Lessons from An Accidental Founder
Lesson 1: Find a void? Step in it.
I didn’t set out to found a small local newsroom. My career in journalism over the past ten years happened quite by happenstance, as my prior background is in tech and product management for interactive agencies in New York City.
Then I moved to Vermont where, in the interest of finding a diametrically opposed lifestyle, settled into a town of around 300 people. Which is more than a little quiet by comparison. Soon after I lucked into a gig in online news media and news product development, which filled that quiet thoroughly.
Mind you, Vermont is not exactly known in the industry as a news desert when compared to the rest of the States. We have a thriving statewide digital news publication that I spent the past decade helping to build, alongside a popular NPR affiliate and some struggling but beloved local weeklies at varying stages of their digital conversions. It seemed, until quite recently, a saturated market.
Until I started talking to the people in the towns around where I live.
The people I spoke with don’t know much about how their local governments operate, though they don’t trust those governments. They don’t have a great sense of where their property taxes go, though they know those taxes are too high. They still get most of their news on Facebook, though they know that a lot of what’s posted on Facebook isn’t true. And on Election Day last year, after I’d logged a hundred hours building a comprehensive election guide for our statewide newsroom, I fielded half a dozen calls from local friends asking who was on the ballot and what issues they cared about.
These locals aren’t incurious — they’re just not finding enough information that’s relevant to them, in their tiny quiet towns. Clearly, there’s still work to do.
As my daughter grew, as pandemics raged and conflict emerged and the climate worsened and elections became more consequential, the urgency of this work became ever clearer. And as the excitement over local news translates into funding and resources pumped into newsrooms that serve larger population centers, rural communities become increasingly ignored. As with many New Englanders, I live in a news desert in the middle of an oasis.
I’d long had the notion of using the skills I’ve cultivated in audience research, news product management, SEO, and membership program development. But because I cut my teeth in doing the work, and not management, I lacked a certain acumen to be able to codify the idea. Further, midway through a career in the male-dominated worlds of journalism and tech, I’d been shouldering a fair amount of imposter syndrome that I hadn’t reconciled. I had the skills to contribute meaningfully and sustainably to my own community, and to develop a model that other communities can replicate, but I wasn’t sure I had the motivation, the business savvy, or the mettle.
Enter EJCP, from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
The framework was simple: a 100-day accelerator in building a news business facilitated by some of the world’s best practitioners, with deep dives into audience research, hyperlocal products, newsletters, podcasts, building loyalty, fundraising, and other business fundamentals. The program was rigorous enough to allow the formation of habits around one’s entrepreneurial activities, and flexible enough to accommodate experimentation. But perhaps most importantly, it offers access to a global cohort of brilliant and driven news thinkers at various stages of their development, whose projects may intersect with your own in the most nuanced and surprising of ways, and the ability to cheer each other on, scheme together, and try ideas out on each other. In other words, in an industry whose working environment so often alternates between solitary work and participating in clichéd deceitful newsroom environments, the program offers support, and community, and a vested interest in helping everyone in our group reach the highest levels.
By the hundredth day of the program, not only had I honed the concept, identified a year-long built relationships with other news publishers, and identified revenue opportunities for my project, but I became an ace listener to audiences in my community and beyond. And I discovered that a lot of what people wanted wasn’t necessarily the deep data projects that I’m competent at building, nor the longform investigative pieces I’d love to deliver. That to build loyalty in isolated communities in search of a trusted news service, sometimes the most basic service journalism — what the weather will be, whether the roads on your morning commute require a detour, or whether your reliable Thursday evening dinner take-out is unexpectedly closed— are the informational couplings that drive deeper engagement, and that cultivate the trust necessary to tell deeper stories on housing, education, health care, and local businesses.
The goal seems simple when stated so plainly here, but to put it even more directly, its scope becomes evident: I want to help reshape America’s rural populations into the most civically engaged and news-literate communities in the country. A hundred days was all it took for the need to be expressed with perfect clarity.
We are piloting this quarter in the White River Valley and Mad River Valleys of Central Vermont. If you’d like to follow along, you can sign up at DailyGrouse.org. To chat about ways we might partner, or follow along, follow this page.
