I believe Popula.com is trying to fill that void. They have fantastic writers but I'm unsure of their business model (it seems to depend on blockchain as a magic fix).
Reading through some of these accounts, I tried to guess whether the writer was a man or a woman (before looking at their name, and not counting obvious tells like pronoun usage)? Do you ever do that? While I haven't performed a real experiment, I gotta say, I'm pretty accurate at guessing the genders of writers--not 100%, but way over 50%.
There have been several papers about identifying the gender of an author with very high success rates using ML, so it’s not surprising that there are at least some patterns even a human can pick up on.
Village Voice is gone but hopefully the New Times can hang on for a while.
Real independent people and voices need a check on authoritarian structures, independent media is one of those checks and they are fading away.