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There's a New York Times piece here (nytimes.com/1996/02/08/…) that says that the Voice was giving away a fourth of its (dwindling) circulation on college campuses before going free in 1996, due to poor readership.
I recall my dad telling me that the Voice was free in Manhattan well before 1996, so it's quite likely he — and many others —…
There's a New York Times piece here (https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/08/nyregion/village-voice-circulation-down-to-be-free-to-manhattan-readers.html) that says that the Voice was giving away a fourth of its (dwindling) circulation on college campuses before going free in 1996, due to poor readership.
I recall my dad telling me that the Voice was free in Manhattan well before 1996, so it's quite likely he — and many others — picked up a copy around the NYU campus and bringing it to our outer borough home instead of buying one at a newsstand.
Every city worth its salt, and more than 100,000 residents, had its own free alt-weekly by 1996, so I'd imagine that cut into the Voice's out-of-town subscriptions.
Don’t forget the short lived Seven Days magazine, another publication that my landlord Leonard Stern started. It was on the sixth floor below me. It went nowhere.
As someone who was there (living upstairs on the 7th floor) watching it happen, and personally knowing staff in circulation and finance, I know that the free era was instigated due to dwindling circulation. A decision was made to prop up circulation with making it free while making up the income through increased advertising. For a period, the paper got bulky. With the net, that model weakened. Finally, few good writers were left: they got fired one by one. I remember running into writers in the elevator after they got the news: it was heartbreaking.
When much of the paper was being subsidized by escort ads, I knew that the end was near.
My memory is that it went free to compete with the upstart NY Press, which was the first major NYC free weekly.
The decline started before that.
Is the NY Press still around? I don’t know that it was ever a threat: they are very different.
Something else that remains seemingly unsaid in this discussion is the change in the Overton Window: in the 50s - 60s - 70s - 80s, much of The Village Voice was sorta inside of it. By the 90s, it was mostly out. The reading propensities of the city’s demographics was well on its way to being filled by the professional classes, a process that was accelerated under Bloomberg.