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A-VERBATIM-Interview Q&As
Founders of a Vermont community/news website explain how it works and why they set it up
By MGP Staff
Jul 18, 2005, 19:23

EXCERPTS FROM A TAPE-RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH
CHRISTOPHER GROTKE AND LISE LePAGE
FOUNDERS OF iBRATTLEBORO
RECORDED JUNE 28, 2005

The following are edited excerpts from a tape-recorded interview with Christopher Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, in Brattleboro, Vt., a community-news website. The interview was conducted by Bill Densmore and Meng-Yi Liu of The Media Giraffe Project.



Q: Brattleboro, Vt., is a town of about 15,000 residents in the southeastern corner of Vermont, along Interstate 91. A former manufacturing town, it has had a long history of progressive thought. What is the media scene here?

GROTKE: If you had shown up two weeks ago you would have found Brattleboro to be a very vibrant local media community . . . Two weeks ago our media landscape here was beautiful and healthy. We had a healthy do-it-yourself radio station a healthy do-it-yourself TV station a healthy do-it-yourself website . . . there was also even an independent advertising rag called the Original Vermont Observer in town. But in the last two weeks the Original Vermont Observer has been bought by MediaNews Group Inc. of Colorado, so they have joined the family of the [daily] Brattleboro Reformer and [weekly] Town Crier and Auto Trader and all those things and so they are no longer original or Vermont. Radio Free Brattleboro was raided by the FCC despite a court case that said that the FCC couldn't raid the station. They kind of went around the station and went to a different judge and got authorization and took all the equipment. Brattleboro Community TV [cable access] -- their directors just eliminated the position of public-access coordinator for the public access station. This was one week after the board at BCTV voted to make sure that position had 30 hours and not 24 that they wanted to cut it back from 40. So Brattleboro has been devastated in the last two weeks.

Q: What would you call what you are doing?

GROTKE: We found it about six months after we started. We started our site, we want to do this, after awhile we started wondering what we were doing. We knew what we were doing but we didn't know what it was called at first. We looked around and OhmyNews was the first place we had that had a name for it and it was “citizen journalism.”

LEPAGE: I don't know that I like it that name. I use it all the time but I use it interchangeably with other things. The website is hard to pigeonhole. ... what we realized as web developers is that the web, especially once you have the ability to have a database, creates an opportunity for community that is different but valid from the real world model, the face-two-face model. So getting that going over the Internet was really important to us and there just wasn't the software available until about two years ago . . . We are defined by our users, the people in the community who use the site and ultimate it is what they want.

GROTKE: One of our inspirations was actually turn of the century newspapers. We found a few old newspapers and you'd read through in the news and those would be like, "Mrs. Smith on Cherry Street has gone to visit her sister in Elmira, N.Y. It's gone out of journalism and it is so much fun to read and it gives you a picture of the time period and what was going on in town and you could just read these things and go, "Oh, they were having a little outbreak of this.” And it was fascinating. So combining that with the database and modern technology, community news and talking over the fence and the idea of a public square where you can just post an announcement and other people can comment on it."

Q: Chris, you mentioned that your mother was in the newspaper business until her recent retirement, as an editor at the Sarasota, Fla., daily. Lise, you published a handwritten community newspaper in your hometown of Baltimore when you were age 9. With you background as a bank teller in Baltimore, English teacher and a multimedia exhibit creator at the Boston computer museum, what motivated you to start iBrattleboro?

LEPAGE: When we got to Brattleboro in 2001, right away we noticed there wasn't a lot going on the web and at the same time it felt like there was a great deal of media consolidation, and other issues related to a kind of clamp down on speech, First Amendment speech and citizen access to those things. And my feeling was that if we created a forum for people to talk about news and we shape it, we want you to talk about news, people will do it. And sure enough, we printed a little flyer that was this big, and that was it. We ran that and when there were no more there were no more. So that was all the advertising there was. And then we got newspaper stories written about us. But as far as what motivated us, it was not money. Money had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was a desire to build an online community based around a real place, where the people using the online community live in the place. And it was to start creating a way for grassroots journalism to flourish. It was so the stories in this town that the Reformer, which is a corporate paper, was not going to cover, got covered. And what we discovered was that when you cover news at that grassroots level, you draw the attention of regular media. And so they then start scanning the site, every day, every other day, and when they see something interesting, they pick it up. So, in a way it is a really great way to bring news up that would otherwise simply not get out at all. Things that are embarassing to [town] board members, and various town boards -- things they don't want to talk about. And certainly points of view that are never going to be represented.

Q: As you try to build iBrattleboro into something that has longevity, do you have to think more about making money?

LEPAGE: We always have to think about making money because we're in business so all of money we get we have to generate ourselves. So if the website, if iBrattleboro, could start generating even $500 a month revenue, that would be helpful for us. As of now, we don't have an ad rep, we don't push ads. When we get ads it is because someone calls us on their own and says we want an ad. I imagine that if we could afford to pay someone to do that -- the assumption would be then that we have capital invested. There is no capital invested in this at all. MuseArts [their web-design partnership] donates the server space and our labor is our own time. People always ask about the money. People always want to know how you make money. And as far as I can tell, if I were doing this and I had a little capital I would have a part-time ad rep. And I would also do classified ads, which is something we are going to do as soon as we have time to install them. Other than that, it is hard for me to imagine. Certainly it would never work as a pay for content, pay to participate program. So I mean you're really kind of stuck with ads. That and maybe donations. I know that some sites like MoveOn are actually funded by donations. We haven't put out a shingle but we have received a couple of donations.

Q: How does somebody do this? Tell us how to do it.

A: Find a local web developer, who knows how to install open-source software.

Q: What is that software?

GROTKE: In our case we use GookLog.Com. We recommend Geeklog or a content management system that you like. We recomend it because it is a very healthy open-source system that a lot of people are using. They keep upgrading it. So, the first think you need to set up the site. It costs no more than $30 to register a domain name. Takes a day to install the software and a week to customize it. A developer might donate their time.

Q: OK, you’ve got the website. Then what?

LEPAGE: "Then you need to promote it. Because you need people to use the site. The method we took works because it is Brattleboro. And that is to print up an intriguing flyer, with the URL printed on it, and make sure the URL is nice and simple . . . If you're doing it on the cheap, I would say get in touch with your local newspaper and see if you can get them to cover you. Because one good story can bring in hundreds of users. You just need a few. We started out with many 20 users in that first three or four months. Now it is over 800 registered users.

GROTKE: We had to write stories to seed the market. I added links in my spare time. And pretty soon you don't have to do it anymore and people are writing their own things now, which is good. We took an approach, in addition to the flyer, a little bit like the Revolutionary War. We heard that a few of those guys in Boston, the John Adams types, would join every organization or go to as many organizations as possible and when public comments were available they would get up and talk about the American Revolution and how everyone should be behind it. And they joined every little group. And so we thought, we can take a page from that. And we went to many community groups and just told them about the site. And we thought, the Peace & Justice Group, they are kind of on the fringe, the have trouble getting their message out and we went to their meeting and presented and they practically kicked us out of their meeting the first few times. Two years later, they're using the site.

Q: Who uses iBrattleboro?

GROTKE: You may not know who your users are going to be. We expected a younger, activist crowd to gravitate to our site. And it really hasn't happened. There's a few. But what we've found is there are a lot more intellectual-thinker types who come to our site.

LEPAGE: There's a million reasons to use the site. You do it to connect with other people in your town, you read the site because it is wild and crazy and you never know what you're going to see there. That's a big reason. I think people get sucked in because you never know.

GROTKE: You can offer your position. You have ownership, you can see what other people are thinking about your idea. You can ask a question. You can get feedback. We have a great link section and calendar of events, which are all self-populated. People just come and put up their event.

LEPAGE: One of the nice things about this software is that every story has equal weight on the home page. So when it fist comes in whether it’s a political story or a meeting summary or something flippant, everything is seen.

Q: In the traditional paradigm of newspapers, editors judge the relative worth of things. And there are some people who will say that “I like that because I want to have a sense of what somebody thought was important.” But what you are saying is the opposite. You are OK with giving neutral weight to everything and letting people decide for themselves essentially.

LEPAGE: Yea! I personally think that thinking for yourself is a lost art. People have a harder time with it. A lot of times people will want to go out and ask a committee for all of their opinions before they make up their own mind about something. And iBrattleboro doesn' t allow you to rely on an editorial board or anything else. You are not going to hear what you should think. There maybe 30 different viewpoints from 30 different people and you decide. And a lot of times people battle it out in the common area. People work out issues and ask questions and find things out. But in terms of not ranking news, once in a while something is so frivolous that he throw it in a section and it is not on the front page. But by enlarge we think every story submitted should have the opportunity to be seen unless it is a silly monkey joke or something.

GROTKE: they'll even get top billing if it is a slow day! But if we have a busy day, like yesterday we had 20 submissions of one sort, and you better have something really good or I'm just going to put in the back because we have 10 other good things. But the vast majority of things do go. We have only not published a handful of things, and most of them have been because they were overt ads. So we have nearly 3,000 stories that have been produced by people.


Q: So you don’t editor or censor and you don’t have an “rules” per se?

GROTKE: We eliminate postings by mean people, lies or slander, things which violate our children’s policy, and we’ll fix some spelling mistakes.

LEPAGE: As soon as you enumerate, you can’t do this, this and this, human beings will immediately find the 11th thing and do that. So rather than giving them rules, we just try to give them guidelines.

Q: Do you think there's an alternative approach of doing it on a member-supported basis the way public radio works?

LEPAGE: No, I don't. Because we have nothing to offer a member that they wouldn't get otherwise. Whether you pay or not the site is there. And it has to be open to all otherwise or else stops being iBrattleboro. If you have people pay to post it’s a self-selecting audience of people who have enough money to pay. And we don't want to limit ourselves like that.

Q: Anybody can listen to a public radio station.

LEPAGE: Oh, that's true, I see what you're saying. You mean go non-profit and do a membership program?

Q: Right.

LEPAGE: Yea, we have thought of those things. You should talk to Chris about that. He is more the money guy although I do the books.

GROTKE: Actually, moneywise, I've always sort of had a 10-year plan with the site and have said that almost from the beginning that what we want to do is concentrate on having a good site that's accessible to the town that has a level of quality that people can count on. Build a reputation that stands. Build readership naturally, and what Lise's saying: Build it and they will come. Once the traffic is there and everyone is reading the site, the ads will come and we won't have to do anything. And that's already starting. First year, no ads. Now, we get calls. Not a lot, but more. And then in 10 years I expect it will just be a natural part of everyone in town. I don't think we have to do the hard sell. We're not really hard-sell salespeople. That's not our passion.

Q: Chris what is your background?

GROTKE: Two things in my childhood influence me for this. My mother was a reporter; just retired. I grew up in newsrooms. In upstate Auburn, N.Y., at The Citizen, and in Punta Gorda, Fla., at the Sarasota Herald Tribune bureau. She became an editor after the New York Times bought the paper. I'm used to going out and doing reporting-kind of activities just as a matter of course. The other things: I've always been one of those kids picking up movie cameras and creating things and creating movies. And that led me to work in radio stations in high school and I thought I'd do that after college but I ended up working at a childrens’ museum and working in their media-arts studio where we had a public-access childrens’ programs for all ages where children could come in and do video, animation, radio lots of photography -- that was in Washington, D.C., at the Capital Children's Museum. I saw the value of giving professional tools to novices. If you give a junior camera to a kid they can make a junior production, but if you give them a professional camera they can make a professional production. So I learned the value of using the real tools and things like that."

I moved to Boston to work at the computer museum. It got great awards, but the owner moved it to California and it closed. And we decided we didn't want that to ever happen again -- put a lot of love and passion into something and have it taken away from you, arbitrarily. So, we started our own company, MuseArts. When we started that that was even a little unique because we decided we'd spend the bulk of our time working for clients and paying the bills. But we'd spend our free time making content. I'm a big fan of Walt Disney and the way he ran the company. I like the way he would throw everything he had back into what he had. I think he died a poor man. He was always mortgaging everything he had to continue his passion. If we can build up our own library of content maybe we'll have something to show for this at the end. So, we’ve made an online interactive castle with 150 hand-drawn rooms you can click around and explore. “Castle Arcana.” It’s very popular in Korea. We have Christmas activities like how to build a snowman. According to our web stats, Korea loves it. We started a series of cartoons. We did guinea pig theater. Guinea pigs sitting in a cage act out drama.

So it was in our tradition to have our own projects. So when we got to Brattleboro we looked around and the Chamber of Commerce site was terrible, there was hardly any information and we thought at first, let's just build a site about Brattleboro and have some links about some things you can do here. And we kind of let that sit for awhile. It was really the FCC decision in making moves in media consolidation that got us thinking we should revisit the idea and maybe use what we had seen going on at RFB, that anyone can be a deejay, well why not anyone can be a writer? And we would use our web skills, we don't have to print anything, we don't have to deliver anything, but anyone with a computer can access it.

Q: When news breaks in town do you make an effort to have it on the site immediate? Are you in the breaking news game?

GROTKE: The people of town are in the breaking-news game. We are if we are on the scene when something happens. We saw a moose in the West River, so we took a picture of that. Somebody else was downtown and the Wilder Building caught on fire and started snappng pictures. In terms of breaking news, we are often first with stories and that's because we don't have to wait until a print and a delivery happens. We also are 24 hours, seven days a week. And our local paper, The Reformer, will go to bed Friday night, and have one issue for Saturday and Sunday and then come back on Monday. So from Friday night through Monday, if anything happens, just about the only place you can find out about it is iBrattleboro, except perhaps radio stations. And a lot of stories, you'll first see them on our site, you'll get somewhat sketch details but you'll know something’s going on and something’s up and then reporters read the site. And they see it and track it down and do the full story with the journalistic approach.

Q: What motivates you to stick with this?

GROTKE: It's fascinating. It's fun. It's scary. You don't know what is going to happen next. It might be a story, or a poem about the weather or it might be the fact that the radio station's been raided by the FCC. There are times when it is nervous and intense. We have select-board members who will call us up at 11 o'clock at night and say that thing that's just written there, I didn't vote this way, I voted that other way.

LEPAGE: The selectboard is on us. Because we're covering them. Because we go to their meetings, and we go to other meetings on public issues. Chris and I do either individually or together. Other people do meeting writeups too, but I would have to say that is my special purview. I would say 90% of the meeting writeups come from me. So I do the selectboard and sometimes Chris does too. And its just because we feel the selectboard needs to be very accountable to the citizens of Brattleboro. And sometimes there is a question over how accountable they are being. So that we felt that by having a pretty detailed writeup of any meetings we're at, would cause them to be more accountable.

GROTKE: We want to get people interested and active in their politics. In a small town, you actually have some control over what happens if you get involved. it doesn't take a tremendous effort. When we were in Boston, we didn't even know where the city council met. In a small town, you all have to get along, because we're all in it together. So no one is out to get anyone. But everyone is out to make their lives and the town better and for some people that means more business and for some people that means keeping it the way it is. And those kind of dialogs need to happen. And the newspaper's not a very good place for that, in my opinion. They seem to kind of write: “Here's what happened, here's what happened, here's what happened.” The don't ask a lot of questions. They don't probe very deeply. The reporters are young, they move on. We have many people on our site that have seniority over reporters at the newspaper. Just because they've been writing for three years on this site and the reporter’s only been there a year and a half. We'll have a longer institutional memory at some point, I think. So it will be harder for the selectboard and people to manipulate young reporters by just saying, "Oh, ho ho, it's just this." We're going to have a crew of people that have been following each meeting, who know what happened at each meeting, who have the agendas of each meeting. We're publishing the agendas of the meetings. Everytime there's a meeting before it we publish the agenda and tell people to go to the meeting. Which has brought a few more people to meetings because they know the agenda and they known they can go and communicate. That's a good thing.

Q: What do you think of the attention paid you by the national, mainstream media? And what do people want to know when they talk to you?

GROTKE: We have been contacted by a number of reporters from trade magazines as well as major media. Boston Globe was doing a feature on a site, “Live from Arlington” and they had talked to us to get started. Dan Gillmor has written about us in his book and on his blog. The Washington Post’s Leslie Walker did a good story which got a lot of attention. Ron Miller just did a story for eContent. When they do the stories they're always interested in the business angle. And its really hard for us to get worked into their stories because we really don't have a business angle. So they usually work us in as a contrast. Somebody else they've found who is setting up a chain of these things. . . . We get questions about it all the time. Every time there's a story somewhere, we get a call, like this. And we go out and meet with people, talk to them. A lot of them are reporters. And a lot of times they will get to the end of the interview and they will admit that what they really want to do is start one of these things and get out of the business . . . The people we've talked to all want to do it on the cheap. Almost everyone has been impressed with how little, one of the main reasons they've gone to the online is the low cost. If they already had a fair amount of money, they are probably thinking of starting a print publication, would be my guess. But, it’s also that this is a young concept and it’s growing and it could go in many directions.

GROTKE: We’ve spoken with the people who are starting up a local paper, the Brattleboro Common, about whether there are things we could do together. Like could we give them the best of iBrattleboro once a week. Ideally they would call it iBrattleboro.com . . . The web-print combination is a natural. We’ve got a site. If you get a prss running, all you have to do is repurpose it to print. It can work both ways perfectly.

Q: But what's intriguing is in a way you really do have a business model, and you articulated a few minutes ago, and it is "slow and steady wins the race."

GROTKE: Yea. And nobody practices that. I was reading about Honda. Honda is thinking long term about wanting to build cars that don't burn oil. They are working toward that and don't really care whether consumers want them right now.

Q: The venture capitalists have a term, "burn rate" to imply how quickly a new company is chewing through cash as it stives for profitability. Because your burn rate is essentially zero can you last at this forever?

GROTKE: Just about forever.

Q: Is that the answer to getting grassroots journalism going?

GROTKE: I think every community is going to have their own solution to this. There is no one size fits all. There is no way as far as I can see that a chain of these or a franchise could really work. You might be able to get a small network of things. I could envision at some point Vermont sites having a network where they work together. But really, the success of the site comes from it being super, super local. And having the ability to run into someone that wrote something on the street. Or bump into them at the store, or something like that. I think each town is going to come up with its own answer.

LEPAGE: I think it depends on the goals of the goals of the people who are doing the site. Our goals were to sponsor grassroots journalism and get the news out locally in Brattleboro. And to promote Brattleboro a little bit. If our goal had been to make money, we would surely be making more of it by now. If you go into it in a community and parts of it are sponsored by a local newspaper with a good local editor, they're go to have the ad people go out to make sure that site has ads on it. And they're going to make money.

GROTKE: They're also going to have rules that we don't have. We have very few rules about what's acceptable. We ask people to be nice to each other, respect each other's opinions. Watch their language -- that its a community that is reading this. Beyond that, we don't really say you can't say that. Whereas very frequently people send letters to the editor of the paper that get edited or don't get published.

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