Matt Steele on Little Village’s history, a little-known Midwest massacre, and how he became a publisher
Print is dead, or so we’ve been told. Sure, there has been some high-profile questioning of that postulate, but nevertheless it remains a prevailing motif in a lot of conversations about the future of publishing. Matthew Steele of the Little Village fame has a more nuanced view, and he is worth listening to. Matt’s iconic, widely beloved Iowa City alt magazine has been growing steadily year over year in terms of both revenue and audience since its first 01' issue, and it has long become a cultural staple of the city that proudly calls itself the Athens of the Midwest, solidly propped up by its readers somewhere in between Prairie Lights and Hamburg Inn — as well as inside of these storied landmarks.
We sat down with Matt to talk about Little Village’s success, the magazine’s deep history and unique distribution model, the role of local press, LV’s production cycle, the value of design, whether print is really dead and how does one become a publisher.
Below is part one of our conversation. Enjoy!
I. Can you give me a little bit of background on Little Village and where did you come in? How did you start with LV?
M. Absolutely. There’s actually a pretty deep history in alternative publishing here, and Little Village can serve as a character in a broader history.
There was an alt-weekly in Iowa City called “Icon” that was published in the 90s, basically from 93' to 00'-01'. They were pretty successful, they started growing into the Cedar Rapids area, and a regional publishing house out of Indianapolis called “Yesse!” picked them up.
Yesse! bought them out, and that was initially perceived as being a cool thing: it was going to make them a part of a larger company, there was probably an initial cash windfall that happened, and the opportunity to tap into what Yesse! was trying to do, which was pick up all these papers in different markets, make a more attractive offer to national advertisers, streamline a few things administratively, and overall create a bit of security for each of the individual papers that they’re not just out there in the wilderness doing it themselves anymore.
About two years after the acquisition Yesse! shut Icon down.
M. They re-analyzed the market, and they decided it’s actually not a good direction. So they shut Icon down, they shut some other papers down, and it was kind of like a massacre in the alt-weekly history of the United States, this well-intended thing that just went bad. And it’s sort of an infamous history for a lot of papers, especially in the Midwest.
And then a couple of people that were involved with Icon, I don’t know how they did it, but they picked themselves up by their bootstraps and relaunched. They didn’t own their name. They didn’t own any of their equipment. They didn’t even have their office anymore. A lot of their advertisers had lost faith and flew the coop, but they got enough of them to come back on board that they were able to relaunch.
They were a weekly as Icon; they decided to relaunch as a twice monthly.
Beth Oxler was the art director with Icon, and she was a part of the relaunch with Little Village, and they were over at Beth’s house trying to figure out what they’re going to call this thing. And there’s a Sonny Boy Williamson song that’s pretty funny; it’s called “Little Village”, and Beth’s husband, an Iowa City blues musician Dave Zollo, was sort of razing them from the other room and he’s like “you should call it Little Village motherfucker!” And that was almost a direct quote from this Sonny Boy Williamson song, and it stuck.
M. So they went with that. The twice monthly thing lasted about a month and went down to monthly. This was 2001. They all took day jobs and kind of moved on.
The publisher was a guy named Todd Kimm, who at one point moved to Ames, and I came into the picture in 2002, when I moved to Iowa City to do school. I was here for anthropology and studio arts. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I had this vague activist/artist identity that I needed to nourish with my social circle.
And that was what led me to running with all the people that were trying to keep Little Village alive about a year into its existence, with a publisher who lived in Ames and nobody had ever met.
M. And so we were literally putting together rock shows at Gabes, selling t-shirts, selling posters. I remember selling t-shirts on Hubbard Park, and sending all the money to this guy Todd so he’d print another issue. And he kind of threw it at us and he said “You guys should just run with it.”
So my friend Alissa was publisher for about three years, and then our friend Kevin took over as publisher and he did everything for one issue. He was publisher, ad sales, layout, editor, everything. For one issue—don’t give him too much credit! …no, he’s my boy. I love Kevin. Great guy, really funny, awesome musician, brilliant. Could do anything, but he didn’t want to make that his life.
Our friend Andrew Sherburne who runs Film Scene, he was helping out with design in the early days. And when Kevin had his moment of clarity, Andrew was there to pick up the pieces, catch the baby before its head hit the ground, and focus on stabilizing it. He was primarily a documentary filmmaker so this wasn’t his main focus, but he had a lot of love for it, and a lot of ability to organize and get it really stable.
We’re back to that once monthly format. I was still an orbiter, just kind of a space kid. Sometimes getting closer to the gravitational pull, sometimes getting farther away.
I. So what made you do the deep dive?
M. Right after I finished school I went away. I had a sad string of events personally, and decided to check out for a bit. I went to Korea to teach English for two years—not in Seoul, but in a small town in the mountains, where I kind of went into myself. I saved money, I got out of debt, I made a lot of art, made some music. I was working on a play. I thought, well, maybe this is what I’ll do, I’ll just travel the world and teach and try to find a meaningful thing. I really enjoy teaching. I love the relationships and I love that window into a culture that you get by going into the school.
But I ultimately had my own moment of clarity where I realized that I want to be in a community where I can just plug in and do things like pick up the phone and put on a play, have people that I know that can do sound and lighting and costumes, and have a stage that I could use; be part of a creative community where I felt at home. And I just thought “my God, why did I leave Iowa City? That place had everything for me. They had photographers, they had fellow musicians, they had all these support systems and this high quality of life.” So I came back here and that was 09'. Andrew had kid number two on the way, and his wife was like “Dude, you gotta knock it off.”
M. So they made me a web editor. I started getting our content up on the site. I started managing our social media for the first time. We were late to the game. I think I remember Andrew saying that our first web site was a MySpace page.
We had a WordPress site, and I started in my kind of lazy way updating it after our issues would come out. It got me into conversations where we were trying to start selling digital. I did a weekly newsletter trying to get our e-mail up. And suddenly I was doing a bit of design, a bit of sales, a bit of writing and editing and strategy, content strategy and found myself wearing all these hats.
But when it was time, it was just weird: Melody who was our managing editor, she had a journalism undergraduate degree, she got into the Library Science master’s program here at Iowa; Paul who was our features editor, he got into a social worker program down in St. Louis; Andrew who was our publisher, had kid number two on the way and a bunch of documentaries in the hopper; and I was the only one who didn’t have anything better going on.
So I got left. I looked up one day and all my friends were gone. And I thought “well, I guess I’m going to try to keep Little Village going.” Also an exaggeration; they were super helpful with the transition, and I was really happy to take on the torch. I didn’t fully appreciate the combination of skill sets that were involved, but I was like “yeah, sure.” I sold an ad once, I designed an ad at another time, and I’ve been writing my whole life. How hard can it be?
M. That was the summer of 2010, when I had my first issue with my name on the masthead as publisher. I remember being in Chicago with my sister when Andrew sent me the proof. Andrew was still designing it, he stayed on to do layout for a few months after the transition. And I remember poring over every page—my name is on the masthead, you know—and just feeling super psyched and having this feeling that I’ve never had before.
M. That’s kind of the quick history. So I’ve been publisher since summer 2010; that’s seven years, fastest seven years of my life.
2012 we went up to twice monthly.
2013 we hired our first employees.
So that’s 12 years of everyone working on Little Village and doing it without any pay. Well, one of our rules from the beginning was that we always pay writers, we always pay photographers, and we always pay for content. But editors… Hmm. They get their name on page 3. “Features Editor” or “Contributing Editor.” I was psyched to be “Web Editor.”
A year into it, I remember getting this one check, a $300 check I totally didn’t expect, just because Andrew realized we were ahead for once and he was like “OK, we’re all getting $300 goddammit.”
But that was tight! It was like a taste in the water, you know? It was like “Alright, is there more of this? Can we do this again in 6 months?”
M. But I was always paranoid. I didn’t fully believe in myself — I just knew that this was the art project that me and all my friends had cared about most for more than 10 years, and it was basically on me to either print another issue or not. I remember when I hit a year and I was like, “Shit we’re still printing! Tight!” I hadn’t hired anyone, but I’d paid every writer for every issue that I’d been at the helm of. Also, our editors were getting a per issue stipend. That was progress to me.
And then it was the spring of 2013 or maybe it was even 2012, when we’ve put our first two people on what basically was considered a living wage. I think they were contractor status for the first six months or a year, and then eventually payroll. And now we’ve got 10 or 11 full time, and a few more half time. The key there was that we figured out how to increase our frequency back to twice monthly. That was a big victory. We went to twice monthly in the fall of 2012.
But even that, I didn’t really believe in that as a long term success. I thought: “OK. We’ve managed to buck the trend in Iowa City, and we’re actually growing as a print publication. I know that’s uncommon. I know that eventually Iowa City will probably catch up to the rest of the world and stop supporting that shit.”
“But for now, I’m going to do right by our closest three or four people. I’m going to sell enough pages to get them on actual wage and then devil may care what comes next — talk to me in a year.”
That’s how my head has been, I haven’t really looked up yet. My head just continues to stay down. Alright, is it the 15th yet? Is it the 1st yet? Is it the 15th yet? Is it the 1st yet?
I. So your whole life at Little Village has been basically two weeks at a time?
M. Yeah. We’re just now kind of coming out of that.
This conversation is the first of a three-part series that touches on the history of Little Village, the importance of design, what it takes to publish a magazine, whether print is really dead, the role of local press and more.
Part 2:
Part 3:
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