For many who read the Voice it was a similar gateway, the definition of urban cool, and generations of young writers grew up fantasizing about seeing their byline printed on its pages. (Ironically, the news came on the one-year anniversary of the end of Gawker, a spiritual nephew for the internet age.) For decades, the Voice set the agenda for the cultural calendar of New York's underground music and arts scene, and influenced dozens of other papers around the country. The Village Voice was the publication that invented the concept of the alt-weekly newspaper, and indeed much of the irreverent, speaking-truth-to-power brand of journalism that we take for granted today. The Voice's future as a newspaper may have just reached its denouement, but it's been a long time coming. But for all the specific changes at the Voice itself, there is a bigger problem across the media in general: declining ad revenues, and, in particular for alt-weeklies, the full-scale migration of classified ads from print to the internet.
The news comes after more than a decade of the paper toggling between owners, mergers, and separations. "You know how you always expect this will be the last month things keep going? Everybody is kind of surprised, but also like, 'I can't believe we got away with it this long.'" "I think everybody was stunned," film editor Alan Scherstuhl told Esquire. A press release went out, and then employees dispersed back to their desks, uncertain about their own immediate future in an even more uncertain media climate. None of the surprised staff asked any questions. When the last print issue would hit the red honor boxes wasn't made clear. The paper, he said, would cease print operations for the first time since its founding in 1955, but will continue to publish digitally.
The sale includes all the Voice’s assets, except for the Obie Awards for off-Broadway theater productions, which will be taken over by its co-producer, the American Theater Wing.On Tuesday morning, Peter Barbey, owner of the Village Voice, assembled the staff of the storied but turbulent New York City alt-weekly for a meeting. Calle said he plans to begin with a handful of staffers and would add more as the publication re-establishes itself. “This is something that is so important historically, and I believe it is something that is going to be needed when New York begins to fully reopen next year,” Mr. Its print frequency might increase over time, he said. The price wasn’t disclosed.īrian Calle, the chief executive of Street Media and publisher of LA Weekly and its sister paper, Irvine Weekly, said he intends to begin publishing new content on the Village Voice website in January and will bring it back to print as a quarterly starting at the end of March. Street Media, a California investment group that owns LA Weekly, has acquired the Voice from Peter Barbey, an heir to the fortune behind fashion brands North Face and Timberland who bought the publication in 2015 but closed it just three years later. The iconic New York alternative weekly, which closed in 2018 after more than half a century of chronicling the city’s cultural life, will return early next year with a new owner.
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