The storied New York tabloid the Village Voice — already down to just over a dozen employees — is now officially dead, its owner announced Friday.
Half of the staff will be fired, with the other half hanging on briefly to work on an online archive, owner Peter Barbey told them by telephone, according to the Gothamist website. The publication has stopped publishing new material.
“I bought The Village Voice to save it,” Barbey told the staffers.
“This isn’t how I thought it was going to end up,” he said, blaming “basically, business realities.”
Co-founded in a Greenwich Village apartment in 1955 by Norman Mailer, the iconic paper was one of the first alt-news weeklies in the country.
It launched the careers of investigative powerhouses Wayne Barrett and Tom Robbins, art critic Robert Christgau and music critic Nat Hentoff.
Its pages have held the work of Ezra Pound, James Baldwin, E.E. Cummings, Tom Stoppard, and Allen Ginsburg. Its cartoonists have included Lynda Barry and Jules Feiffer, who in 1981 won one of the paper’s three Pulitzer Prizes.
Some of its most beloved and longstanding writers hung on through a series of layoffs, with nightlife and gossip columnist Michael Musto, restaurant critic Robert Sietsema and theater critic Michael Feingold ultimately suffering the ax in May 2013.
Barbey, scion to the wealthy family that owns The North Face, Timberland, Vans and Wrangler, purchased the paper in October 2015.
The paper closed its free print edition a year ago.
Its website remained online with its final original news stories datelined Friday.
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