The Village Voice, America’s first alternative newsweekly, is shutting down

The Village Voice — the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York alt weekly newspaper known for its muckraking investigations, brash political reporting, exhaustive arts criticism and anxiety-laden cartoons — is shutting down entirely, a year after jettisoning its print edition.

The paper, launched in 1955 by a group that included writer Norman Mailer, was the nation’s first alternative newsweekly.

“Today is kind of a sucky day,” owner Peter Barbey told the staff Friday, according to audio obtained by Gothamist. “Due to, basically, business realities, we’re going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.”

Barbey told the shocked staffers that about half of them would keep their jobs to “wind things down” and help make the publication’s print archives publicly accessible online.

The company said eight of the Voice’s 18 remaining staffers were laid off Friday.

“I bought the Village Voice to save it,” Barbey, who purchased the Voice in 2015 from Voice Media Group, told staffers. “This isn’t exactly how I thought it was going to end up.”

Barbey is also president and chief executive of the Reading Eagle in Pennsylvania, a daily newspaper his family has published for a century and a half. In 2015, Forbes listed the Barbey family as the nation’s 48th-richest.

The Village Voice’s recent struggles were well known. It said goodbye to its print edition in August 2017 in an effort to stop its financial bleeding, but that didn’t work.

News of its demise triggered an avalanche of anguished voices on social media.

“It’s hard to even imagine New York without the Village Voice,” tweeted Sam Adams, an editor at Slate.

New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis noted that she cut her teeth working for the Voice. “This is a tragedy, and it hurts my heart,” Dargis tweeted. “This is where I started my professional writing life and where I met brilliant writers — and many friends — too numerous to mention.”

Barbey said the Voice fell victim to the stiff headwinds menacing print media.

“In recent years, the Voice has been subject to the increasingly harsh economic realities facing those creating journalism and written media,” he said in a statement. “Like many others in publishing, we were continually optimistic that relief was around the next corner. Where stability for our business is, we do not know yet. The only thing that is clear now is that we have not reached that destination.”

Barbey vowed to preserve the Voice’s print archive in a way that makes it digitally accessible.

“I began my involvement with the Voice intending to ensure its future,” he said. “While this is not the outcome I’d hoped for and worked towards, a fully digitized Voice archive will offer coming generations a chance to experience for themselves what is clearly one of this city’s and this country’s social and cultural treasures.”

The Village Voice once had a weekly circulation of 250,000 copies and was a home for some of New York’s best investigative journalists and music writers.

It has won three Pulitzer Prizes, for editorial cartooning and feature writing in the 1980s and an award for international reporting in 2000 for a series on AIDS in Africa, among many other awards.

Schapiro writes for the New York Daily News. Los Angeles Times staff writer Lauren Raab and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

UPDATES:

1:40 p.m.: This article was updated throughout with additional details about the Village Voice closure.

This article was originally published at 12:10 p.m.