Boston Phoenix Shutting Down

The Boston Phoenix, one of the country's most venerable alternative weekly titles, announced on Thursday that it is shutting down.

In a memo first posted on the Boston Globe website, Peter Kadzis, the exectuive editor of media group that owns the Phoenix, wrote that it was "the long-term decline of national advertising dollars that made the Boston Phoenix economically unviable."

The Phoenix's sister titles in Providence and Portland, Maine will continue publishing.

The Phoenix's closure is just the latest sign of the deep challenges facing alternative weeklies. The paper was once a hub for countercultural political and arts writing, but alt-weeklies have been hit very hard by the migration of classified advertising to the Internet -- and by the mainstream media's adoption of many of the things that once made the alternative press stand out. In 2012, the Phoenix tried to reinvent itself as a glossy magazine, but evidently found that the economics of print were no longer working.