45°
Friends,
It's been ten months, almost to the day, since the idea for this enterprise popped into my head, and five months since we started operating as a company. In that period we have invented a wholly new idea in communications; convinced an extraordinarily intelligent and accomplished group of Americans to finance and guide our adventure; assembled a management team that is smart, committed, and almost crazily hard-working; designed, constructed, tested, and introduced our own CMS (content management system), that is unlike any that the world has witnessed: at once pleasing to look at, easy to use, replete with content, and responsive to the needs to its three audiences (neighbors, local businesses, and prospective affiliates); developed a business plan that clearly maps our route to becoming one of America's largest and most profitable news and information channels (the map will prove wrong in a hundred particulars, but you don't get anywhere without a map); assembled a team of 25 writers, photographers, sales folk, engineers and administrators, more than a few of whom work every waking hour to bring this dream to life; developed a new way of supporting community businesses with visibility, which explodes the crippling Google pricing paradigm; learned how to communicate our vision to the businesses who will support us, and listened to their responses, which vary from intrigued to enthusiastically involved; begun to understand how to mobilize neighbors in support of the resuscitation of their communities' communications heart; developed a new way of socializing community news, which eschews traditional media and concentrates on neighbor collaboration, social media, and guerilla marketing; raised the curtain on www.thedailynorwalk.com (four weeks ago) and prepared for the introduction of www.thedailywestport.com (two weeks ago) and just last week we launched www.thedailyfairfield.com, shortly thereafter, sibling sites in Darien, New Canaan, Wilton, Weston, and Easton; watched with astonishment the initial ramp-up of viewers to www.thedailynorwalk.com, which suggests that we are fulfilling a community need and that folks enjoy returning to our site regularly; and begun to spread the word about our unprecedented adventure to national and regional audiences.
Ten months feel like ten years.
If I had the time I could write a book about our adventure (maybe one day I will). Time, though, is our scarcest resource. Every day, all seven in a week, we are rushing, rushing, rushing from when we wake to when we slump to sleep. Yesterday, I sent out (I just counted them) 66 emails on different topics (not counting hundreds more that were copied); my first call with our president, JohnFalcone, was at 8 a.m., my last at a few minutes before 9 p.m., as he cradled his smart-phone with his chin and spoke to the clerk at Best Buy, where he was purchasing two additional notebook computers for our troops. (His day was not done he just had "a few more calls.") Nor are John and I alone. My wife, Jane Bryant Quinn, and every member of our leadership team are communicating with each other at all hours between 7 a.m. and 11 p. m.(or later) Monday through Sunday. The pace is as breathless as one of those big roller-coasters, giddying, breathless, and exhilarating. One member of our team said to me the other day that the reason he was having such fun is that everything he did mattered. We all feel that, that we are engaged in changing the shape of tomorrow's communications.
What have we learned? More than we can say, even if time allowed. Every day is crammed with surprises, as if we were travelers in an exotic civilization. If I had to sort our surprises into buckets (John is forever, with dazzling analytical acumen, sorting quandaries into "buckets"), I'd suggest three:
1.) Complexity. Turns out, this is a much more complicated business than we gave it credit for. Coordinating and teaching technology, local reporting, sales force management, community relations, social media, ad-trafficking, and billing, while maintaining on-line sites around the clock so they present well to any visitor day or night, and figuring out how to build these skills in affiliates takes a lot of doing far more than a single person could accomplish. When we were starting, I was often asked, Why would affiliates need you? Why wouldn't they do this on their own? That question has become ludicrous. Others could do what we're doing (none has tried yet keep your fingers crossed), but no human being could do this without the help of a team with varied competencies and a whole lot of commitment. One reason no one has yet created and propagated high-quality, profitable community news sites around the country, despite the quite obvious allure of that proposition, is that it ain't easy. That is great news. Every day we work, we put distance between ourselves and the competitors who inevitably will be coming after us. They will have to work through the questions we are working through. Our intellectual property, the array of things we do to bring this off, is hard to replicate.
2.) A Young Person's Business. Our business benefits from a few gray heads to steer it, but the work, in the main, depends on strong, eager, men and women in their twenties and thirties. Those of us older than this cohort find ourselves panting to keep up.
There are reasons for this. Technology evolves so rapidly that obsolescence nips continually at our heels. Almost none of the technology our business depends on was available when I sold my company ten years ago. My learning from those years is applicable, but few of my skills. The next generation is familiar with this technological climate. They friend and tweet and ping and tether and synch and e-exist with the ease of native speakers. Many of our initial assumptions about technology just four months ago have been superseded by new and superior capabilities. Novelty is a continuous reality. There is no steady state, at which one arrives; every week our tools can accomplish something new and amazing, and we have to keep up. This is easier when you're younger.
The pace of today's work is grueling. Much higher per-person output is standard operating procedure. Partly, this is the effect of technology, and partly, I think, of our competitive global economy. The familiar divisions of work-time and play-time, weekdays and weekends, are eroded by the cell-phone and our ability to operate effectively outside a geographically fixed office. This is hardly new news; but working in such a marketplace requires more physical strength and stamina than the more structured, less stressful workplaces of my younger years. Those who are not quick, strong and adaptable fall by the wayside. It's brutal, but that's the way the world is.
It's easier when you're younger to imagine things that have never been. The reason that existing newspaper companies have produced, almost universally, such unappealing and unsuccessful community news sites is that they've been translating their products and approaches and values onto the Web. It seems hard for them to fathom that this is a new medium which visitors and businesses use in new, heretofore unimaginable ways. When we design a page or a program, we are not freighted with some preconception about how "things ought to be done." We salute no "oughts." We just ask ourselves, who is our audience, how does she or he communicate, and what might she or he find really useful or attractive?
Younger people like building the future because they'll get to live in it. I confess to a little nostalgia, helping to invent a world I will only briefly inhabit. Younger people can imagine the benefits this will bring to the Main Streets where they will raise their kids and evolve their society. We are determined, all of us, to make Main Street Connect sites a force for good in the communities we serve.
3.) The Right Idea. True, our adventure has taken more doing than we predicted, but each day fortifies our conviction that this is the right idea at the right moment. Local businesses have endured a decade of deteriorating advertising choices. As newspapers waned, and yellow pages and pennysavers lost audience, and radio and cable markets fragmented, and junk mail proliferated, and online choices further fractionated consumers' attention, advertising cost more and more and became less and less effective. Now, in major brands throughout the country, we are seeing a resurgence of interest in local marketing, community by community, even person by person. If you think of communities as concentric rings, Main Street Connect sites are the ring just beyond Facebook, the nation's single most attractive medium in terms of numbers. We give our readers community vividly for free on the communications medium with which they are most familiar. Towns desire a single Town Green, whether physical or digital. When we become the Digital Town Green for Main Street Moms throughout America, we will be providing local businesses a truly effective place to congregate and share their good news.
So far, audience response seems to indicate we're on the right track. Granted, it's early innings, but already we have a lot to crow about and be grateful for. If you'd told me we could construct a site of such excellence and a team so committed and capable in this short time, I'd have told you you were hallucinating. Maybe we are but the dream is delicious.
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