Village Voice To End Print Edition

EAST VILLAGE, NY — The Village Voice, New York City's iconic alt-weekly, is ending its free weekly print edition and concentrating its efforts to an online product, the company announced on Tuesday.

Owner Peter Barbey cited declining revenues from the print edition's advertising as one of the main reasons behind ending the news magazine's signature offering.

See also: A look back on the many peaks and mini-deaths of the Village Voice.

"When 'The Village Voice' was converted into a free weekly in an effort to boost circulation back in 1996, it was 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 in a statement. "Clearly a lot has changed since then. 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."

The news magazine, which has long served a pivotal role in New York City's cultural landscape, had undergone a number of changes since it was purchased by Barbey in 2015. Barbey abruptly appointed Stephen Mooallem as the magazine's editor in chief in December, the latest in a number of leadership changes under Barbey's ownership. Barbey replaced editor Tom Finkel with editor Will Bourne, who was fired shortly after and replaced with interim editor Joe Levy before Mooallem got the job, all leadership changes which happened within a year.

The Voice, founded in 1955 by Norman Mailer, Ed Fancer and Dan Wolf, has been a staple of the New York journalism world, producing as many big stories and investigations as it has launched powerful journalistic careers.

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