The Village Voice To Shutter Print Edition

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

According to The NYTimes, the paper’s owner, Peter Barbey, said in a statement that the move was 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 finalized, 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.

Mr. 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, Mr. 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.

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