Boston Courant Shutting Down

The Boston Courant, a weekly newspaper that covered local issues in several neighborhoods and made headlines for refusing to try an online model, announced Saturday that it had released its final issue.

A front page story with the headline “The Boston Courant is Shutting Down” explains the paper had lost a wrongful termination suit to a former employee, and the resulting fees made it “no longer feasible for the paper to continue publishing.”

In 2009, former VP of sales Kevin Smith filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the Courant. He was awarded $239,884 in 2013.

The Courant was profiled by Harvard’s Nieman Lab in 2012, talking about how publisher David Jacobs paid a web designer $50,000 to make a website the Courant could use. The designer did just that, but Jacobs would not open it to the public “until I find a viable business model,” he said.

The Courant started in 1995 and initially covered Back Bay before expanding to areas like Beacon Hill and Fenway.