We Cover the People Who Keep Neighborhoods Alive

The Village Courier is a small business newspaper. We report on the independent shop owners, neighborhood merchants, and community anchors who hold American cities together — and on the forces that threaten them.

We started this paper because we kept noticing the same story in city after city: a hardware store that had been on the same corner for forty years, suddenly gone. A family restaurant replaced by a chain. A record shop, a bookstore, a butcher — businesses that were the actual fabric of a neighborhood — priced out, bought out, or simply outlasted by forces that had nothing to do with whether they were good at what they did.

Nobody was covering that story the way it deserved to be covered. Not as a trend piece. Not as a lament. As news — with names, addresses, dollar amounts, and the people who are fighting back.

We believe in the dignity of work. We believe that a neighborhood without independent businesses is a neighborhood that belongs to someone else. And we believe that the people who run these places — who show up every morning, who know their customers by name, who stay when it would be easier to leave — deserve a paper that takes them seriously.

Our Coverage

The Village Courier publishes full independent coverage in each of the following cities. Follow any beat to read the latest stories from that city.

• Nashville— Nashville Beat
• Atlanta— Atlanta Beat
• New York— New York Beat
• Chicago— Chicago Beat
• Los Angeles— Los Angeles Beat

Our Editorial Stance

We are not neutral about small businesses. We think they matter. We think the concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands is bad for cities, bad for workers, and bad for the people who live in the neighborhoods being remade around them.

Our editorial thinking is shaped by the Catholic social tradition — particularly the principles of subsidiarity and the dignity of work. We believe decisions should be made at the most local level possible, and that a person's labor is not a commodity to be optimized. These convictions inform our coverage, though we report the facts as we find them and let readers draw their own conclusions.

We accept tips, story leads, and first-person accounts from shop owners, employees, customers, and neighbors. If you know a story that deserves to be told, we want to hear it.