Hyperlocal news sites — Main Street Connect — launch March 22

Carll Tucker talks about his new venture in hyperlocal news sites called Main Street Connect.

Update: By May 20, 2010, Main Street Connect had launched three more community news sites in beta, all in Fairfield County, Conn.:  The Daily Westport, The Daily Fairfield and The Daily Darien.  It also announced these members of its board of directors:  Chairman Peter Georgescu, chairman emeritus of ad giant Young & Rubicam Inc.; Stephen I. Sadove, CEO of Saks Inc.; and financial journalist Jane Bryant Quinn. Quinn is also the editorial director for Main Street Connect and the wife of founding partner Carll Tucker. 

Original post: On March 22, Carll Tucker  launched the first in Norwalk, Conn., of what he hopes will be 3,000 hyperlocal news sites by 2013.  

Tucker, the former editor/publisher of  Trader Publications Inc., is the founding partner of Main Street Connect, which describes itself as a national community news company. It will offer franchises to start community news Web sites. He said that franchisees would have to invest $25,000-50,000 and, within 18 months, should have $250,000-500,000 in cash flow.   Similar ventures, by both big companies, such as Microsoft with Sidewalk.com, and startups, such as Backfence.com, have yet to crack this market. ”We sell community, not clicks,” Tucker said in differentiating his offering. “There’s nothing on the Web that is a satisfying ad medium for local businesses.”  

He spoke on the eve of launch at a panel on entrepreneurial journalism as part of the SABEW Conference at the Cronkite School. Others on the panel were Eric Schurenberg, editorial director for CBS MoneyWatch.com, which he started in six weeks in 2009; Rob Cox, a founder of Breakingviews.com, which started in 2000 and was sold to Thomson Reuters in 2009; and Dan Gillmor, director at ASU’s Cronkite School of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. The panel was moderated by Warren Watson, executive director of SABEW.   

Tucker started his venture after the weekly paper serving his and wife Jane Bryant Quinn’s country home in Beekman, N.Y., went out of business. He saw an opportunity: “Our core reader is a mother of school-aged children; Madison Avenue is having trouble reaching her, and we hope to help them out.”  The group’s Web sites will use the URL: “TheDaily(town).com.”  

A promotional video described The Daily Norwalk Web site as a combination of a great community newspaper and Facebook: “Beneath this old-fashioned exterior is a high-tech heart.”  

He said that his sports editor, recruited from a local newspaper, at first wanted to recruit many people to do extensive coverage of varsity high school sports. Given his target audience of moms, Tucker told him that the first sports that needed to be covered were youth sports and rec sports. “With newspapers, you have a limited amount of space and quite a lot of personnel. Here (online) we have unlimited space and very limited personnel.”  

The newspaper industry got into a rut, he said. “The great liberation of a new medium is that you don’t have to do anything anybody tells you.”  

 Cox attributed the success of Breakingviews.com, which offers financial commentary and analysis in “realish time” to the “global financial elite,” to having excellent content, a good idea that served a market need, financing, supportive shareholders (who were very patient) and good governance. He said the sale to Reuters in December created “a reasonable return to our shareholders.”  

 Schurenberg said that the video-centric, personal-finance site, CBS MoneyWatch.com, is the network’s experiment in low-cost business reporting. ” We have to operate with a gimlet eye on costs, and everyone is responsible for everything.”  

Gillmor said that “the students we have here (at the Cronkite School) are largely going to be inventing their own jobs.” He admitted that it’s “so exciting for them that I’m jealous beyond words.” One reason is that you can go from an idea for an online media venture to doing it in a short time with almost no capital. “You can do 90 percent of the technology from off-the-shelf parts that you bolt together.”  

Gillmor said it’s hard for big news companies to innovate because of the desire to protect cash flow — “which is still massive” — by not competing with yourself. “The small stuff – if it doesn’t move the needle in a visible way — they’re not interested.” He noted that his former employer, Knight Ridder — which was purchased by the McClatchy Co. in 2006 — owned the domain name, Headlines.com, since the mid-1990s and never used it to aggregate news headlines.