Two media veterans ”“ and a married couple to boot ”“ are poised to take local community news to the next level.
Carll Tucker and Jane Bryant Quinn will debut the first expansion of their Main Street Connect online news company next month.
“This is the first time we”™ve propagated from our original pots,” Tucker said of the move to introduce 31 Westchester sites June 1.
Main Street Connect, which Tucker said is destined to be a national community-news presence, launched its first site, TheDailyNorwalk.com, in March 2010. Less than a year later, this past February, that first site had passed 1 million visits. There are 10 sites in Connecticut now.
With corporate headquarters in South Norwalk, technology headquarters in Brooklyn and new offices in Armonk, the company continues to grow.
“Everything was a surprise,” Tucker said. “The immediate positive reaction was a surprise.”
Tucker is the former editor and publisher of Trader Publications in Cross River, while Quinn is the veteran financial journalist and longtime Newsweek contributor.
Tucker and Quinn, 59 and 72 respectively, are still making news.
“Jane and I are essentially print people who had to learn about this new medium,” Tucker, who lives with Quinn in Manhattan and Dutchess County, said. “It was really like putting up a sail in a gale-force wind.”
But it”™s been a way for these veteran journalists to keep moving forward.
“Obviously, Jane and I talk a lot about journalism,” Tucker said.
Local papers nationwide, he said, are missing the mark.
“They developed a culture of deciding what people should read about,” Tucker said. “The product just drifted farther and farther away from what people want.”
The dire state hit close to home for them in February 2009 when Tucker and Quinn were in Dutchess and learned the little local paper had folded.
“We looked at each other and said ”˜How is this possible?”™” Tucker said.
Quinn said they were spurred to do something for others facing that same situation.
“We said ”˜How do we get news?”™ Clearly, you are not going to publish a paper anymore,” Quinn said.
Tucker added they didn”™t want to just sit by and “watch the inevitable and sad decline of news on paper.”
“We love the industry,” Tucker said emphatically. “The news was really not dead. It was just trying to find its future.”
The audience, Quinn said, want news “but not on paper.”
So Main Street Connect was the pair”™s way to take their experience and move forward with Tucker as founder, editor, publisher and CEO and Quinn its editorial director.
One thing, Tucker said, was clear from the start ”“Â readers would need to trust the company and its work.
“Part of the challenge is how do you guarantee the quality of sites across this huge network,” he said.
That, he said, is where Quinn comes in, handling the intense training for employees, who range from new graduates to career journalists transitioning from the print world.
“Actually for me, the fun is developing the reporters, developing the writing,” Quinn said, and added the teaching element reminds her of earlier days in her career when she was writing a newsletter for McGraw-Hill.
Tucker says the Main Street Connect”™s goal is simple. It”™s to give every community in America a community-news site that is “as good and as satisfying as the great community newspaper” of old.
Not charging for content is also key, or as Quinn says, “Free is good.”
Monies come via advertisers, who Tucker says are reaching their prime audience through “annual visibility packages” rather than traditional ads.
“We know that every day, anyone who comes to our site comes there voluntarily, every day, to read about their town,” Tucker says. “This is the group they want to reach.”
And in coming to Westchester, Tucker and Quinn both are reaching back to their own earlier days. Tucker grew up in Mount Kisco and also lived in Bedford; Quinn has lived in both Chappaqua and North Salem.
Local connections are key to them, as well as their readers.
“We intensely identify with the towns that we live in, so our dominant metaphor is the digital town green,” Tucker said.
Added Quinn, “We don”™t have a narrow view of news. (It”™s) anything you see there that wasn”™t there yesterday.”
