VillageSoup: Sustaining News in a Rural Setting

In rural Camden, Maine, Richard Anderson has found a formula for sustainable news coverage in an age when the Internet seems to be killing the news business. He began by starting an online-only news site for the community in 1996, an ambitious and early web presence. By specializing in quick, hard news, community service, citizen involvement, and community leadership, Anderson built an audience for his VillageSoup website. But the community had a moribund weekly newspaper that soaked up much of the advertising revenue. After five years of online-only news, Anderson started his own weekly paper newspaper that republished his web content. Today, Anderson has a sustainable multimedia enterprise, and a business model that could serve as the savior for weekly newspapers in communities with a population around 30,000. VillageSoup may be the first genuine example of alternative news media reaching sustainability. As Richard Anderson walked through downtown Camden, Maine, there was a palpable skip in the gait of the former Chicago book-publishing entrepreneur, now in his late sixties. It seemed as if every third passerby was a friend or customer, worthy of a hello or a quick chat. His pace slowed, though, as he reached the corner of Main and Mechanic streets and the French & Brawn delicatessen, which was owned by his son Todd. His eyes brightened as he remembered the story of the webcam. He installed the video camera in 1998 in the storefront window of French & Brawn looking out at the street of spiffy little shops—very few chain-store names here—that lined the roads for a few blocks around Camden Harbor. Camden is made up of community-minded people with cultural interests, wealthy retirees, marine and outdoor-oriented people. And so people noticed this piece of electronics because it wasn’t just a video camera—it was a ―webcam.‖ Around the VillageSoup: Sustaining News in a Rural Setting Vol. 5, Issue 6 (2010) 2 clock, day-after-day, the faces of passersby, converted to bits and bytes, moved through wires to the offices of VillageSoup—the local, online news company that Anderson founded in 1996— across a high-speed link, and into the Internet cloud. Anderson liked to think of the camera as a media metaphor. ―It was just like sitting on the park bench watching people walk by,‖ he said. There were those who loved it. Teenagers would ham it up. Parents would bring their young children down to the storefront and beam a view of the kids to grandparents online a few thousand miles away. It was a community snapshot. But some townspeople saw the webcam in French & Brawn’s window differently. The mood changed. Some avoided the camera’s incessant prying, not willing to have their stroll on the street documented and perhaps recorded by some precursor of Big Brother. It didn’t help that one of the people concerned was balladeer Don McLean (―American Pie‖). Then Dan Rather picked up the controversy and CBS Evening News showed clips from the webcam one night. Anderson’s son and daughter-in-law began to worry that their store was seen as invading the privacy of Camden’s citizenry. There was talk about a boycott of the store. Richard Anderson decided the camera had stirred up enough controversy along with a good discussion of privacy, and removed it after a couple months. ―That was fun!‖ Anderson recalled with a wide-eyed smile. Call it an experiment or a stunt, but for Anderson it was a playful attempt to document the faces of a community. And when it became a referendum on the notion of privacy, that was okay, too. He said the experience taught him something about being a community publisher: That it was part of his role to stir conversation in the community and let people express themselves, but never make any lasting enemies, and keep it fun. Experience would be the great teacher for Anderson as a pioneer in online news. He started a Web-only news site much earlier than most, and in doing so he used hard news professionalism to create value in his product. In competition with existing weekly newspapers in his region of Mid-Coast Maine, he was winning the battle for readers but not attracting all the advertisers away from print products. So he started weekly print newspapers of his own, going from Web to print in a counter-intuitive move that few others have tried. Mid-Coast Maine sits in a vast rural district surrounded by working forestland, and it sustains itself in part from tourists attracted to a beautiful harbor and coastline. With only 1.3 million residents in an area the size of Indiana (which has more than 6 million residents), Maine is the most rural of the New England states. The Congressional district that includes Camden is the The Online Journal of Rural Research and Policy Vol. 5, Issue 6 (2010) 3 largest in geographical area east of the Mississippi, and Maine has only two districts. Only three daily newspapers are published in Maine, plus a number of weeklies, giving most residents less access to the news of the day than more urban folks would have. The finances of newspapers and media in Maine mirror the issues found in rural areas of the Great Plains. This story from start-up to sustainability at VillageSoup reads like a three-act play, including many of the same complications that new-media sites encounter everywhere, but it resolves using what may become a standard economic model for sustainable Web-based news production, especially in rural regions. Act One: “Do you know about the building burning downtown?” On Dec. 9, 1996—Richard Anderson’s 56 th birthday—he and his son, Derek, started the Webonly news site focused on local news. Camden was a convenient location, but not an ideal place for a business experiment. It boasted a great deal of Internet penetration into the community, especially for 1996, but it also had a 127-year-old weekly newspaper, the Camden Herald. To compete, Anderson adopted hardcore news values. His first employee was Managing Editor Jill Lang, a journalism graduate of the University of Massachusetts and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism who also had substantial print journalism experience in Maine. A focus group helped them settle on a distinctive name, VillageSoup.com, that emphasized the community affinity focus and suggested a warm stew of ideas, words, photos, ads and listings. For a logo, they picked a big orange dot, plastering it on cars, buildings and sponsorship venues. Anderson was born in Burlington, Iowa, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, and taught middle school math in Cedar Rapids. He moved to Camden in 1996 after closing his successful elementary and high school textbook production company, Ligature, in Chicago. After Ligature, he had tried to start an innovative company that published curriculum on CDs and on the Internet, but teachers hated it. As often happens in the information age, however, failure can lead to innovative success. Anderson read a book called Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities, published by John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong in 1997, and saw that topics and geographical areas could create business affinity groups. ―I started with monetizing but after reading that book I saw the affinity side. Daily news online was how we generated traffic,‖ he said. ―We were organizing affinity groups. We weren’t publishing a newspaper.‖ To put it in simpler language, he decided to create a website that people in Camden (his geographic affinity group) would go to. He could create one that featured businesses and advertising, but he knew those weren’t as popular. He decided to put up local news to get people to the site. Once there, they could interact with advertisers, and do other local business, which had been his original intent. News wasn’t the passion so much as something he saw as his best vehicle. At about the same time, America’s newspapers were taking baby steps online. Papers started up websites. At first, crude software shoveled the day’s print stories online, lightly embellished. Gradually came photos, then some audio, blogs, and video. Most of those sites remain unprofitable today. VillageSoup: Sustaining News in a Rural Setting Vol. 5, Issue 6 (2010) 4 The Andersons concentrated on the Web. They published Web-only and built an audience with fast, accurate, and well-written stories along with all the interactive services that only the Web can provide. They quickly expanded to the nearby towns of Rockland and Belfast. Thomas J. Hall, the city manager of Rockland from 1999 until 2008, said, ―The freshness of the news causes us to click on several times a day to find out what’s happening. There’s a level of journalism we haven’t enjoyed before.‖ He watched discussions on VillageSoup, for example about a methadone clinic, and felt those forums could be the future of government discussion. ―VillageSoup gets community voices on a soapbox,‖ he said. ―Other things VillageSoup affords us cannot be translated into a traditional print newspaper. This is made for the common man. This has the ability to change habits.‖ Bob Hastings, until 2009 the C.E.O. of the Penobscot Bay Regional Chamber of Commerce in Rockland, knew about VillageSoup before he moved from Door County, Wisconsin. He used it to find a house in Maine. Sitting in his office a few steps from Rockland harbor, Hastings said, ―That’s where you go for news. I check it eight times a day. The old media don’t get it. Most newspapers have very ineffective websites. Derek and Richard figured it out. But VillageSoup is part of the fabric of the everyday life here. Everyone talks about it. It really took off when the branding took place with the orange circle. The new name really says what it’s about.‖ He predicted the website would become a ―national model.‖ Talking about the ―real time online‖ quality of the site, Hastings told the story of a prisoner who had escaped during a hearing at the court in Rockland, within sight of the Chamber office. About 15 min