On Wednesday morning, the seven-person editorial staff of the San Francisco Bay Guardian met around a table at the Muddy Waters Coffee House in the Mission. Marke Bieschke, the executive editor, arrived a couple of minutes late and pulled up a chair. “How is everyone feeling?” he said, sounding a little like a camp counselor at the end of his rope.

They weren’t feeling great. The previous morning, Glenn Zuehls, the head of the company that owns the Guardian, had assembled most of the editorial staff and made a jarring announcement: The next day’s Guardian—a special annual “Best of the Bay” issue—would be its last. The editorial staff members were to pack up their belongings and leave the building. Meanwhile, visitors to the Guardian’s Website were greeted with a white screen announcing that the paper had stopped publishing. All else had been scrubbed from the site—the paper’s archives, masthead, advertisements.

The Guardian, founded in 1966 by a journalist, Bruce B. Brugmann, was, for a long time, one of the most prominent free alternative newsweeklies in the country. Its motto was “Print the news and raise hell,” and it aggressively covered malfeasance by local politicians and those who helped fund their campaigns. But in 2012 Brugmann and his wife, Jean Dibble, announced that they were selling the paper to SF Newspaper Company, the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, a free daily newspaper. (SF Newspaper Company later reformed under new ownership, and is now known as the San Francisco Media Company.) The Guardian simply hadn’t been able to turn a profit. “It’s been hard for us,” Brugmann told Andrew S. Ross, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Guardian’s relationship with its parent company was rocky. In 2013, the Guardian’s owners bought the San Francisco Weekly, its main rival, from the Voice Media Group, which owns the Village Voice and other alt-weeklies. Later that year, Tim Redmond, the Guardian’s editor, left the paper amid an acrimonious fight with the company over layoffs and other issues. Prior to its closure, the Guardian_ _had been assembled mostly by five editors, one art director, and one writer.

The demise of the Guardian isn’t an isolated event. Alt-weeklies used to be vibrant and well-respected parts of the media ecosystem; they bred star journalists and covered local controversies that their more mainstream daily competitors were sometimes too timid to address. But prominent alt-weeklies like the Boston Phoenix have shut down in recent years, while the Village Voice and other outlets have lost or laid off some of their best-known writers. One by one, independently owned publications, like the Baltimore City Paper, have sold themselves to bigger—and, often, much more conservative—media corporations.

On Tuesday, Bieschke had told SFist, a San Francisco blog, that the Guardian would “live on in some other form,” and suggested that maybe some rich buyer would come along. But on Wednesday this wasn’t seeming particularly likely (and, indeed, Zuehls told me on Thursday that he hadn’t heard from any potential candidates). Most of the staffers were ready to move on—to other gigs, maybe other professions. Even Bieschke seemed to have lowered his expectations, though he still held out hope. “Maybe we produce a handmade paper, like a zine, that brings it back to the streets?” he suggested. He added, “I’m not sure we’d make any money from it.”

Steven T. Jones, the paper’s editor, told the group he was exhausted. He was the most veteran member of the staff, having joined in the early aughts. “I think I’m going to step back for a couple of months, ride my bike, maybe write a book,” he said. He wore a T-shirt that read “CORPORATE WEEKLIES STILL SUCK,” next to the Guardian_ _logo; it had been printed years ago, he explained, when the paper was independent. “It was ironic till a couple of days ago,” he said.

The focus turned to what felt like a manageable idea—getting the San Francisco Media Company to make the publication’s archives available again, and preferably to release them into the public domain. Maybe they could get influential local politicians to pressure Zuehls? Or write an open letter? Or should Bieschke and Jones just sit down with Zuehls and ask? They tossed around ideas for a Facebook page on which they could mobilize support for this: they could call it SFBG in Exile, or maybe Guardian in Exile.

When I spoke Wednesday afternoon with Zuehls, he told me that the company plans to put the archive back online by the end of the week. (It has since been restored.) He also told me that the Guardian and Examiner have both been losing money, though the Weekly is profitable. One particular challenge with the Guardian, Zuehls said, was that its editorial viewpoint (which is progressive) turned off some potential advertisers. “They have such an incredible voice,” he said. “The problem is that that voice knocks down a lot of things that you would sell advertising to. It’s very hard when you can’t go to big customers because the voice is against them.”

Bieschke took issue with the notion that the Guardian’s politics were a serious deterrent for advertisers, many of whom have come back year after year; he noted that the “Best of the Bay” issue, traditionally one of the biggest of the year, was full of ads. But it’s true that in years past, advertisers who wanted to reach San Franciscans—especially the sort of young, hip ones who read alternative newsweeklies—had fewer distribution channels to choose from, meaning that they might advertise even if they didn’t like the _Guardian’_s politics. With the Internet, they have many more alternatives.

On the face of it, it might seem that alt-weeklies are simply being replaced by online sites with better business models. But, at least so far, that doesn’t seem to be the case. National and international news sites, like Buzzfeed and the Intercept, have certainly begun investing aggressively in investigative journalism; but it’s hard to think of many Web-based outfits that replicate the deep focus on local news and politics that has been central to the mission of alt-weeklies. “For many people, the alt-weekly as a genre is already passé, rendered irrelevant by the rise of the Internet,” Baynard Woods, an editor at the Baltimore City Paper wrote in a Times op-ed earlier this year. “But an alt-weekly is connected to a city in the way that a website can never be.”