In the summer of 1972, Richard Missner, owner of what was then simply called "The Phoenix," fired editor Harper Barnes[1] in a journalistic dispute.

Soon afterwards, the staff was informed of the purchase of the paper – its name and goodwill – by Stephen Mindich, owner of the more established (and more commercial) competitor Boston After Dark.

Notable hires included reporters Joe Klein, Bo Burlingham, Anita Harris,[10] Burt Solomon and Ed Zuckerman, the late movie critic Stuart Byron, and columnists Kay Larson, aka Nora Lasky (art), and Mark Zanger (food, as "The Red Chef"), and music writers James Miller and Dave Marsh.

Stephen Davis has written biographies of Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Aerosmith, Guns N' Roses, Carly Simon, Bob Marley, Levon Helm, and Jim Morrison, among others.

In 1986, he was nominated for a Grammy for co-producing, with fellow Real Paper alumnus Joe McEwen, a Frank Sinatra multi-disk boxed set.

O'Connor is now a journalist, educator and documentary filmmaker who, with Real Paper contributor Danny Schechter (1942–2015), has for decades run the award-winning production company Globalvision and has written several books, including, most recently, Nukespeak, Shock Jocks, and Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media.

He is the author of Woody Guthrie: A Life, Payback, Primary Colors (as "Anonymous"), The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid, and The Running Mate.

She is the author of three books on culinary history: Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1984); Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (2004) and Julia Child (2007).

Jon Lipsky, who died in 2011, was a noted playwright (Coming Up for Air, Living in Exile, among others)[16] who wrote the book Dreaming Together (2008) and taught theater arts at Boston University for 28 years.

Listings editor Monica Collins became a television columnist at the Boston Herald and USA Today and now writes the online advice column "Ask Dog Lady.

After a stint at Rolling Stone, Ed Zuckerman became a TV writer and producer, long associated with the Law & Order series and more recently, Blue Bloods.

Boston television sports reporter Clark Booth wrote a story about violence in pro football in 1975 for both Mother Jones magazine and The Real Paper that Joe Nocera reprinted in part in The New York Times in 2012.

[21] Film critics contributing to The Real Paper included Chuck Kraemer; Stuart Byron; the prominent left-wing journalist Andrew Kopkind, who died in 1994,[22] Stephen Schiff, who covered films for The Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix before moving on to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and then establishing a career as a screenwriter (Lolita, The Deep End of the Ocean, True Crime); Kathy Huffhines (later with the Detroit Free Press before she was killed in a parked car by a falling tree limb); Patrick McGilligan (who later wrote biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Nicholson and others); David Rosenbaum; Bhob Stewart (later film critic for Heavy Metal magazine); David Thomson; Michael Wilmington (later film critic for the Chicago Tribune); Gerald Peary, who had moved from New York City to Cambridge in 1978 and continued to review for The Real Paper until it folded in June, 1981.

[24] Circulation Director, David Stein founded two commercial real estate trade publications purchased by Communications Channels, Inc., redeveloped historic mills, and is the managing partner of a marketing company representing states' DOTs.

Jon Landau's prophetic 1974 article in The Real Paper in which he famously claimed that "I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen" is credited by Nick Hornby[25] and others with fostering the artist's popularity.

Gelber subsequently had a distinguished career as a documentary television producer at 60 Minutes for 25 years and at ABC News, winning eight Emmys and numerous other awards.

[33] In 1979, the Boston Globe's Nathan Cobb, who had lionized the two papers seven years earlier, wrote a story headlined "Their big worry is going broke.

Financial problems caused The Real Paper to cease publication, silencing a voice that was devoted to community-based efforts in the arts as in other cultural fields.