Today, we’re excited to announce the upcoming launch of Downtown Voices, a new publication serving the growing Downtown Minneapolis* community.

When we launch in the coming weeks, Downtown Voices will be a digital publication that centers around a weekly newsletter, website, and social media platforms. Before then, we’ll announce a new hire that will help guide the editorial vision for this publication. We’ve launched a survey to hear from you on what it should look like, and we’d love to have you fill it out now.

I will readily admit to having a romantic, logic-defying love for Downtown Minneapolis. I grew up going to Peter’s Grill and the downtown Barnes and Noble on the last day of school. I bought baseball cards and comic books (and that’s it) at Shinders. My parents would drop me off at Block E where I would spend hours between Gameworks and the movie theater and just wandering around. I got my wedding suit at Hubert White. I took my prom photos at Brit’s. I have had more memorable great days and mostly-remembered nights than I can count in Downtown.

There’s a lot of news and discussion about Downtown Minneapolis for people that do not spend time there. There is not enough news and discussion built specifically for the people that do live and spend time in Downtown Minneapolis. Downtown is not an abstract idea, it is a place, full of people, looking to live their lives and occasionally have a good time. We want to celebrate those people by building a publication that is for the people that live, work in, and visit Downtown Minneapolis, in that order. We want to build a platform that can support the dreamers and the risk-takers that want to build something that hasn’t existed before or to grow the thing they’re fighting to keep alive.

That doesn’t mean we’ll go it alone, or think that we’re the only ones that should be covering it. As we do with Southwest Voices, Downtown Voices will share smart, interesting, impactful writing about Downtown Minneapolis from other local publishers, as well as a roundup of (high-quality) social media posts. We’ll also work to connect you to civic information, so that you can be an active participant in the community when the city has a survey, or Metro Transit has questions about the buses, or the Park & Recreation Board wants to redesign a public space. We’ll also look to publish lots of high-quality commentary about the community. That includes yours! If you’ve got an idea you’d like to write about, get in touch with us at info@downtownvoices.news.

Downtown has changed – a lot – and we hope to chronicle and track those changes while constantly centering the people that make it great. Yes, there are fewer workers going into the office five days a week, and that won’t change any time soon. But there are also many more residents than there once were, and the cranes dotting the skyline are only going to bring more. Entertainment seems to be headed in a positive direction this summer, between new restaurants and bars and major events. In the span of two weeks in June, the Twins have drawn more than 30,000 multiple times, U.S. Bank Stadium will host close to a hundred thousand Swifties, and Pride will bring even more than that to celebrate in Loring Park and beyond this upcoming weekend. Some of the energy has shifted, with Nicollet Mall looking emptier and the North Loop and Washington Avenue continuing to grow. Some things mostly look the same – if you’ve been into Brit’s on a Saturday morning, The Local for happy hour, or Manny’s any day of the week, you would think everything looked like it always has. 

We will always be objective, and we won’t always be sunshine and rainbows. There are real challenges facing Downtown Minneapolis that need deeper exploration. In our initial conversations, we’ve heard a lot about the need for more things to do late at night, better transportation options, more resources for families like childcare, public safety issues, better options for young people, and more. Many of those issues are really poorly served by social media-driven discourse that spews anger but is usually way short on solutions. And while we will always be objective, we will also readily admit that we are biased – and our bias is that we want Downtown Minneapolis to do well, to thrive, to grow, to welcome everyone, and to prosper. 

As part of this expansion, our team, which has previously launched Southwest Voices and Minneapolis Schools Voices, will now be known as “Minneapolis Voices”, and Downtown Voices will be our third publication. We’ll have more details on our reorganized structure and team, including the hire of a new editor for Downtown Voices, soon.

Thanks for reading, and please take our survey to tell us what you want Downtown Voices to look like.*

- Where is Downtown Minneapolis, exactly? It’s a great question. To start, our plan is to cover everything inside of the area that includes Loring Park to the southwest, runs up along the east side of 94 to Plymouth Avenue, down through the North Loop, includes the area of St. Anthony Main along the river, then passes through the Mill District, East Town, and Elliot Park. Or, basically this map, with the freeways, Plymouth Avenue, and the river acting as boundaries and St. Anthony Main invited along for the ride. Do you think that’s wrong? Let us know at info@downtownvoices.news!