By Nathan Alderman, former J-Lab Online Editor
Aubrey Young liked to go for Sunday drives with his long-haired dachsund Simon in the woods outside Camden, Maine. His relatives worried that the 80-year-old might get confused or lost, but he always came home by early afternoon.
On July 4, 2004, he didn’t.
As the search for Young began, police turned to an unusual source for help: VillageSoup, whose Web sites, online business directory and weekly newspapers serve Knox and Waldo Counties in Midcoast Maine. VillageSoup’s coverage of Young’s disappearance may have led to his recue.
VillageSoup, one of the older online community news operations, treats newspapers and the Web as two halves of a complementary whole. “We’re trying to use both [print and the Web] for what they’re good at,” said publisher Derek Anderson.
The winner of an honorable mention in the 2003 Batten Awards, VillageSoup uses its two weekly newspapers to promote its Web sites, drive readers online and attract local advertisers. Its two VillageSoup.com Web sites cover Camden, Rockland and 14 other towns in Knox County and Belfast and 26 other towns in Waldo County, providing expanded coverage, community interaction and breaking news. The sites also generate copy for the company’s newspapers: Knox County’s VillageSoup Times and Waldo County’s VillageSoup Citizen.
As the company grows, Anderson hopes to license VillageSoup’s technology to small-scale news operations in towns and urban neighborhoods throughout the nation (See sidebar, “Making Community News Pay.”)
After VillageSoup posted Young’s description, police officers made printouts of the Web story and placed them in local businesses.
Young was found alive two days later on the outskirts of a nearby town thanks to a tip from a resident who’d seen a printout. VillageSoup’s online coverage included on-the-scene photos of Young’s rescue, interviews with his family, a map of the remote area where he’d been found – even photos of Simon, the dog.
The flexibility and speed of the Web is key to covering stories like Young’s, Anderson said. “Even in a small community like this, news doesn’t care what a press schedule is.”
VillageSoup has 17 paid reporters and editors at its three town bureaus. In addition, dozens of community members contribute news, notices and commentary.
VillageSoup began in 1996 as the brainchild of Anderson’s father Richard, a former teacher and textbook curriculum developer and current CEO of VillageSoup. It started as an online directory of local businesses, then expanded to cover Camden news in 1998 when the Andersons hired managing editor Jill Lang, a Columbia Journalism School graduate and veteran local reporter.
“When I joined the company, I was one of five employees,” Lang said. “There was a pool table in the middle of the office.”
From that modest beginning, popular demand drove VillageSoup to open bureaus in Rockland in August 2000 and Belfast in February 2001.
In 2003, Derek Anderson noticed that many of the local weekly newspapers, most owned by a South Carolina company, were cutting budgets and focusing less on local news. “They were losing the vision of what we thought a community newspaper should be,” he said.
In response, the Andersons launched Knox County’s Village Soup Times in September 2003. The Village Soup Citizen followed in June 2004 for neighboring Waldo County.
“We rely on the community for ideas and content,” Lang said. VillageSoup accepts news from residents, press releases from businesses, poems and essays from students, school lunch menus, animal shelter notices and the local bridge scores. VillageSoup doesn’t pay Web contributors, but citizens chosen as “guest columnists” for the print editions earn $15 – $45 per article plus a smaller reprint fee if their work appears in both papers.
Rob Oakley, a local information technology professional, freelance writer and part-time VillageSoup contributor, said the site’s local focus has made it popular among residents. “Sure, you can get CNN, but we can see who got arrested for DUI, what’s cooking in the local restaurants, who’s hiring, and what new animals are in at the shelter,” he said.
Doug Hufnagel, another citizen contributor, likes VillageSoup’s Community Letters sections, which host lively discussions on community issues. “It’s what every community needs, like Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, London,” he said. “It’s taken a while, but [people] are becoming braver about expressing their ideas in a public forum.”
Unless users become vulgar or threatening, “we don’t monitor, edit or remove content users post on the site,” Derek Anderson said. “Users are responsible for what they say here.”
However, Anderson closed the sites’ community bulletin boards as the presidential election approached in fall 2004 after anonymous comments grew increasingly abusive. “I felt like I had a group of bullies hanging out in the boards, looking to pick fights with people,” he said. “It was a bad representation of our communities. “He hasn’t ruled out reopening the forums in the future, but said he has no current plans to do so.
VillageSoup didn’t lose traffic when the forums closed. The regular posters among the sites’ 8,300 registered users simply moved their discussions to Community Letters. Letter writers are identified by their real names, which has made the conversation “more civil,” Anderson said.
“[VillageSoup] has given a voice to many community members whose comments were formerly limited to over-the-fence gossip,” said Harvey Ardman, an early VillageSoup employee who now contributes to the sites. “The result is a community that knows itself much better than before. It’s a kind of participatory democracy.”
The influx of letters is also a boon to reporters, who sometimes use citizens’ remarks as quotes in their stories. Editors have invited some of the most frequent letter writers to become regular contributors.
Even as the Web sites create copy for VillageSoup’s print editions, the newspapers drive traffic online. The Times, with a combined newsstand and subscription circulation of 8,000, and the Citizen with 4,000, are “the best marketing tools our Web sites have ever had,” Lang said.
“Take It Online” blurbs in the paper encourage readers to find expanded coverage online. When Camden hosted the National Toboggan Championships in February 2005, the newspapers ran six photos but invited readers to see hundreds more online.
“People see something in the paper and go to the Web to send it to someone else,” Lang said. “Even years-old stories in our archives are e-mailed.”
VillageSoup’s custom-built content management system allows reporters to write long for the Web; editors then trim the copy for print. “Will people read 2,000 words on the Web?” Lang said. “I don’t think so. But they should have the option of finding it there, with photos in galleries whenever we can provide them.”
As more citizens use VillageSoup’s online features, its Web traffic continues to grow on a monthly basis. In December 2004, its two sites received 1.75 million combined page views. The following month, traffic increased to 2 million page views, and in February 2005 it rose to 2.25 million. Derek Anderson attributes much of the growth to an influx of new readers from Waldo County, many driven to the site by the VillageSoup Citizen newspaper.
One reader, however, thinks that launching the newspapers has shortchanged VillageSoup’s Web sites. “It currently seems that everyone works for the paper and the online version gets fed the leftovers,” said Camden resident Bridget Qualey.
Where the site once covered local news promptly and aggressively, now “sports and accidents fill most of the daily menu, with a smattering of articles from the print version,” she said.
Lang said the situation is more complex. In VillageSoup’s early days, the Web sites posted news as quickly as possible. The rapid updates were popular with the sites’ readers but didn’t reach the larger audience now served by the newspapers. The print editions broadened readership “without a substantial increase in the number of news staff,” Lang said.
“In a best-case world, we’d have fresh community news online seven days a week,” she said. “But that’s not a realistic goal for our staff right now. And on Monday and Tuesday as we near deadline for Wednesday publication, some attention does, indeed, shift toward the production of our newspapers.”
Lang said the company is still working to find the right balance between serving its print and online outlets. Even on her staff’s busiest days, the sites “are full of fresh and important news for the community,” Lang said. “We know our roots. We respect them.”
