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AP

Groundbreaking Newspaper Shuts Down — It Was the Country’s First Alternative Newsweekly

Aug 31, 2018  •  Post A Comment

A newspaper that was a big part of the counterculture when that was a thing in the 1960s has shut down.

“The Village Voice, the Pulitzer Prize-winning alternative weekly known for its muckraking investigations, exhaustive arts criticism, naughty personal ads and neurosis-laden cartoons, is going out of business after 63 years,” the AP reports. “Its publisher, Peter Barbey, announced Friday that the paper is ceasing publication altogether because of financial problems, a year after it stopped circulating in print and went to digital-only.”

Eight of the paper’s 18 remaining staffers were laid off, while others will stay behind to digitize the publication’s print archive.

“The Voice was the country’s first alternative newsweekly, founded in Greenwich Village in 1955 by a group that included writer Norman Mailer,” the AP report notes. “It once had a weekly circulation of 250,000 copies and was home to some of New York’s best investigative journalists and music writers.”

The paper won three Pulitzers, for editorial cartoons and feature writing in the 1980s and for international reporting in 2000 for a series on AIDS in Africa, the AP notes.

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