Dear readers, thank you for your readership over the last five years — and for your support, story tips, photos, reader comments and more, and for your friendship. Five years! Time flies! And we launched this paper during the COVID pandemic, to boot.
However, due to circumstances both foreseen and unforeseen, The Village Sun (thevillagesun.com) unfortunately must suspend publication, both online and our monthly print version, for the time being. We are currently exploring what we can do to keep the newspaper going in some form.
Running a start-up business is never an easy proposition, and it’s a fact that many community newspapers are run on a shoestring. Frankly, it’s kind of amazing that we were able to keep this hyperlocal paper going for five years and make a living off of it.
We want to give a sincere thank you to our incredible advertisers (you know who you are!), generous supporters and phenomenal GoFundMe contributors. All your support really did make a difference — 100 percent — and allowed us to do what we’ve done these past few years. We couldn’t have done it without you! And that’s the truth.
It’s been a lot of fun and it’s been engaging, interesting, exciting, gratifying and fulfilling — from launching a news site from scratch (thanks, RJ) to adding a monthly print issue, to covering the news of this amazing community that is like none other. Hopefully, we helped make a difference on important issues that the community faced, and also provided an entertaining read and information source.
On a personal level, I’ve gotten to know so much about this community, covered so many great stories, worked with so many awesome writers and photographers and made so many friends and acquaintances, it’s really just been a privilege and an honor. And our work has been recognized with awards from the New York Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest, which has also been gratifying.
Personally, I’ve covered this community for longer than just these few years at The Village Sun — actually, more like decades, again time flies! — so it will be a real change for me not to be doing it anymore. But, as Bob Marley sang, “When one door is closed, many more will open.” And fortunately I do have an exciting new opportunity.
Thank you sincerely for being a part of The Village Sun community — and we’ll see what we can do about keeping the paper going.
Best,
Lincoln Anderson,
Publisher & Editor
I always started my day with the Village Sun.
Thank you.
Lincoln, your truly independent, all-are-welcome reports, op-eds, & un-preprogrammed essays were as close to an idyllic “Public Square” for all of us as one could have wished for. At a time when the public — in the most democratic meaning of the word — is too often silenced, and so-called journalism has been mostly performative PR reposts concocted by Lobbyists — one could always rely on the Village Sun to tell it like it is…without fear or favor. That’s why this Brooklyn resident checked back with you daily…no zip codes ever, ever circumscribed your work! I will count on your phoenix rising…you’re too important to disappear from your admiring readers.
I immediately noticed the absence of the Village Sun in my inbox! My first piece edited by Lincoln Anderson was “Why I Hate Gay Pride Day,” which I submitted to The Villager as a lark in 2009 and never expected would be published. Lincoln took a chance and we got a lot of reader response! Since then, I feel that I had a tremendously productive relationship with Lincoln as an editor who was always receptive to my off-the-wall ideas. Thank you for your support! I think he has a finger on the pulse of the community as no one else. And a great news sense of what will fly. To say he will be missed is to say nothing. I really hope you are able to put to use your knowledge and that somehow we can collaborate in a future project.
Kathryn
Lincoln thank you and the VS for covering our community so faithfully, we really appreciate the voice Village Sun allowed for us.
this is extremely sad news….lincoln and the village sun are downtown’s only true source of local coverage….. which was often then picked up by the larger media.
lincoln anderson provided, and hopefully will once again provide, the best and most accurate spotlight!
thank you thank you thank you
we are all in your corner…..
Thank you Lincoln for all your hard work and good luck with the new opportunity.
Thank you!
Embedded in The Village and EV for almost two decades with The Villager, Lincoln hit the ground running with The Village Sun– filling a much-needed gap in hyperlocal news. Hopefully his expertise and contacts will still be put to good use in his next venture.
This saddens me so much and I hope this closure is only temporary. I am not a resident of the Village (Brooklyn), but so many of the topics covered so well by the V.S. are applicable to all residents of NYC. The reporting is excellent and I was happy to be a supporter. I hope I can be again.
This is really sad news. I hope the newspaper will be able to resume again in some form. You did a great job, Lincoln, and thank you for publishing
many of my pieces, which led to my pandemic memoir.
Coincidentally, I was doing some historic research on Greenwich Village today and took advantage of old “The Villager” newspaper articles. In those days, The Villager was quite the newspaper, pages and pages long, with lots of ads to support it. It was a treasure.
It was first published in the 1930s and continued for decades, even before and after The Village Voice existed (which actually had few Village stories).
In the 1990s and 2000s, the Butsons and John Sutter gratefully kept it going.
Its demise happened when it was acquired by Schneps Media about a dozen years ago, which also acquired other community newspapers.
Immediately, corporate cost-cutting measures took over, the quality went downhill, and editor Lincoln Anderson was persona non grata.
Now The Villager is a compendium of Manhattan stories and one is lucky to see one Village or Downtown story per week
So Lincoln continued with a real hyperlocal news outlet and started The Village Sun. Regretfully, it seems not to have received the financial support needed. (Check out the lackluster GoFundMe appeal on the upper left of Page 1).
Just to let folks know the insidious role Schneps Media played in the obliteration of a once-great newspaper, the next time you are tempted to read their main publication, amNY. But I choose not to. I boycott them on principle.
And thanks, Lincoln, for your valiant efforts.
Yes, Schneps Media ruined the Villager. Very little of the content now is about the Village.
Hoping you come back soon…..
In the meantime, thanks for the past quarter century-plus of great journalism.
Hope to see you back soon covering the neighborhood which you have done well for many years .
The Village Sun is great – the best!
Truly the only reliable source of NYC news.
No way to continue?
Kudos to Lincoln Anderson who gave so much to keep us informed and more. Great good luck on the new journey.
This is sad news but perhaps inevitable given the huge cost of maintaining a community newspaper and start-up. There have been so many terrific local stories, photos and commentary in The Village Sun over the last 5 years from contributors, many garnering awards from the New York State Better Newspaper Contest. I look forward to seeing another version of The Sun emerge under Lincoln Anderson’s dedicated leadership.