NewCanaanite.com Turns Two Years Old

On this day in 2014, I posted the following Tweet from a local news site account that my brother Terry and I had conceptualized the prior day—the first public post of any kind for NewCanaanite.com:

Hello New Canaan

— NewCanaanite.com (@NewCanaanite) January 31, 2014

It was two days after Patch laid me off and that night, Terry covered a New Canaan High School varsity boys’ basketball game, our first story, and the following Monday, I showed up at a police briefing at NCPD headquarters in the morning, reporting on a number of arrests and investigations, and covered a Zoning Board of Appeals meeting that night—the first few news articles to appear on the New Canaanite.

Our concept was to fill what we perceived to be a news need in the town where we grew up: timely, originally reported local news stories that addressed quality-of-life matters to New Canaanites, presented in a Web-friendly way that was attuned to the town’s unique sensibility—covering traffic and parking, pets, parks, schools, land use, the downtown, local history and resident profiles.

Now, two years later, we measure our progress in different ways, including these numbers:

• After breaking local news stories this month about a fox caught in a leg hold trap, The Hub launching, Philip Johnson Glass House expanding, New Canaan Library’s rebuilding plans, Chicken Joe’s closing and the Grand List—we are poised to set a new high for a single month of traffic, at 105,000-plus pageviews this January.
• We earned eight “Excellence in Journalism” awards from the CT Society of Professional Journalists for work done in 2014.
• We eclipsed 1 million pageviews in 2015.
• Our daily M-F newsletter (sign up here) goes to more than 1,000 subscribers, and they’re opening it and clicking thru at unusually high rates—open rate on left, click-thru on right:

Those numbers are important in their way, and we continue to track our metrics daily as NewCanaaite.com’s business and reach grows.

What is equally important and more meaningful to me are the ways that I myself, and the website, have become more ingrained in the community in these two years:

• I joined the peerless New Canaan Chamber of Commerce within weeks of launch, and it remains the single most important decision I made since we started. This month, I became a member of the chamber’s Board of Directors.
• I took in a summer intern for the summer of 2014, Alex Hutchins, then participated in the NCHS Senior Internship Program as a host site the following year, taking on additional interns, and now serve on that program’s Steering Committee.
• We forged a partnership with the fabulous New Canaan Library and our news feed appears on their homepage.
• We also forged a partnership with the one-of-a-kind New Canaan Historical Society, digitizing a searchable database that gives readers information on the history of street names in town, and drawing on its researchers’ expertise to deliver a presentation about New Canaan in 1927.
• We hosted two successful Community Coffees, and now have a regular schedule set up for all of 2016, in partnership with the library.

Our local sensibility tells us that New Canaanites would be just as quick to help a neighbor in trouble as they would be to gossip about that neighbor, so we stand by our policy of withholding the names and mug shots of people who are arrested, choosing—at the cost of rather cheap traffic—to appeal to the better sides of our readers. The people who live here continue to show us that side.

We do not practice “aggregation” from our colleagues in this field—a four-syllable word for a four-letter act, in which some rather disingenuously capitalize on the boots-on-the-ground reporting of others. We do not post weather updates, town meeting agenda items, police logs or other items that our readers could find just as easily on their own elsewhere on the Internet.

We don’t shoe-horn nonlocal storylines into our editorial coverage plan. The two criteria we have for posting any article are:

1. Only someone with a strong connection to New Canaan—from here, lives here, works here—would be interested in reading it.
2. It’s a story that would look out-of-place on a local news site covering any other town.

To this point, our coverage strategy has resonated with local readers.

We hope that continues into 2016 and beyond.

It will only happen with the continued support of the local businesses that advertise on NewCanaanite.com—take a look up and down the right-hand column of this story. Our very first local advertiser and supporter was Bob’s Sports—an iconic New Canaan business. Our first continuous advertiser was New Canaan Olive Oil, a newer business that’s already carved out a singular place in town.

Soon after launch and even more recently, some of the New Canaan businesses that support nearly every community-focused event or effort in town came on board, including Walter Stewart’s, Karl Chevy, Bankwell and Pennyweights.

Many thanks to you, to all of our advertisers—Halo Studios, Christine, Robbie, Kendall and Jaime—and to our readers.

Stop by and say ‘Hello’ some time—we have an office at 140 Elm St.