Village Voice to end print publication

NEW YORK — The Village Voice, the left-leaning independent weekly New York City newspaper, announced Tuesday that it will end print publication.

The paper’s owner, Peter Barbey, said in a statement that the move is intended to revitalize the 62-year-old Voice by concentrating on other forms and to reach its audience every day rather than once a week. The exact date of the last print newspaper has not yet been determined, according to a spokeswoman.

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. In 1996, facing competition from publications like Time Out New York and the New York Press, it changed to free distribution, in an attempt to boost circulation numbers.

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.”

The newspaper business has moved online, Barbey noted, 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,” he wrote.

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This summer, the Voice redesigned its website, and it has since reported rapidly increasing traffic.

Over the years, the paper fostered the careers of such journalistic luminaries as investigative reporters Wayne Barrett, who died this year, and Jack Newfield, and music critics Gary Giddins, Ellen Willis and Robert Christgau. It was the home of Nat Hentoff, who wrote a column for the paper for more than 50 years and died in January, and the launch pad for the New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als and novelist Colson Whitehead, both recipients of the Pulitzer Prize.

“The most powerful thing about the Voice wasn’t that it was printed on newsprint or that it came out every week. It was that the Village Voice was alive, and that it changed in step with and reflected the times and the ever-evolving world around it,” Barbey’s statement said. “I want the Village Voice brand to represent that for a new generation of people — and for generations to come.”

Sarah Maslin Nir is a New York Times writer.