The Village Voice, the liberal, independent newspaper that has been a fixture in New York culture since the mid-20th century, announced Tuesday that it would discontinue its print publication, The New York Times reports. The paper will operate entirely online and will publish on a daily rather than a weekly basis.

The publication has not yet finalized the date of its final print edition, a spokeswoman told the Times.

The paper’s owner, Peter Barbey, who bought The Voice from Voice Media in October 2015, said in a statement that the decision to go paperless was an effort to keep up with the continued shift of media and its audience into the digital sphere.

Under Barbey’s leadership, the publication redesigned its website in 2015, and has since reported an increase in online traffic, the Times says.

The digitization, Barbey says, was also a response to readers’ desires to see Voice content more frequently. “Our audience,” wrote Barbey, per the Times, “…expects us to do what we do not just once a week, but every day, across a range of media.”

What is it, exactly, that the Voice does? It helps New Yorkers find everything from jobs to apartments to local music to phone sex. It offers political commentary, literary criticism, and descriptions of New York culture.

According to the Times, The Voice was “where many New Yorkers learned to be New Yorkers.”

Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf, and Ed Fancher founded the paper in 1955 in Greenwich Village. Since, the pages of The Voice have held the words of investigative reporters including Wayne Barrett and Jack Newfield, and music critics including Gary Giddins, Ellen Willis, and Robert Christgau. Nat Hentoff published a column in the Voice for more than 50 years.

Hilton Als, who has written for the New Yorker since 1994, and who won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017, began his career at The Voice, as did novelist Colson Whitehead, who has won two Pulitzers for his fiction.

The paper has also published content by James Baldwin, E.E. Cummings, Allen Ginsberg, and a host of other notable writers.

The paper was sold until 1996 when management dropped the price in an effort to keep pace with competitors and to increase circulation. Then, Barbey notes, per the Times, “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.”

Now, the Voice is making another change in an attempt to keep up with the industry. Some New Yorkers told the Times the Voice was already obsolete.  “You have Uber killing the taxi biz, are you going to lose sleep over The Village Voice?” said Paul Vezza, 60, the third generation owner of Astor Place Hairstylists. “No.”

Vezza remembers when hordes came into the shop every week just to pick up the most recent edition of the paper. He still keeps a stack of print copies of the Voice in his shop, but they remain mostly untouched, the Times says.

Alicia Johnson, a 46-year-old from Brooklyn, told the Times she hadn’t read anything in the Voice for a while. Still, she certainly hasn’t forgotten about it.

“That’s the iconic paper of this neighborhood,” she said. “If you are a New Yorker you should know that, period.”

Many New Yorkers, though, recognize the Village Voice by the red street corner boxes containing free copies of the paper. The recent announcement means those will be gone, and Johnson wonders how The Voice will capture the ears of New Yorkers without them.

But Barbey says that boxes or no boxes, weekly or daily, ink or pixels, the Voice will roar on.

“The most powerful thing about The Voice wasn’t that it was printed on newsprint or that it came out every week. 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,” Barbey said in a statement. “I want The Village Voice brand to represent that for a new generation of people — and for generations to come.”

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons