Edgy newspaper VUE Weekly to stop publishing after 23 years

The familiar yellow boxes on Edmonton streets will soon sit empty as arts and politics newspaper VUE Weekly calls it quits at the end of the month.

The free weekly, which just printed its 1,200th issue in October, has been a mainstay in Edmonton since 1995.

The ongoing struggle to secure advertising is being blamed.

“We decided that we would cease publication now, rather than face another year of diminishing resources,” VUE’s president Robert Doull said in a statement.

VUE absorbed See Magazine when Aberdeen Publishing purchased both in 2011, and St. Albert’s Great West Newspapers is buying a number of Aberdeen’s publications, including the annual Hot Summer Guide and Golden Fork Awards.

The paper ran columns by Gwynne Dyer, Ricardo Acuna and Dan Savage.

It also had one of the few remain- ing comics pages in alternative press in the country, including Bob the Angry Flower, drawn by the premier’s brother, Stephen Notley.

“It was always great you could pick up a VUE and there would always be comics in them, some of them even good,” he said from Los Angeles.

“As far as I recall, it’s the only paper I was ever in that didn’t censor me.”

Former editor Steven Sandor noted on Twitter, “I took over in 1996, and then what a ride I had. I was in my 20s, given the chance to edit a weekly, and then we lived week to week like it was our last.

“I think about the passion of our old publisher, Ron Garth, and how he let us push and push and push the envelope. I don’t know if you could do some of the things today that we did back then. We didn’t have any political leaning, we just stirred it up, no matter left or right.”