The death of The Village Voice marks the end of the alt-weekly era Calum Marsh shelf THE FIRST ISN'T THE LAST BUT IT WAS PROBABLY THE BEST

The first thing I was invited to write for the Village Voice was a 250-word review of a low-budget biographical film about Jeff Buckley. It was opening at a small theatre in Manhattan where very few people were likely to see it. I liked the performances, from a television actor in the lead role in particular, and I asked my editor if I might have a little more room to express some praise. He doubled my word count and put the review on the front page of the film section.

I learned then what a lot of older, better writers knew already about The Village Voice: that it took its duty as cultural custodian seriously, and was uniquely committed to informing its savvy readers in New York about whatever its writers felt the city ought to know.

Now The Voice is dead, shuttered ignominiously by the billionaire who acquired it with aspirations toward rejuvenation only three years ago. Though it’s a quirk of the famed altweekly that its admirers have been declaring it in terminal decline for the better part of its 63-year history – like The Simpsons or Saturday Night Live, The Voice is an enduring mainstay with a nebulous Golden Age somewhere in the past, often conveniently located near the youth of the one doing the remembering.

Most stalwart New York cognoscenti tend to reminisce about the paper’s centrality to the cultural happenings of the city in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It taught people about bands and bars, about playwrights and politics. As The Times reflected when the print edition was terminated and it went online-only last year, The Voice “was where many New Yorkers learned to be New Yorkers.”

By the time I started contributing regularly to The Voice, in 2013, the paper had already passed so far out of fashion that the only times I heard it mentioned at all were when it was being viciously disparaged. The paper’s chief film critic at the time, Scott Foundas, had just quit to move to Variety, less than four months after he came aboard; his predecessor, the great J. Hoberman, had been fired by new management in early 2012, one of several high-profile exits that inspired a number of long-time Voice writers to voluntarily and noisily abandon ship.

At that point, The Voice’s credibility seemed irrevocably desecrated. This was the former home of Andrew Sarris, Jonas Mekas, Gary Indiana and Molly Haskell. How far had they fallen that they were now housing me?

But even in so-called weakened form, The Voice was producing something valuable. As late as the final months of its publication, The Voice’s film section spanned upwards of six pages each week in print. They reviewed everything. If a neorealist coming-of-age drama from Georgia was opening in the East Village, The Voice would bestow it an attentive few paragraphs the interested might peruse; if a crackpot naturalist rented out a cinema to show his self-funded documentary about the restorative powers of sleeping in the dirt, The Voice would do it the courtesy of lambasting it, giving it the same amount of column inches as a Marvel movie.

One week in a reputable theatre was all you needed to secure a review. This exhaustive mandate was the source of much misery for the critics obliged to suffer the dreck. But it reflected a noble desire to do right by art, and to live up to posterity. Everything had its opportunity to impress and be praised. No film left behind.

With The Voice gone, the number of publications (and working critics) in New York who might reasonably be expected to write about a tiny independent film opening at Cinema Village or the Quad is startlingly few. The New York Times has likewise elected to no longer review every theatrical release in the city, for similar reasons of economy and glut. Sharp sites like Screen Slate and Slant are diligent about repertory offerings, but have small budgets. It’s a significant loss.

Without criticism, films may languish undiscussed and unnoticed; moviegoers might not discover their would-be favourite films of the year; critics will have to write about major Hollywood blockbusters exclusively, if they can find work at all. But something else is lost in all of this, too. Alt-weeklies such as The Voice fostered developing talent in the writers they encouraged to experiment and grow, in the later years as much as in the golden age.

It was the virtue of The Voice that its writers always had their own space. “There is, there must be, some wavering zone of consciousness where more than one of us can, at least for a moment, be in the same place at the same time,” Gary Indiana wrote in the introduction to his collection of cultural criticism and reportage, Let It Bleed. Indiana is an artist and novelist, but in the ‘80s and ‘90s, installed as a staff critic at The Voice, he wrote about everything: Bill Clinton, the AIDS crisis, Eurodisney, the Kennedy assassination, Rodney King. The Voice gave him the latitude to demonstrate the range of his brilliance. How can a journalist hope to find that shared zone of consciousness if they don’t have the freedom to create it? That was the dream of the alt-weekly. A city reading The Voice could be in the same place at the same time.

The Voice clued readers into restaurants and turned them onto punk bands, in the influential glory of print and more lately online. It promoted conversations – about everything from jazz clubs to poetry readings to mayoral candidates and beyond. The archives are teeming with wonderful journalism and arts writing from some of the strongest critics and reporters to grace any pages anywhere.

Of course, the dissolution of The Voice has implications for the world of journalism and criticism that extend outside of the city where the paper was born. The Voice was the first major alternative newsweekly, and was always the most important. For a long time it seemed like the only alt-weekly that could not be defeated by the vicissitudes of the turbulent business. It survived so many of the local alt-weeklies its legacy inspired, including Toronto’s Eye Weekly and The Grid, Montreal’s Mirror and Ottawa’s XPRESS — all shut down over the last couple of years.

It’s not hard to fear that if The Voice has ended, the other holdouts soon will too – the disappearance of Now Magazine feels like it could happen any moment. We will feel the full effect of these absences over time. The Voice is dead, and one can only conclude that with it, the alt-weekly as a whole is not too far behind.