When a young music journalist moved to New York in 2006 looking for work, she didn’t quite grasp the power of her résumé.

Noticing that her most recent job was as music editor for the Minneapolis alternative weekly City Pages, the editor interviewing Lindsey Thomas for a position at MTV News playfully dropped a phrase she’d never heard: “So you’re part of the Minnesota music critic mafia, huh?”

She got the gig.

Since the days when Prince vaulted to stardom and the Replacements and Hüsker Dü established the gold standard for raw indie-rock, Minneapolis has always punched above its weight, musically. And City Pages, the free weekly that documented those artists, developed an outsized reputation all its own.

While it outlasted many of its kin, including the Village Voice, City Pages was shut down suddenly last Wednesday by its current owner, the Minneapolis daily newspaper the Star Tribune, which said challenges brought by the pandemic made the paper “economically unviable.”

Throughout its four-decade run, a disproportionate number of City Pages alumni went on to work at national musical magazines, to publish definitive books of music history and criticism, and to foster a tone that was envied and emulated throughout the industry. Even City Pages’ readership proved influential.

“It was absolutely essential as a local road map to arts culture,” said Ryan Schreiber, the founder of the music website Pitchfork, who grew up in the Twin Cities suburbs. “City Pages led me to weird places where I made weird friends, and it taught us about all the weird art that brought us together. Its 2006 cover story on Pitchfork is the only press that’s ever meant enough to me to have framed.”