In 2018, Jeff Elgie received a coffee mug from his own company. SooToday’s recurring “Mid-Week Mugging” feature had turned its attention to the boss, who appeared beside finance and operations director Jake Cormier, both equipped for a suitably modest celebration. Village Media was five years old. There were larger things to discuss than crockery, but the mug suited the occasion: a local news organization introducing its proprietor to the people already reading it.
Elgie had come into the business through digital consulting. He was interested in traffic, audiences and the commercial possibilities of websites. Local journalism gave those interests a particular address. It also gave him a reason to keep going that he described as different from anything his previous ventures had offered.
Today, his work joins two ambitions that can pull against each other: build a company that can expand, and make each publication feel as though it belongs where it lives. The software can travel. Familiarity with a town takes longer.
Before the newsroom, the machinery
Elgie grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, attended Sir James Dunn, and went on to Western University. His entrepreneurial life began early: by 15, he was starting businesses in information technology and digital communications. He later built Lucidia, a communications agency, before moving into another venture, Digital Intelligence Group.
In April 2013, that business offered a rather different view of his future. His digital properties included websites devoted to the Greek islands of Antiparos and Euboea. There were possibilities for tourism, advertising and, one might reasonably hope, an occasional site visit.
His method was practical. Find interest in a subject or place, examine the competition, improve the website and develop its revenue. He compared it with property development. A domain was something to work on, with its own market and plan.
This background helps explain the publisher he became. He already understood that a website needed several things to happen after it was built: people had to discover it, return to it, and give businesses a reason to spend money there. A handsome homepage could have a very quiet life.
A village, with room to grow
SooToday was already an established local operation when Elgie formed Village Media in 2013. Its earlier story belonged to broadcaster Dick Peplow; BayToday, serving North Bay, was already part of the business. Elgie brought an appetite for expansion to something that had demonstrated its usefulness at home.
“I was fascinated by the business and thought SooToday had a ton of potential,” he said. The existing second market mattered. It offered evidence that the idea could work beyond the Sault, while leaving him plenty of places still to try.
The company’s name came from creative director Dennis Houle. Elgie liked the sense of intimacy and connection it suggested. “Village” was a curious ambition for an expanding publisher: the larger the company became, the smaller each reader’s world was supposed to feel.
In Guelph, the opportunity arrived with an unwelcome event. The Guelph Mercury closed in 2016, and Village moved in quickly with a digital publication. A newspaper’s disappearance did not remove the council chamber, the schools or the businesses that needed covering. It left the work waiting for somebody else.
The software earns its keep
The commercial logic was visible in Elgie’s explanation of the business in 2017. Readers still wanted information about their council, courts, schools and new businesses. The audience had moved online. Advertisers needed help making the same journey.
His sales teams therefore had an educational job as well as a sales job. They helped local businesses understand digital advertising, measurement and value. That was familiar territory for someone whose earlier work involved bringing visitors to websites and making those visits commercially useful.
The publishing platform became another part of the equation. Village developed its own system, including commercial functions such as classifieds, directories and auctions. Other publishers could license it. An expense required to operate the company became a service the company could sell.
In 2024, Elgie acknowledged that roughly ten markets would struggle to support themselves as independent enterprises with their own infrastructure. Shared systems helped make the network work. It was a revealing qualification to the growth story: the individual newsroom and the company around it had different economics.
Shared publishing technology supports the newsrooms - and is licensed to other publishers.
The model asks a publisher to pay attention to unglamorous things. Weather and event listings share space with original reporting. A directory entry seldom wins the room at a journalism conference. It can, however, help somebody find a business. The usefulness is the point.
When the distribution disappears
Elgie’s attention to audiences also helps explain his position in Canada’s argument over the Online News Act. He opposed its approach, warning about the consequences if the large platforms withdrew news. For a publisher trying to attract readers, a distribution channel carries a value that does not always fit neatly into a compensation debate.
Village paused new-market expansion and all but replacement hiring in May 2023, anticipating the risks. Meta’s subsequent news block made the question immediate. In a later interview, Elgie described Facebook as particularly useful when establishing a publication in a new market.
When Google reached an agreement to remain in Canadian news, he expressed relief. His concern had been access to readers. He could welcome that outcome while remaining critical of the route taken to reach it.
The episode exposes a vulnerability in a business built on reach. Readers may live down the street, while an important part of the route to them belongs to a distant technology company. Local knowledge does not confer control over that route. Building more direct relationships became a practical concern.
“I like to call us a daily newspaper without the paper.”
Jeff Elgie, December 2023
A place for the conversation
SPACES gave Elgie another way to approach the relationship. Village’s community platform was designed around local interests: gardening, hockey, restaurants and the activities that make a place feel inhabited. Local enthusiasts and experts could host conversations alongside the company’s reporting.
There is a pleasingly specific ambition in this. A person might arrive for a news story and stay for a discussion of something they enjoy. The same town contains voters, customers, volunteers and people who would very much like to talk about their garden. Often they are the same person before lunch.
Elgie had discussed the project publicly before its launch, describing a lengthy period of research, planning and prototyping. The willingness to try it fitted the digital entrepreneur’s habit of building new things. Here, the experiment was attached to an existing audience and a set of local relationships.
By September 2026, the activity included a Harry Potter book club meeting at Village Media’s Canopy in Sault Ste. Marie. The group had reached its sixth gathering. A digital community business had produced a very physical result: people turning up in the same place to discuss a book.
Keeping an address in the Soo
Elgie’s own investments make the local commitment less abstract. He co-owns OutSpoken Brewing, Peace Restaurant and DIG. The city in his company’s address is also a place where he participates in other kinds of business.
In 2025, Algoma University selected him as the honouree for its John R. Rhodes Scholarship Dinner. The recognition included Village’s community programs, among them Random Acts of Kindness and Community Match, as well as its contributions of advertising and editorial support to local organizations.
Those activities put company resources behind community relationships. They also extend the publisher’s role beyond the moment a story appears. Village can introduce a cause to readers, connect it with businesses and help organize support.
The headquarters stayed in Sault Ste. Marie through the expansion. That choice gives his story a useful centre of gravity. Elgie has spent years arguing, through the business itself, that smaller places contain enough activity to support attention. Leaving his own behind would have made the argument harder to picture.
Wisconsin is the next question
In July 2026, Village announced a $5 million investment from the Knight Foundation to support plans for 15 local newsrooms in the United States. Wisconsin would come first, with Pennsylvania and Illinois identified as tentative later destinations. The plan grouped neighbouring communities so they could share operational and editorial expertise.
AppletonToday went live in September. For Elgie, the launch extended a familiar sequence into another country: select a community, hire a team, prepare the technology and begin earning a place in readers’ routines. The plan for 15 remained a plan, with the work of each launch ahead.
Another experiment was taking shape at home. Village’s October recap described Open Door, a community resource navigator being piloted in Sault Ste. Marie under a new partnership with OpenAI. The company said it connected information from more than 500 community organizations.
That returns the story to something recognizable from Elgie’s consulting days: organize useful information, make it easier to find, and give people a reason to use the product again. The purpose has become more specific with time. There are reporters to employ, communities to serve and neighbours to bring into the conversation. The coffee mug was a small reward. The continuing work is getting people to come back tomorrow.