Metro Roundup: Village Living celebrates 10 years of service

Mountain Brook’s community newspaper is celebrating a big birthday this month.

April 2020 marks Village Living’s 10th anniversary.

“I feel like it’s a really significant milestone,” said Dan Starnes, the paper’s owner and publisher. “It’s a decade. It’s almost 25% of my life.”

The first edition of Village Living arrived in approximately 13,000 Mountain Brook mailboxes in April 2010. Another 500 or so simultaneously appeared in pick-up locations throughout the city.

Although this is the paper’s 121st edition, its contents resemble those from the first: unparalleled hyperlocal coverage of city government, schools, businesses, sports and events, along with stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

“In this day and age, you really want to know what’s going on with the people you know, the people who your kids go to school with,” said Kari Kampakis, whose faith column has run in all 121 editions of the paper. “It is neat to have a publication that you can look through, and it’s beautiful and it’s well-written and it’s very professional and it just tells you what’s going on in your community.”

Starnes published one other paper before he launched Village Living. He purchased 280 Living, which serves the U.S. 280 corridor from The Summit to Chelsea, for $10 in 2008.

He was the publication’s only full-time employee and worked primarily from his residence at the Park Lane Apartments.

“I would walk to the post office every day to get my mail, and I thought about starting another publication,” Starnes said. “I used to think, ‘You know, Mountain Brook would be a really good community to have this model,’ but I wasn’t quite sure.”

Starnes knew other print publications circulated in the community. But he came to realize that none of them produced the quantity and caliber of hyperlocal journalism he wanted to provide.

He felt confident that each of the city’s 20,000-plus residents had a story to tell.

“I felt like Mountain Brook was a community whose residents would really care about the community and would want to know more and be hungry for more stories and more information about their community,” Starnes said. “I felt that by creating that paper, we could really enhance the community, enhance the experience of residents.”

Once Starnes decided to start the paper in early 2010, he began to look for an editor. He searched for someone who was plugged into the community and could help him develop story ideas.

Starnes found the ideal candidate in lifelong resident Jennifer Gray, who was married to one of his childhood friends.

“I took the job because I was looking for a new challenge in my own life outside of home, but what appealed to me about it as opposed to other things that might have certainly met that need was that it was all about the community I grew up in and that I lived in,” Gray said, “and it was going to be about promoting what a unique and special place it was and telling the stories of the people that live here. I thought there was a lot you could do with that.”

Gray connected Starnes with local writers, such as Kampakis and Christiana Roussel, who penned stories to fill the publication’s pages. Michael Seale wrote the paper’s first cover piece, which examined the pending development of Lane Parke.

The first edition of Village Living went to press in late March and was much thinner than today’s publication.

“I didn’t try really hard to sell ads because I was very confident the publication would work,” Starnes said, “...I felt like I just needed to get it out in the public and then we could start selling ads.”

Kampakis remembers the first edition well. The weekend after it hit mailboxes, she said she was approached by close to 50 people at her oldest daughter’s softball game who expressed their affinity for the new publication.

“Everybody was taken back by it. They loved the stories,” Kampakis said. “They loved how it was such a niche market, that every story and every person you’re reading about you pretty much know or you know somebody who knows them.”

Starnes slid a copy of the first edition under the door of the Mountain Brook Chamber of Commerce. He then met Suzan Doidge, the executive director, and her staff.

“They really kind of took us under their wing and helped us understand the community and introduced us to people and were advocates of us from the very beginning,” Starnes said.

One day after Village Living’s first edition published, Starnes received a call from the Homewood Chamber of Commerce. Its director, Tricia Ford, was a Mountain Brook resident who was impressed by Village Living.

She asked him to come publish a paper in Homewood.

One year later, he did. The Homewood Star will celebrate its 10th anniversary next April. It was the third of seven monthly publications Starnes launched in communities across the area.

Others include the Hoover Sun, Vestavia Voice, Cahaba Sun in Trussville and Iron City Ink in Birmingham. Starnes also created a digital marketing agency, Starnes Digital, in 2016 that complements Starnes Publishing.

But as the first publication Starnes started on his own, Village Living holds a special place in his heart.

“The thing I think that stands out to me is how many people have been a part of it and how many people have helped us over the years,” he said. “There were people that were a part of the community that wanted to be a part of it.”

While Starnes is proud of what his paper has accomplished in its first 10 years, he said he’s looking forward to making even more of an impact in its next 10.

He knows that countless stories are waiting to be told.

“It says a lot for Village Living that in this day and age where things are going online and not all the print publications are making it that it’s still popular and people still read it,” Kampakis said. “One thing people have always told me from the beginning is that it’s one of the few publications they read from front to end.”