If you walked the streets of NYC over the last dozen or so years, you might recall that bins such as these pictured below would be lined up together on the sidewalks and be filled to the brim with free newspapers such as “The New York Press” and the legendary “The Village Voice”. It was almost a year ago that I shared the news on PiercingMetal about the final issue of “The Voice” being published (which you can reflect on HERE if interested). Today there was much sadder news as the entire shebang will be ending and NO new content will be published effective immediately. The Official Statement from owner Peter Barbey is below.
“This is a sad day for The Village Voice and for millions of readers, In recent years, the Voice has been subject to the increasingly harsh economic realities facing those creating journalism and written media. Like many others in publishing, we were continually optimistic that relief was around the next corner. Where stability for our business is, we do not know yet. The only thing that is clear now is that we have not reached that destination. A fully digitized Voice archive will offer coming generations a chance to experience for themselves what is clearly one of this city’s and this country’s social and cultural treasures.”
Piercing Ken Thoughts: Reports went on to reveal that in addition to the news that the company had terminated half of its remaining 20 employees with the rest working to digitize the paper’s enormous archives. Barbey acquired the paper in 2015 so hey, good on you for giving it a whopping three years. Having a print nowadays must be an uphill battle. Speaking frankly, I’m not sure how the digital archive is going to be received and if we will even be able to click the domain and find result after the coming weeks. I don’t look back on any reference materials other than Wiki pages or the dictionary for the most part and as far as physical editions, those days are over for me. Everyone is different and while I missed the sight of the newspaper on the stands for some weeks after the final one that you see in my photo from last years news I got over it and moved on. I will miss the existence of “The Voice” as a media entity because they did more good than not. I’m sad that I never tried to contribute to it as a notch on my own media belt but what can you do. We live in different times and the idea of casually leafing through a physical newspaper or deeply into a websites archive are alien terms to the youth of today. I read where we now have less of an attention span than a goldfish. Theirs is 12 seconds while ours is 8.5 seconds. Pretty amazing isn’t it.
Goodbye Village Voice I hardly knew ye. Thanks for the years of different journalism and features that kept NYC talking and a little more vibrant. If any of my friends had content in there I would scan it or copy paste the website pages into their own blogs just in case. I say this as someone who once counted on all his old “Metal Edge” content getting digitized and well…..let’s not go there.
Official Website: http://www.villagevoice.com
Official Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Village_Voice