Magazine staffer buys Little Village

IOWA CITY — Jordan Sellergren has bought Little Village, the Iowa City-based arts and culture magazine where she’s worked the past 10 years.

“My favorite part of the magazine is that we’re unapologetically progressive,” said Sellergren, 42, of Iowa City. “It’s kind of our job to do that. We punch up, speak truth to power and incorporate community voices.”

Sellergren has been the magazine’s primary designer, art director and production manager for the past decade. She bought the publication from Matthew Steele, the Little Village publisher since 2010.

The “alt weekly,” along the lines of the famed Village Voice in New York City, publishes a magazine once a month and updates its website daily.

Little Village, with offices at 623 S. Dubuque St., has seven full-time staffers, two part-timers and a host of freelancers who write columns and contribute photos. The magazine highlights Iowa artists and photographers, with its writers focusing on the arts and statewide and legislative issues, Sellergren said.

“It’s fun, the voice of the community, with a lot of different perspectives and geographic perspectives,” she said. “It’s my job now to grow it.”

Twenty thousand copies of the magazines are distributed monthly throughout Iowa in the Iowa City, Cedar Rapids and Waterloo-Cedar Falls area. Distribution moved into Des Moines in 2021 and into the Dubuque area in 2024.

“The magazine is free, entirely ad-supported,” Sellergren said.

Copies of Little Village are left in coffee shops, restaurants, New Pioneer Co-op and Stuff Etc. stores, hotels “and lots of mechanics and auto dealerships,” Sellergren said. Or people can subscribe to the magazine with a $10 donation and have it mailed to their homes, she said.

Little Village was founded in 2001 after the demise of the Icon alt weekly that was published in Iowa City from 1993 to 2001. Icon’s art director Beth Oxler helped start Little Village, with her husband, blues musician Dave Zollo, supplying the new name.

Steele came on board at a writer and web designer in 2002, left to teach in Korea, came back and ended up as publisher in 2010.

Sellergren used a loan from the Small Business Administration to buy the magazine. The purchase price was not disclosed.

“I’ve got a 17-year-old son, so I’m in a good place,” she said. “I can really dig in and spend 24 hours a day in the office.”

That is, unless she’s out making music.

Sellergren’s third album, appropriately named “Banner Year,” with songs she characterizes as “indy American,” comes out this spring.

Comments: mary.sharp@thegazette.com

  Buy Photo