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A happier time. (Photo credit: The Phoenix)
The Boston Phoenix, an alt-weekly popular for it's political and arts coverage, is shutting down, they announced today. Next week will be the last print publication, and the following week will bring the last online edition. Before releasing a statement, the magazine announced their closure on Twitter, writing "Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck" earlier today. The post has now been retweeted 639 times.
"As everyone knows, between the economic crisis beginning in 2007 and the simultaneous radical changes in the media business, particularly as it has affected print media advertising, these have been extremely difficult times for our Company and despite the valiant effort by many, many past and current staff to attempt to stabilize and, in fact, reverse our significant financial losses, we have been unable to do so and they are no longer sustainable," publisher Stephen M. Mindich wrote in a staff announcement that went out earlier today.
Just six months after the newspaper reinvented itself as a glossy mag, they found that they couldn't find the advertising revenue to continue publication.
"We are a text book example of sweeping market-place change. Our recent switch to a magazine format met with applause from readers and local advertisers. Not so -- with a few exceptions -- national advertisers," the executive editor, Peter Kadzis, said in an announcement. "It was the long-term decline of national advertising dollars that made the Boston Phoenix economically unviable."
The Phoenix's sister publications in Portland, Maine and Providence will continue, which Mr. Kadzis attributed to the ability to find ad revenue in smaller markets.
"Providence and Portland, however, don’t suffer from that problem. The local advertising market is sufficient to support those publications," Mr. Kadzis continued. "You can see why Warren Buffett favors small market papers over their big city brothers and sisters.”
