of readers. The Voice has been a key element of New York City journalism and is read around the world. As the first modern alternative newspaper, it literally defined a new genre of publishing.
Although the Voice will not continue publishing, we are dedicated to ensuring that its legacy will endure to inspire more generations of readers and writers to give even more speed to those same goals. We have begun working to ensure that the enormous print archive of The Village Voice is made digitally accessible.“
Founded in ’55, The Voice became a staple of living in NYC. Before the internet every Wednesday morning the new rental listings came out and NYers in need of a new place POUNCED to get a copy first thing. I was living in the East Village in 1989 an $1800 a month duplex rental (that was expensive then, btw) I decided I wanted twice the space at half the rent. I always contended you never found a good apartment in the paper but I found a duplex brownstone with a garden in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn for $900 a month in the Village Voice. Six years later, I bought the 4-story building with a friend for $168,000. So, thank you for that VV.
The paper leaves behind a long history of stories like that as well publishing the works of legends in the journalism and literary world, including one of its co-founders, Norman Mailer. It won three Pulitzer Prizes.
In April 2017, the Voice halted its print production and went entirely online. The move was aimed at reinvigorating the more than half-century old publication. But it didn’t work apparently, and yesterday readers and employees both were told of its ultimate fate.
Tweeted Valerie Vande Panne, a freelance journalist who has written for The Voice.
“That’s… the bad news.”
Dylan was the last print cover of The Village Voice, April 2017
(via CNN)