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Related, don't miss the Reason feature on Larkin and Lacey. They purchased the Village Voice in 2005 and had a solution for the classifieds problem, Backpage.com.

Unfortunately, they ran afoul of some young politicians/prosecutors who needed to make a mark to get into national politics (Hello, Senator Harris), and some old political families they burned, and are now languishing without money to pay for attorneys before their 2020 trial.

https://reason.com/archives/2018/08/21/backpage-founders-lar...

The article mentions Gothamist and DNAinfo but the NY Daily News also recently laid off half of their staff.
Uh, that’s a whole ‘nother story. Nuked from orbit, so to speak.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614771

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614310

The debate intensifies.

> Some staff members will stay on to make the paper’s print archive digitally accessible...

Good for the owner that at least they were willing to spend a tiny bit more to make this part happen.

Thought they closed down years ago. Used to see tons of village voice newsracks all over the city. Haven't seen any in years.
They went digital-only last year.
They never made it online in a meaningful way. Not once have I had a must read link to their website. There are news websites that even if you hate the paper will lure you back due to content, for instance the New York Times will get stories on here, one will visit even if one hates the bloated paywall. But the Village Voice? It never made it onto most people's surfing radar.
They were Craigslist before Craigslist - classifieds were the heart their business model and the money stopped flowing hard and fast. Once that happened they had no means of funding ‘must read’ articles. They kept the lights on with the collapsing print display ad business until that gave out.

The irony of a former longtime Voice editor now teaching at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism is straight out of the pages of another dead paper: The Onion.

The irony and tragedy of a former Village Voice writer Tom Robbins now at the NYU Craig Newmark journalism school. Craig Newmark, the founder of the site that killed print newspapers. I'll miss the Voice.
> Do you really truly believe that, if not for Craigslist, little kids would be riding around your neighborhood today tossing thick newspapers onto your lawn laden with classified ads? If so, we need to talk.

https://medium.com/@pilhofer/no-craig-newmark-did-not-kill-l...

By the way, "Posting Instagram Sponsored Content Is the New Summer Job" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878131

Only in the sense that if it wasn't Newmark and Craigslist, it would have been someone else with a different site. The fact is that classifieds were a major supporter of journalism and that they were killed by Craigslist. That he has given money to journalism schools is nice, but not unlike how Gordon Moore's foundation gives grants for environmental research despite Intel not being the most environmentally friendly company.
Maybe it should be "... History of Journalism School".
Journalism is nit limited to paper journals.
Nor are the challenges for serious journalism.
In theory no, but in practice it sure looks that way...
When they removed the good cartoons and the horoscopes, the writing was on the wall. It was very clearly over. That was back around 2005.
Removing something as useless as horoscopes was a sign they were going down hill? I would think that would be a sign the content was improving.
A media _business_ going downhill and its content improving or regressing are two orthogonal concerns.
It's indicative that they didn't even have the budget to syndicate horoscopes.

Does that make a little bit more sense?

"didn't even have the budget to syndicate horoscopes"

A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed.

>A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed.

For someone who knows the industry, such a sign is not as irrelevant as it appears - nor is closing down a sudden affair. Unlike SV startups which can fold in 1-2 years, news outlets are surprisingly resilient in their dying. It's a long process of decay with several milestones along the way...

As someone that has worked in the print business, and am familiar with the history of lots of businesses (although in a different country), alot of media businesses had a decade or more of struggling before they finally give up the ghost -- and it indeed starts with signs like these (first they cut some expensive syndications, a first round of lay-offs, then they give up some subscriptions to news services like A.P. and Reuters, call off special reporters stationed abroad, a few major columns are cancelled because they can afford their top columnists, the quality of photography drops, and so on. In the end, the content is mostly sloppy rewrites from whatever wire service they still have, plus amateur "opinion pieces", then a final round of layoffs, and they die...

The cancelling one or more expensive features, like syndications, are a sure fire sign of a decay process starting...

No doubt predicted by the horoscope.
You are right. For more on the demise of the big city alt-Weekly, see the linked excerpt from a 2009 summary by Marc Cooper, who used to be an editor of the LA Weekly. This was also taken over by Mike Lacey, and as Cooper recounts, they tried to cost-cut their way to profitability.

[http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/01/marc_cooper_the_la...]

I think it's really telling that even though I consume content voraciously and am a highly educated 26 year old making a decent wage, I have never heard of literally any of these writers and Pulitzer Prize winners. I only know ee cummings in passing, because my high school English textbook told me he was famous for using non-standard punctuation and capitalization.

I'm sad that an alt-news source has died. I would have loved to consume their content, but I wouldn't have paid for it. I don't really buy much stuff either, so ads don't work on me.

RIP

You are just of an age where the periodical wasn't really relevant any longer as another poster mentioned -- it started it's decline in the early 2000s. EE Cummings was known for way more than just the village voice.
It wouldn't have died maybe if it did an OK job of connecting with people born after say 1977
Tell me about your experience in publishing. How many publications have you run?

   I consume content voraciously
What kind of "content" are you "consuming"?
Hours and hours of youtube and HN per day. All non-fiction and all different topics. I work a very boring job so I will read nearly anything. I also read a ton of ebooks, some even fiction but mostly non-fiction. Things like Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, or Jason Fung's books on fasting.
>Hours and hours of youtube and HN per day. All non-fiction and all different topics.

And how do you expect to read Pulitzer winning journalism among these?

Could I ask what line of work you're in that gifts you so much free time?
Serious question: What are you thinking this is “really telling” of?
He's generalizing from self.

Which is odd considering his high education having attained a Massachusetts in the 30th best school in the nation. You'd think he'd know better than to do that.

Regardless of whether or not he would fall within Village Voice's demographic, the fact that he was never aware of it is telling of nothing. Nothing is ever going to capture 100% of their target demographic. And thanks to wide breadth of the totality of human experiences the world has to offer, that he was not aware of it says nothing except that it never crossed his sphere of awareness.

I mean, I'm not aware of a lot of things myself. Barely aware of a ton. Like I might vaguely remember hearing something possibly about it maybe. Kind of acquainted with some. I'll know the name but not exactly what it is, or kind of know what it is, but not the name. Etc, etc. I don't have time to be intimately familiar with everything. No one does.

I think it's telling that this paper failed to connect with my generation. I am a prime candidate to be a reader of this paper and its high quality writing. It never was put in front of me like YT or HN was. Now it's dead
I'm the same generation as you. But I'm not very educated, have never lived in New York, and am familiar with the Village Voice and most of the writers mentioned in the article.

Weird.

[edit]
>even though I consume content voraciously and am a highly educated 26 year old making a decent wage, I have never heard of literally any of these writers and Pulitzer Prize winners.

Well, consuming e.g. Medium posts or Lambda the Ultimate discussions is not the same as consuming the kind of content that gets Pulitzers.

Can you elaborate on being "highly-educated?"
MA in History from top 30 US school
Advertising works just as well on you as it does on everyone else.
What have I bought lately that I've seen an ad for?

I signed a lease for an apartment after searching google maps for the closest corporate apartment buildings (Bozzuto) near my job.

I bought Verizon internet because that's what the building is wired for.

I bought an LG phone because I impartially reviewed the specs and played with the phones at the closest Walmart to my house.

I bought a bag of onions and some ground chicken from the closest/cheapest super market to my house.

I think you get the point. I don't buy things like RGB keyboards or concert tickets, that require exposure

It's all about the moment you're standing in the phone store and there's two phones in front of you, one from "LG" and the other from "Hyvver7" and like 99% of other people you're probably going to get the "LG" phone even if the Hyvver7 phone has a similar price and seems to work just as well after poking at it for a few minutes.

The reason you know the name "LG" isn't because you somehow heard the name through a complex series of coincidental events... instead, it's because LG spends money in a way that directly or indirectly imprints their brand in your mind.

  I wouldn't have paid for it.
It was a free newspaper and website. It was like The Onion. No one paid to read it. Repeat: no one.

It existed to appeal to people, and get ads in front of them. Just like The Onion. At which point, whether the ads worked or not (and just like everywhere else on the internet, people resist and try to ignore ads, and that resistance is a known quantity) advertisers paid to get in front of eyeballs. Mostly, New York concert venues paid for its existence, and you picked up the paper, to see who was playing that week, or what dates upcoming shows were. That's why it was free in New York. It didn't really advertise any events outside of New York.

It died because it failed to connect with the younger generations.

Additionally, advertisers pay for conversion, not eyeballs. If they aren't noticing an uptick in prospects or revenue, they stop advertising with their current campaigns

Truth, but of interest is the part of "if they aren't noticing". I think that the (mostly positive) trend of using more data-driven decision making processes, has caused a lot more advertisers to (very slowly) realize that a lot of the advertising they were paying for wasn't doing anything. The decline in print advertising didn't happen in isolation: billboards, radio, TV, even youtube advertising has had declines recently. I think this is part of a generational change in the management of companies that pay for most of the advertising, where instead of going with a gut instinct about what works and what doesn't, they require evidence that it works, and often it doesn't. This would have killed a lot of the advertising income regardless of anything else.
"No one paid to read it. Repeat: no one."

I was a paid subscriber to the Village Voice for a year or so when I was living in Minneapolis. 2008/2009, I think ?

So while the cover price was indeed zero, there were indeed people paying to read it.