Village Voice, The

The Village Voice was a New York City alternative weekly founded in 1955 by Edwin Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer in Greenwich Village. Considered the first alt-weekly newspaper in the United States, it gave writers unusual creative freedom and became a national arbiter of hip taste from the 1960s through the 1980s. The Voice was among the mainstream-adjacent publications that covered gay life, the 1969 Stonewall uprising, and later the AIDS crisis and LGBTQ+ civil rights with more seriousness than most of the era's press. Known for its investigative reporting, arts criticism, and free distribution, it ended its print run in 2018 after 63 years, though later attempts revived the brand online and in occasional print editions.