Just before 3 p.m. on Wednesday, employees at The Village Voice in Manhattan received an email from co-workers saying that the weekly newspaper appeared to be on the verge of announcing layoffs.

Within a few hours about a dozen employees were summoned into a conference room inside The Voice office in the Financial District and told that they would no longer have jobs after the third week of September, a union representative said, when the paper’s final print edition will be distributed.

Thirteen of the paper’s 17 union workers are being laid off, said the president of the local that has represented Voice workers since 1977, when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. According to the union, they include a writer, a social media producer, an administrative assistant and a photo editor who has worked for decades at the left-leaning newspaper, which was started in 1955 by Norman Mailer and others then went on to provide a blueprint for a scrappy, muckraking journalistic format that became known as the alt-weekly.

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What is it? An app for making animated stories with images, video and text, that can then be shared on Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook.

Cost: Free, with an upgrade to Pro available for $9.99 (£7.80)/ month

Devices: iOS (Android version in progress)

How is it of use to journalists? News outlets have been using the 'stories' feature on Instagram and Snapchat to give their audiences a behind-the-scenes look at their newsrooms, to cover events, or to take the pulse around an issue. Stories can also sometimes be tweaked and repurposed according to the strengths of the platform – while Snapchat is more recognised for its unfiltered content, Instagram is more well-known for its carefully crafted visuals. Flyr enables journalists to create animated stories for these platforms, either from scratch or by tailoring its selection of pre-made templates.

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