A map of the USA/Canada border with an arrow showing VIllage Media entering Wisconsin.
The Canadians are coming!
Village Media, which operates more than 30 hyperlocal digital newsrooms in Ontario, is expanding across the border and into Wisconsin.
Jeff Elgie, founder of Village Media, says in an interview that he expects the first outlet in Appleton to open this fall. An editor and a “community lead” (think publisher) have been hired and the company is currently interviewing for reporter positions.
Elgie confirms that Village is also seeking applicants for newsrooms in Fond du Lac, Kaukauna, Manitowoc and Sheboygan. Sheboygan will likely launch after Appleton, but the other locations are up in the air.
The venture is being funded, in part, by the Knight Foundation, which has long supported journalism, but usually nonprofit media. Under this partnership, Village Media is also looking to open digital newsrooms in Pennsylvania and Illinois.
“Knight and Village Media will work together to demonstrate a new ownership and operating model for strengthening local news and civic life in communities where trusted local information is increasingly at risk,” the two parties said in a recent news release.
Knight’s $5 million stake in the United States expansion is not a grant, but an investment.
“This is actually an equity stake within a company,” says Amalie Nash, vice president of journalism at Knight. When newsrooms reach sustainability, Knight will sell its share to a local investor.
This is a “fairly new” approach for the foundation, Nash confirms. “If this works well, we get money back that can be recycled into additional investments.” That doesn’t happen with grant awards, she notes.
Elgie says the Knight funding is intended to cover the startup period for the first couple of years, before the newsroom turns a profit. “None of the money flows back to Village. It all stays in the local communities.”
Knight and Village Media set their sights on Appleton and surrounding areas because they were looking for communities with both a strong sense of identity and a deficit of local news, says Elgie.
Like many other papers that are part of the Gannett chain, the Post-Crescent, based in Appleton, has a much smaller newsroom than it once did, notes Elgie. It also has a focus on print subscriptions and a paywall in front of much of its content. When the daily in a community of Appleton’s size “doesn’t seem to be overly relevant from a digital standpoint anymore, we see that as an opportunity,” says Elgie, who does not consider radio, television or print-only outlets as competition.
Lisa Hale has spent 40 years in radio, newspapers, TV and magazines, most recently as the northeast Wisconsin bureau chief for Civic Media. From her perspective, Village Media has chosen a good spot to launch in the states. “There is no extensive governmental reporting happening in Appleton,” says Hale, who lives in Oshkosh.
While the city of Appleton counts some 75,000 residents, the metro area swells to 250,000. “Appleton metro is a big metro that doesn’t see the love it deserves,” says Hale. “I’m kind of excited to see what happens.”
This is not the first time Village Media has crossed the border into the U.S. market. The company sold its custom publishing software to outlets in Colorado, and in 2021 purchased The Longmont Leader and, later that same year, the Broomfield Leader, both in Colorado.
Elgie says “the Colorado experiment” was an early partnership with the McClatchy chain and Google. When McClatchy reorganized, Google asked Village Media to take over the outlets but “they were far outside the scope of our geography and were not markets we would have selected from the beginning,” he says. “Quite honestly, we did not pay attention to them.” Village eventually sold the newsrooms.
Village’s approach for Appleton and other U.S. newsrooms, Elgie says, will be wholly different and based on the company’s “five pillars,” which include news coverage, growing the local economy by providing an advertising platform for businesses, connecting residents through civil, community-centered spaces and events, and nurturing community conversations around local issues. Village will sponsor some events that are meant, at least in part, to raise revenue.
Organizing around a cluster of communities in Wisconsin and elsewhere allows for regional sales opportunities as well as content sharing, Elgie says.
Yoni Greenbaum sees Village Media’s launch in the U.S. as a game-changer. The journalist and vice president of product strategy at the American Press Institute wrote in a recent post on his Substack that Village’s “massive 15-market U.S. expansion” is an “owned-and-operated invasion.”
“This is a declaration of commercial war,” he wrote. “The Villagers are stress-testing what it takes to hit revenue density and own the last mile of local news.”
Greenbaum, in an interview, says it is important to consider whether there is enough money in a community to support a new news outlet. “We have a tendency to build an operation and then say we want the community to support it, instead of saying, what can the community support?
“Where there are not other news organizations, in theory it’s a win-win,” he adds.
Greenbaum is “fascinated” by what Village Media has accomplished. “In general the sense I get now is that the communities where they are [located] really value the news they provide, the approach that they take, and the quality of the work that results.”
But, he notes, it typically takes five years for a news outlet to be self-supporting. “If they get to sustainability in two years, I hope they share that playbook. The rest of the industry would really benefit from it.”
