RIP The Village Voice

"Today is kind of a sucky day," Village Voice owner Peter Barbey told newspaper staff in a phone call Friday. "Due to, basically, business realities, we're going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.”

"I bought the Village Voice to save it; this isn't exactly how I thought it was going to end up. I'm still trying to save the Village Voice,” said owner Barbey, who bought the paper in 2015.

Gothamist first reported the sad news that New York's once-great indie newspaper is shutting down. 63 years after it was co-founded by the late Norman Mailer. They'd stopped printing a paper version about a year ago.

Barbey said half the staff (15 to 20 people) will "wind things down," and work on a project to archive the Voice's material online.

Everyone else at the organization lost their job today.

From Gothamist:

The Voice, founded as an alternative weekly newspaper in 1955, has had a number of previous owners, including New York magazine, Rupert Murdoch, Leonard Stern, and New Times (later Village Voice) Media.

Barbey also seemed to indicate that he may have been thinking about selling the Voice for some time.

"I've been having conversations with other entities for months now," Barbey said in the Friday meeting. "This is something we have to do—for some of them this is something we'd have to do before they could talk to us any further."

Barbey has issued a statement, and you can read it here.

[Photo: Village Voice newspaper boxes on a sidewalk in 2013 (Mark Lennihan/Shutterstock)