After 34 years in operation, the Richmond Free Press is closing its doors.

“We know for sure that we do not have the advertising support to continue,” publisher Jean Patterson Boone wrote in a post to the newspaper’s Instagram account. “We have given our advertisers a high-quality environment to place their advertising to our responsive readers. Each week our advertising lineage has diminished. Yet the quality remains.

“Payment has become slower and slower,” Boone added. “Is it racism? Is the Free Press no longer relevant? And so, this chapter ends.”

The Free Press was founded in January 1992 by Boone and her late husband, Raymond H. Boone. Raymond Boone was a career newspaperman and stepped away from his position as an associate professor at Howard University to launch the publication.

The weekly newspaper’s primary focus has been on the region’s African American community as well as the city’s poorest residents — two groups the Boones found to be underrepresented in mainstream media coverage.

That coverage has garnered the publication multiple awards for journalistic excellence from the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Virginia Press Association and the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association, as well as recognition from the NAACP and the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus.

After Raymond Boone died of pancreatic cancer in 2014 at the age of 76, Jean Boone continued as the sole publisher.

“We made it work for 30 years,” she wrote. “Our team has worked as hard and as smart as we know how.”

In its latest edition, published online on Thursday, Free Press reporter George Copeland Jr. noted that last week’s print version would be the newspaper’s last. The Free Press building was listed for sale in October.

“All goodbyes are not forever,” Jean Boone wrote. “Perhaps, dear reader, we’ll meet again.”

Mayor Danny Avula issued a statement about the paper’s closing.

“It is a sad day in Richmond as one of our core institutions, the Richmond Free Press, is closing its doors,” the statement read. “For more than three decades, this Black-owned newspaper has been a beacon. In a city with a history as complex and painful as ours, the Free Press did more than report the news. It reinvigorated the Black press, asked hard questions of the city’s leaders, and amplified voices often pushed to the margins.

“I am deeply grateful to the founders — the devoted and trailblazing Boone family — the editors, reporters, photographers, and staff, who poured their talent and heart into this work.”

https://www.pilotonline.com/2026/02/14/richmond-free-press-closing/