The Village Voice's print edition is folding, and the Poynter Institute said it marks the continued shrinking presence of alternative weekly newspapers in major cities around the country.
The Philadelphia City Paper closed in 2015 after alternative weeklies in San Francisco, Boston, Columbus, Ohio, and Knoxville, Tennessee closed, Poynter noted.
Peter Barbey, owner of the Village Voice, New York City's progressive alternative weekly for more than a half-century, made the announcement Tuesday morning, Poynter said. Barbey said that the Village Voice's online edition will continue on.
A spokeswoman for the weekly told The New York Times that a date for the last print edition has not been finalized.
"My family has been in the newspaper business for more than 200 years," Barbey said, per Poynter. "I first read The Village Voice in print as a student in the 1970s — that was how I first encountered it and how it became as important to me as it did.”
"But the most powerful thing about the Voice wasn’t that it was printed on newsprint or that it came out every week. 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."
Barbey's family purchased the alternative weekly from the Voice Media Group in October 2015, the Times noted. He told the Times that classified ads, the staple of most newspaper business models, had moved to free markets online, leaving alternatives struggling around the country.
"When The Village Voice was converted into a free weekly in an effort to boost circulation back in 1996, it was at a time when 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," Barbey said, per the New York Post.
The Village Voice also is best known for launching the careers of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Wayne Barrett, Robert Christgau and Molly Haskell, along with its investigative reporting and cultural criticism, the Post said.
The Barbey family owns the Reading Eagle newspaper in Pennsylvania along with the clothing companies The North Face, Timberland, Vans and Wrangler, the Post added.