A LOWER VOICE
‘Village’ icon ends print run
Stop the presses. The Village Voice is ending its free print edition to go entirely online, the company announced Tuesday — marking the end of an era for a longtime fixture of New York City street corners.
The iconic alt-weekly, cofounded by Norman Mailer in 1955, will continue as a “brand” online — where all the classified ads that once funded the paper have now gone, owner Peter Barbey said.
“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,” he said in a statement.
“That business has moved online — 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, from words and pictures to podcasts, video and even other forms of print publishing.”
The move means layoffs “in the near future,” a spokeswoman confirmed, but wouldn’t say how many people will get the chop or how many would be from the editorial section.
No specific end date has been set for the final print edition.
The once-pioneering media outlet will now be “exploring some exciting new opportunities related to its archives” and “potential partnership opportunities” akin to the Pride Awards that it launched this year, Barbey said.
It will also continue to present the Obie Awards for Off-Broadway theater.
The paper — one of the first alternative news weeklies in the country — was co-founded by Mailer, Dan Wolf, John Wilcock and Ed Fancher in a Greenwich Village apartment in 1955.
Once known for its investigative reporting and cutting-edge cultural criticism, the Voice launched the careers of writers including Wayne Barrett, Robert Christgau and Molly Haskell and is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes.
But the title has struggled after the collapse of print advertising — and faced a huge backlash when it tried to fill the gap with escort ads that often featured underage girls.
Barbey, a Pennsylvania publishing scion, purchased the company from the Phoenixbased Voice Media Group in 2015, and relaunched the paper and Web site the following year.
The Barbey family is the 48th wealthiest in the country, according to Fortune, and owns a slew of clothing companies including The North Face, Timberland, Vans and Wrangler, along with The Reading Eagle newspaper.