A generation of great journalists cut their teeth at alt-weeklies, and The Boston Phoenix produced some of the best of them. When the Phoenix announced it was closing last March, the city lost a powerful cultural force and a vibrant source of information.

We discuss the Phoenix‘s legacy and the ways in which its loss will affect Boston.

Panelists are author and essayist Anita Diamant, who started out answering the editor’s phone in the mid-1970s; Charles Pierce of Esquire and NPR, and a staff writer with the Phoenix in the 1980s and ’90s; poet and classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz, who won a Pulitzer Prize with the Phoenix; and Carly Carioli, who started as an intern and rose to become the paper’s editor.

Seth Mnookin moderates.