Without it, if you are a New Yorker of a certain age, chances are you would have never found your first apartment. Never discovered your favorite punk band, spouted your first post-Structuralist literary jargon, bought that unfortunate futon sofa, discovered Sam Shepard or charted the perfidies of New York’s elected officials. Never made your own hummus or known exactly what the performance artist Karen Finley did with yams that caused such an uproar over at the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Village Voice, the left-leaning independent weekly New York City newspaper, announced on Tuesday that it will end print publication. The exact date of the last print edition has not yet been finalized, according to a spokeswoman.
The paper’s owner, Peter D. Barbey, said in a statement that the move was intended to revitalize the 62-year-old Voice by concentrating on other forms, and to reach its audience more than once a week.
In recent years, many of the writers most associated with The Voice, including Wayne Barrett, Robert Christgau, Nat Hentoff and Michael Musto, have either died or been pushed out of the paper.
The print pages of The Village Voice were a place to discover Jacques Derrida or phone sex services, to hone one’s antipathy to authority or gentrification, to score authoritative judgments about what was in the city’s jazz clubs or off off Broadway theaters on a Wednesday night. In the latter part of the last century, before “Sex and the City,” it was where many New Yorkers learned to be New Yorkers.
Continue reading the main storyWriters feuded with each other in the paper’s letters column and in the offices. Readers were as opinionated as the writers. Marginal tastes in the arts or ideology flourished, often in language that readers armed only with graduate degrees could understand. No pun was too convoluted, no cross-cultural reference too obscure. One measure of the paper’s contrarian vitality was the certitude with which diehard readers of any era could say exactly when its quality went downhill. For Voice devotees, the golden age was always the one just past.
But the printed paper was also an artifact of a downtown world that no longer exists.
The Village Voice was founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer, and for decades it sold a weekly version thick with classified ads. Its mix of political and cultural coverage created a model for alternative weeklies around the country, many of which have since folded. In 1996, facing competition from publications like Time Out New York and The New York Press, it changed to free distribution to boost circulation numbers, but gradually it came to rely on ads for sex and escort services for revenue. Under its current ownership, the paper eliminated sex advertising and increased its print distribution to 120,000 copies.
The print paper fostered the careers of such journalistic luminaries as the investigative reporters Jack Newfield and James Ridgeway, and the music critics Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis and Greg Tate. It was the launchpad for The New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als and the novelist Colson Whitehead, both recipients of the Pulitzer Prize.
Mr. Barbey, whose family has owned The Reading Eagle newspaper in Pennsylvania for generations, purchased the paper from Voice Media Group in October 2015. In his statement, he noted that when The Voice converted to a free weekly, “Craigslist was in its infancy, Google and Facebook weren’t yet glimmers in the eyes of their founders, and alternative weeklies — and newspapers everywhere — were still packed with classified advertising.”
The newspaper business has moved online, Mr. Barbey noted, and so has The Voice’s audience, “which expects us to do what we do not just once a week, but every day, across a range of media,” he wrote.
This summer, The Voice redesigned its website and has since reported an increase in audience traffic.
“The most powerful thing about The Voice wasn’t that it was printed on newsprint or that it came out every week,” Mr. Barbey said in a statement. “It was that The Village Voice was alive, and that it changed in step with and reflected the times and the ever-evolving world around it. I want the Village Voice brand to represent that for a new generation of people — and for generations to come.”
On Tuesday, Voice readers lamented the news on Twitter and Facebook.
But in the Village itself, around the paper’s Cooper Square offices, word of the print edition’s demise was more often met with a shrug.
Print?
“You have Uber killing the taxi biz, are you going to lose sleep over The Village Voice?” said Paul Vezza, 60, the third generation owner of Astor Place Hairstylists. “No.” Mr. Vezza recalled a time when people used to come in for fresh copies of The Voice on publication day. These days a pile sits largely untouched every week, he said.
Alicia Johnson, 46, a chef from Brooklyn, sat on a bench outside the paper’s former offices, reading an article from another publication on her phone.
It had been a long time since she read anything in the physical or online Voice, but it remained a memorable part of her youth, she said. “That’s the iconic paper of this neighborhood,” she said. “If you are a New Yorker you should know that, period.”
Ms. Johnson said she worried what would happen to the paper without its streetcorner red boxes. “They need to do more to make themselves known,” she said. Without the boxes that contain the free papers, “They’re just a building right now.”
A previous version of this article misstated the current location of the Village Voice’s offices. They are on Maiden Lane in the Financial district, not on Cooper Square.
