The free alternative weekly paper the New York Press has folded after a 23 year run, the NY Observer reports. During its strange scrappy life, its stable of contributors included such notables as author Jonathan Ames, The New Yorker's Ben Greenman, contrarian film critic Armond White, current Times Dining critic Sam Sifton, and, uh, "JT LeRoy." The tabloid's demise had been rumored for some time, and it seems Manhattan Media, which bought it in 2007, decided there was no way to make the thing profitable in this day and age. We'd be lying if we said we'd picked it up recently, but it's always sad to see a newspaper go. (Well, almost always.) The silver lining, perhaps, is that the New York Press will live on in some form.

Starting in September, Manhattan Media plans to relaunch Our Town Downtown, a weekly publication magazine/community newspaper hybrid, according to a press release. The arts section of this new entity will be called New York Press, and nypress.com will expand as an aggregator of all Manhattan Media's properties. "It’ll compete with the Voice for hipsters, Downtown Express for community activists, and New York magazine for intelligentsia who care about real estate and their home values," says Tom Allon, President of Manhattan Media.