The print pages of The Village Voice were a place to discover Jacques Derrida or phone sex services, to hone one’s antipathy to authority or gentrification, to score authoritative judgments about what was in the city’s jazz clubs or off off Broadway theaters on a Wednesday night. In the latter part of the last century, before “Sex and the City,” it was where many New Yorkers learned to be New Yorkers.

Writers feuded with each other in the paper’s letters column and in the offices. Readers were as opinionated as the writers. Marginal tastes in the arts or ideology flourished, often in language that readers armed only with graduate degrees could understand. No pun was too convoluted, no cross-cultural reference too obscure. One measure of the paper’s contrarian vitality was the certitude with which diehard readers of any era could say exactly when its quality went downhill. For Voice devotees, the golden age was always the one just past.

But the printed paper was also an artifact of a downtown world that no longer exists.

The Village Voice was founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer, and for decades it sold a weekly version thick with classified ads. Its mix of political and cultural coverage created a model for alternative weeklies around the country, many of which have since folded. In 1996, facing competition from publications like Time Out New York and The New York Press, it changed to free distribution to boost circulation numbers, but gradually it came to rely on ads for sex and escort services for revenue. Under its current ownership, the paper eliminated sex advertising and increased its print distribution to 120,000 copies.

The print paper fostered the careers of such journalistic luminaries as the investigative reporters Jack Newfield and James Ridgeway, and the music critics Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis and Greg Tate. It was the launchpad for The New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als and the novelist Colson Whitehead, both recipients of the Pulitzer Prize.

Mr. Barbey, whose family has owned The Reading Eagle newspaper in Pennsylvania for generations, purchased the paper from Voice Media Group in October 2015. In his statement, he noted that when The Voice converted to a free weekly, “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.”