The Boston Phoenix

» see thephoenix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the boston phoenix sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. the paper was 33 years older than my first modem and its audience was a specific new england college town from a specific era of US print media. even in the 2000s when thephoenix.com posted most of its content online for free, the appeal was regional. music listings for shows on lansdowne street, restaurant reviews in cambridge, endorsements in massachusetts state races. i read a couple of things over the years when a link surfaced, but the paper was not part of my regular week.

the phoenix started in 1965 as "boston after dark," a listings sheet founded by joe hanlon (former MIT tech editor) alongside james t. lewis and larry stark. hanlon sold his half to lewis after a year. stephen mindich came in from the advertising side and gradually took control through the late 1960s. by 1972 the paper had renamed to the phoenix and settled into the format it would keep for four decades. long-form political reporting up front, a fat middle section of music and film coverage. classifieds at the back paid the rent.

at peak in the 1990s the phoenix pulled a weekly circulation around 253,000 across its boston flagship plus providence and portland editions. it was one of the original members of the association of alternative newsweeklies, alongside the village voice and la weekly, and shaped what the alt-weekly form was supposed to do. the paper was where many prominent US journalists started their careers. susan orlean wrote there before the new yorker. joe klein was on the political desk before newsweek picked him up.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the phoenix's business model was the same one every US alt-weekly ran. free at the door, printed weekly, funded on the ad side by classifieds. the ticket-broker and adult-services placements up front. local retail across the middle spread. the phoenix ran three regional editions from a single newsroom, with boston as the flagship and providence and portland covering their respective states. WFNX-101.7 FM was the sister radio station, an alternative-rock outlet that broke bands like nirvana and radiohead in the boston market before formats consolidated in the 2000s.

the paper ran serious investigative work alongside the listings. kristen lombardi's phoenix reporting on sexual abuse in the boston archdiocese in 2001 predated the boston globe's spotlight coverage by several months and got largely overlooked outside the local alt-weekly circuit. reporting like that was expensive relative to the paper's ad base and was one of the first things the post-2008 budget cuts had to defend.

~ the day it died ~

the 2008 financial crisis broke the alt-weekly model everywhere. classified revenue had already been leaking to craigslist for years. adult-services ads had leaked to backpage. ticket-broker ads had leaked to stubhub. local retail advertising had leaked to google and facebook. every revenue line an alt-weekly ran on was moving to a digital pipe that did not need a printer or a distribution truck.

mindich tried a relaunch in september 2012. the boston phoenix stopped being a tabloid newspaper and became a glossy magazine, printed on higher-quality paper with a redesigned art direction. WFNX had been sold that spring to clear channel and the newsroom was already smaller than it had been the year before. the magazine relaunch was expensive and did not move enough new ad revenue to cover the print upgrade.

on 14 march 2013 mindich told the staff at 2 pm that the paper was closing. about forty employees were let go on the spot. the phoenix twitter account posted "thank you boston. good night and good luck." the last issue was dated 15 march 2013 and hit red boxes across boston the same day. the sister papers in providence and portland kept publishing without the boston flagship for another year before providence closed in october 2014. portland lasted until july 2023.

~ the long tail ~

the boston phoenix was one of a wave of US alt-weeklies that died in the 2010s. the village voice went print-free in 2017 and shut down entirely in 2018. the la weekly changed hands three times and shrank to a shell. the chicago reader survived by becoming a nonprofit. the model that had funded independent local investigative reporting for fifty years did not have a digital equivalent that could pay comparable rates.

thephoenix.com went dark within a few months of the print shutdown. the archive of forty-seven years of boston music coverage and long-form political reporting became difficult to access from anywhere outside the wayback machine. the domain lapsed. a bostonphoenix.com archive project run by former staff kept a fraction of the archive online through the mid-2010s but never covered the full run. most of what the paper published between 1965 and 2013 is preserved only in the microfilm collections of the boston public library and a few academic libraries in the northeast.

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