'The Village Voice' is dead, shuts down and lays off half its staff

Dalvin Brown | USA TODAY

After operating for more than 60 years, the Village Voice is shutting down.

The owner of the groundbreaking New York City publication, Peter Barbey, gave staff the news on Friday.

“Today is kind of a sucky day," he said, according to audio obtained by Gothamist. “We’re going to stop publishing Voice's material online.”

The decision to close shop comes one year after the former alternative weekly newspaper went 100 percent digital as a last-ditch effort to stay afloat.

The newspaper advertising 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, from words and pictures to podcasts, video and even other forms of print publishing," Barbey said in 2017.

Approximately half of the staff, 15 to 20 people, will be staying on to archive some of the publication’s content.

Barbey bought the weekly newspaper from Voice Media Group in 2015 after it had gone through various owners and mergers.

“This isn’t exactly how I thought it was going to end up. I’m still trying to save The Village Voice,” Barbey said.

He said that the decision to shut down the paper was brought on by “harsh economic realities facing those creating journalism and written media.”

The Voice, once home to a number of critically acclaimed writers and journalists, now joins the long list of former alternative weeklies to fold in recent years, such as the Boston Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Journalists who started their careers writing for the paper have taken to Twitter to offer condolences.

And pour one out for the Village Voice. It was a good run. — Neil deMause (@neildemause) August 31, 2018

Long live the Village Voice: the newspaper that gave New York its cool, birthed generations of some of the best writers this city has ever known, and taught me everything I know about being a journalist here. You will be dearly missed. https://t.co/yi9FGbkQZ7 — John Surico (@JohnSurico) August 31, 2018

Follow Dalvin Brown on Twitter @Dalvin_Brown