Village Voice: an ode to the iconic weekly gem with Google’s archive

“Without it, if you are a New Yorker of a certain age, chances are you would have never found your first apartment” reports the New York Times on The Village Voice, the left-leaning independent weekly New York City newspaper which has announced that it will end print publication.

According to the paper’s owner, Peter D. Barbey, the move was intended to revitalize the 62-year-old Voice by concentrating on other forms, and to reach its audience more than once a week.

Founded by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer in 1955, the Village Voice introduced free-form, high-spirited, and passionate journalism into the public discourse. As the nation’s first alternative newsweekly, the Voice today carries on the same tradition of no-holds-barred reporting and criticism it embraced when it began publishing 60 years ago.

The recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes, the National Press Foundation Award, and the George Polk Award, the Voice remains a vigilant investigative watchdog and a go-to source for coverage of New York’s vast cultural landscape. The Voice’s unique mix of in-depth newswriting and reporting, incisive arts, culture, music, dance, film, and theater reviews, and comprehensive entertainment listings provides readers with an indispensable perspective on the inner workings of the world’s most vibrant city.

The Voice website, www.villagevoice.com , has twice been recognized as one of the nation’s premier online venues for quality journalism and local content. The site is a past winner of both the National Press Foundation’s Online Journalism Award and the Editor & Publisher EPPY Award for Best Overall U.S. Weekly Newspaper Online.

“The most powerful thing about The Voice wasn’t that it was printed on newsprint or that it came out every week,” Barbey said in a statement. “It was that The Village Voice was alive, and that it changed in step with and reflected the times and the ever-evolving world around it. I want the Village Voice brand to represent that for a new generation of people — and for generations to come.”

“The alt-weekly’s purpose was, in theory, speaking truth to power and the ability to be irreverent, and print the word ‘fuck’ while doing so’” wrote editor and writer Camille Dodero. With strong visual language, typography and illustration – after all it is a product made by and for New Yorkers - Village Voice’s mission has been accomplished too many times over.

Enter Google’s Village Voice archive, featuring 1,000 scanned issues going all the back to 1955 and lose yourself into the iconic publication before it’s leap of faith towards the digital realm, here.