The obituarists issued last rites for Baltimore’s alternative weekly, City Paper, last month not long after they penned the same for the 62-year-old Village Voice. In 2015, they gave the Philadelphia City Paper its death notices, and before that the San Francisco Bay Guardian (2014) and the Boston Phoenix (2013). Today, reporters are sharpening their quills should they be assigned to bury the Washington City Paper—a paper I once edited and which is up for sale—or one of the other financially frazzled alt-weeklies.

The alt-weekly sunset has many causes, as I wrote five years ago. The record shops and bookstores, the ones that reliably advertised in alt-weekly pages, have mostly vanished, as have many local retailers and service providers. Once the lowest-cost advertising vehicle in many cities, alt-weeklies have lost that status to Web advertising, most notably in the classified ads and personals categories, where the mass migration from print to online has sapped all newspapers, alt-weeklies and dailies alike. Once the untouchable authority for what to do in the city, the alt-weeklies were long ago eclipsed by the mobile phone.

As alt-weekly revenues, circulation and influence have wound down, one thing has endured: distinctive editorial content. The slant has varied from town to town, with some papers advancing a lefty political agenda and others embracing a more independent direction, but most such papers produced a worthy combination of news, investigations, commentary, essays and critical writing. Unfortunately, great copy may be a necessary condition for publishing success, but it’s not a sufficient condition. This breaks every noble heart that ever edited or wrote for one of them.

My love for alt-weeklies doesn’t blind me to the fact that they weren’t consistently great. But the same applies to most daily newspapers. What did distinguish alt-weekly copy from what you got in your daily was a palpable sense of the city, a connection most dailies lost as their readers and many of their writers moved to the suburbs or more genteel parts of town. Cities are places of conflict, congestion, confusion, creativity, drugs, larceny, sex and licentiousness, all of which make great copy. The closer you were to the city—and at alt-weekly salaries few could afford to live anywhere else—the richer the variety of stories that would come your way. Plus, alt-weekly writers, being younger, were always more willing to take chances.

The alt-weeklies also drew their ranks from a separate talent pool. Newspapers have always attracted misfits, a notion captured once by Canadian press mogul Roy Thomson: “The social call of each newspaper is to provide a home for a huge number of salaried eccentrics.” At alt-weeklies, this maxim was even more true: In my day, at least, a disproportionate number of staffers were outsiders who eschewed the aspiration track—even though many of them would eventually get their tickets punched.

No lamentation for the alt-weekly is complete unless it notes that their fall will kill the conveyor belt of talent that has funneled such writers as Joe Klein, Dave Kehr, Katherine Boo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Carr, Susan Orlean, Matt Groening, Jonathan Gold and Liza Mundy—your list may vary!—into larger media organizations or to careers as best-selling authors. This formulation annoys me for two reasons. First, because it relegates the alts to the status of developmental leagues, a place where Toledo Mud Hens gestate in the hope they can grow up someday to become Detroit Tigers. It also implied that the work done at alt-weeklies was somehow inferior to the output of the dailies or a mere supplement—when, often, the opposite was true.

It would take several anthologies to collect the big and consequential stories published in alt-weeklies. Wayne Barrett’s Trump investigations for the Village Voice come to mind, as do the Chicago Reader’s coverage of police torture, Willamette Week’s exposé of a former governor as a child molester, SF Weekly’s piece on radioactive waste, the Boston Phoenix’s groundbreaking work on pedophile priests and Phoenix New Times’ dogged coverage of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It may sound corny, but one hallmark of a great alt-weekly investigation was a variety of fearlessness that was beyond the ken of the big dailies that worried about offending advertisers and readers. Years before the New York Times dared to unsettle the powers that be by using the word “gay” in its pages, alt-weekly writers wrote candidly about the gay and lesbian scenes.

“It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell,” said a Chicago newsman in 1861. At their best, alt-weeklies subscribed to this quotation like a mission statement. With their passing our cities become duller, hell-less places.

I can’t speak for everybody who ever collected an alt-weekly byline, but the sensibility of the staffers I knew best was expressed by Christopher Hitchens when he wrote, “I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.” Alt-weeklies embraced press criticism before it was trendy and by doing so kept the dailies and local broadcasters on notice. In one sense, each issue could be read as a critique of the established daily, a reported account of its failings in covering government and power.

Like their mainstream brethren, alt-weekly writers and editors tend to think highly of themselves, maybe too highly. At annual alt-weekly conventions, panel discussions had a way of devolving into bragging matches. “We brought the mayor down in our city,” one might say. “We sent our mayor to jail,” another might respond. “That’s nothing,” the third might say, “We put a crown of thorns on him and crucified him in the public square.”

Although getting clocked on the business side has made it tougher for alt-weeklies to survive, some continue to succeed, especially papers in mid-market cities where there’s less media competition and knowledgeable owners or founders remain on staff. One such paper is Portland’s Willamette Week. My friend Mark Zusman cautions his paper is “hardly swimming in cash,” but says that what separates his paper from the pack is a continued devotion to enterprise journalism—long an alt-weekly staple—and success at earning income outside of the print product, such as digital and events.

I write as if the alt-weekly concept is dead when it isn’t, so hold the grief until the last one expires: It took two generations for the afternoon daily to join the choir invisible. It may be a small consolation, but I invite the alt-weeklies to take it: You’ll outlive most of the people reading this column.

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Do as I do and spend part of each week reading Westword, the Stranger, Washington City Paper, Phoenix New Times, Miami New Times and other alt weeklies. What’s your favorite title? Let me know at [email protected]. My email alerts sleep on a futon, my Twitter feed attended every movie at the latest film festival, and my RSS feed buys its marijuana based on the alt weekly reviews.