Editor: I’m On Vacation

I’m headed out Monday to visit my mother in South Carolina (hi, mom—she gets the newsletter) for five days, then my wife Marie and I together will travel to an island in the Caribbean for a week while friends house- and dog-sit here.

(In my absence, and I return Aug. 24, please contact guest editor Dave Gurliacci at dave@darienite.com with any news tips or announcements.)

Part of vacation so far has meant sitting out on the back deck with Wilbur, who turned 10 on July 22.

This will be my first break from NewCanaanite.com since we launched in January 2014, and it seems like a good time to stop and take stock.

Last week when we reported that the news site had passed 1 million pageviews, I paused to thank our advertisers and readers.

Here, I’d like to thank some of the those who have helped me get the New Canaanite to the point it is today, a regular source of local news for many.

Here’s what happened:

• Terry Dinan, my brother—I had been employed by Patch since 2010 but things grew shaky when in the summer of 2013 the company had two major layoffs. Then parent company AOL sold Patch in January 2014, and on the last Wednesday of that month, most of us lost our jobs. On the phone later that day, my brother Terry told me that the URL ‘NewCanaanite.com’ was available and that I should buy it and make a go of covering the town with my own website, with his help. I had no thought of doing this: I had never owned a business (or even taken a business class), Marie and I have mortgage payments, our three dogs’ bills were considerable, especially with two senior dogs, and we were in the process of adopting a fourth, winter oil bills are enormous, we needed a new car and the only money I really had in the bank would be my severance. Still, that Friday, when I met with another former Patch editor, Bill Demarest, at a Panera in Port Chester, N.Y., I told him my brother’s idea. Bill had been with Patch until the prior May, and had launched the highly trafficked Nyack Free Press. Bill told me that if I was going to start my own news site, do it right now: Buy the URL, he advised, and have it redirect to a free WordPress or Blogspot page and just start posting content there. He told me that if I started showing up to public meetings but didn’t have a destination for content, it would confuse people. So that Friday afternoon, I bought the URL and had it redirect to a free page. That same night, Terry covered a NCHS varsity basketball game, and on Monday, I showed up to the weekly police briefing with the local press corps. With zero business experience and never having sold an ad, I was thinking only of posting content and covering the town while I figured out the rest—a vague plan that understandably concerned and underwhelmed Marie. Terry was as good as his word (in fact, with his high quality work, he would take home most of the ‘Excellence in Journalism’ awards we won for work done in 2014 from the CT Society of Professional Journalists).
• Kenny Katzgrau and John Crepezzi, co-founders of Broadstreet—On Wednesday of the following week, thanks to fellow former Patch editor Tom Troncone, several of us from the tri-state area who had been laid off were scheduled to meet at Montclair State University in New Jersey for a how-to in independent news publishing. But there had been a huge snowstorm overnight and the time it took to shovel myself out of the driveway that Wednesday morning was making me late. In my haste, I backed out of our driveway at a bad angle, and became stuck on a snow embankment. I ran back inside our house, grabbed a fire poker and got down on my stomach in the street, trying to smash apart the ice that now was lodged between my car’s front end and the street. My hand soon was bloodied, clothes soiled and I was sweating through my good button-down shirt despite the cold. The young guy with the beard and sunglasses barely registered with me as he walked past, but then he returned a few minutes later, while I was on my stomach under the car: He had come back with his own small shovel, to help me. I’d never met him. He got down on his stomach, too, and said that he went through the same thing only that morning. I told him he had no idea how much I appreciated it, that I had been laid off last week and needed to get on the road for job training. On the way to New Jersey, I picked up Leslie Yager in Greenwich (another laid-off Patch editor, she launched Greenwich Free Press just a few days after I had launched New Canaanite) and Pam Stern (who would go on to launch Inside Rye). We were late, but got to the gathering in time for pizza and to meet Kenny and John, who had founded Broadstreet. Though my site had only been live for five days at that point, I found (and for a few more weeks, continued to find) that I faced two major obstacles in promoting NewCanaanite.com and developing the business. Because the site had ‘Wordpress’ in the URL and because it had no ads, people thought that I was a blogger, a hobbyist. Broadstreet had developed a free, downloadable WordPress theme with a built-in ad server—meaning advertisers could get real-time data on clicks, views and generally how their ad was performing. In other words, what John and Kenny called the “Blargo” theme from Broadstreet was a fully functional website platform for independent publishers like me, who needed not only to do the editorial work of reporting and writing articles, but also needed to handle sales. I switched to that theme three weeks later, and on the strength of the “new look” site (which is basically what NewCanaanite.com is now), launched a daily newsletter using Mailchimp.
• Marie—It’s impossible to measure how much influence my wife has had on the site because so much has been bounced off of her, in casual conversations or more formally—logos, standing features, color schemes, articles, emails, story mix, pages. Not to mention: It wasn’t until about March of this year that I started paying half of our household bills with the income earned through New Canaanite. Marie shouldered the burden through its first year, and is a major reason I was able to focus so completely on building it. Not to mention again: I am, like my mom, a creature of enthusiasms, and I tend to throw myself into things and hyper-focus—that’s often a difficult thing to be around. About three months into New Canaanite, in April 2014, Marie conceived of the idea of a launch party where we’d invite some local stakeholders. For the party itself, held at New Canaan Olive Oil, Marie not only kept me sane and arranged for the food and wine from the restaurant where she works, but also arranged for some swag for attendees—T-shirts, pens, magnets and, with her special touch, a small paper bag of wildflower seeds with a message to “Come Grow With Us” printed on a label she made.
• Tucker and Laura at the Chamber—My emotional amplitude during the first six months of New Canaanite was very erratic: One person’s inquiry about our ad rates could make a bad day good, another person flagging a typo in the seventh paragraph of an article could ruin a good one. Something I learned quickly and definitively, and what I never would have known had I remained on the editorial side of the news business exclusively, is that building a business is about far more than creating a worthwhile product—in this case, something that reaches local people and so could be a useful vehicle for advertisers. What matters are people—having people who are willing to help and encourage you, share a kind word or helpful thought. The smartest thing I did in the early-going of New Canaanite was to join the Chamber of Commerce and by doing so, become part of the closely connected community of local businesses that belong to that group led by Tucker Murphy and Laura Budd. I have said before and will repeat here that the most surprising and rewarding part of this whole experience, for me, has been to become part of the community where I grew up in ways that I never had before—it has been a second chance at New Canaan for me, and a rediscovery of my hometown. And the wonder of the experience has been plugging into the community and getting to know in new ways the people who are involved in New Canaan. The gateway for me was joining the chamber and becoming part of its extended family.
• Mom—How do you thank your mom? She flew up from where she’s retired in North Carolina to be at our launch party last May. She reads the site every day, commenting on New Canaanite as well as Facebook. She has always said to do what makes you happy, and she is in that way, and every way professionally, the great role model: Mom retired from New Canaan Public Schools as a speech and language pathologist in 2005, and went on to work in her retirement, first with stroke patients in Florida, and more recently with little kids in North and South Carolina. She is a survivor of extraordinary energy and a singular work ethic. With respect to getting to this place, now, where I have made room to go away for two weeks, she’s the reason—and her qualities in me will also be the reason that come Aug. 24, I’ll be excited to get back at it.
• Contributors and interns—The site has benefitted from having multiple voices and areas of coverage, not only from Terry’s contributions, but also from contributors such Jes Sauerhoff and Darcy Pennoyer Smith, and from NCHS ’15 grad Alex Hutchins, our intern during the crazy first summer of NewCanaanite.com, from his classmate Mackenzie Lewis, our Senior Internship Program intern this spring who has stayed on for the summer, and from Bella Carpi, RJ Scofield and Sophia Welch. Thank you all for lending your voice, talents and interests to New Canaanite.
• Others—This list could get very long, very quickly, and there are many others who easily could be listed here and toward whom I feel overwhelming gratitude. Someone I had never met—New Canaan’s Charlene Berardino, on April 4, 2014 sent me an unsolicited, encouraging email that I keep and have returned to—it arrived during a very touch-and-go period for the site early on, and on a particularly tough day. In his capacity as a member of the Rotary Club, Bill Walbert a couple of months after New Canaanite launched, took the time to sit with me outside the meeting room at NCPD and asked whether I would be interested in talking to Rotary about the site—which was a fun and validating experience, also in early and uncertain days.

In all cases, I’ve had support from others where they’ve gone out of their way, far beyond what’s required—from people I’ve known my whole life, like Terry, to people I had never met before, like that guy who came back with the snow shovel.

In taking these two weeks, I’m also taking a big step toward achieving a goal with New Canaanite, which is to be part of a rapidly growing group of independent news publishers who figure out together just how to create and sustain a solo media outlet like this, so that we can help others do it. Dave Gurliacci recently launched Darienite.com, and Leslie Yager is having huge success with the Greenwich Free Press. For independent news publishers like us, part of forging a real, repeatable business model is that it’s sustainable, and taking time off is an important, central part of that effort.

I’ll be back Aug. 24.