TWO MILLION VISITS

Exciting news: RiverheadLOCAL.com hit the 2-million-visit mark this weekend!

Peter and I are blown away by the support we’ve received in our community and thank each of you from the bottom of our hearts.

This independently owned and operated online “newspaper” startup covering a town with a total population of under 35,000 has had more than 2 million visits in less than three years…

And, as you can see from a screenshot of a Google Analytics report below, RiverheadLOCAL has had more than half a million unique visitors since the first time I hit the “publish” button on the back end of this site.  And our pageviews, which surpassed 2 million for 2012 alone, are approaching the 5-million mark since launch. (Click here to view larger image in a new window.)

Well… wow.

And thank you. Thank you for reading and writing. Thank you for advertising with us and sponsoring our work. Thank you for news tips and photos. Thank you for laughing with us, crying with us, and being inspired with us by the stories of the people of this community we’ve had the privilege to tell. Thank you for your passion and commitment to this place we call home.

RiverheadLOCAL has been recognized by journalism academics, researchers and think-tanks studying the future of news as one of the most successful independent community news sites in the country. They wanted to know the secret to our success, and help us get to “the next level,” so the founders of a conference dubbed “Block by Block” chose RiverheadLOCAL to participate in a “News Entrepreneur Super Camp” in 2011. It began with an intense four-day “boot camp” in Chicago following the 2011 BxB conference and lasted for the whole year following, with weekly conference calls, business coaching, site visits and a lot of work. It culminated in my participation as a panelist at the 2012 Block by Block Conference about “Pivot Points” in our journey.

So, what’s the secret to our success? 

It’s actually not a difficult question.

The secret to our success is you. It’s community. It’s our community. It’s our part in the community, our commitment to our community and our love for our community.

As NYU professor of Journalism Jay Rosen put it at BxB12 in Chicago this year, “Big media companies write about your communities. You write for your communities.”

That sums it up perfectly. And it’s been the difference between big media companies and community journalism forever. 

There’s a lot of hype about “hyperlocal”… like the world has made a new discovery called “hyperlocal” news.

Well, “hyperlocal” news may be a new discovery for big corporations like America Online, which spent millions to buy a little news website in Connecticut called Patch (a company AOL’s CEO had founded and was a principal in, by the way, before he was hired by AOL.) AOL’s been trying to roll it out in a 1,000 communities across the US. It’s AOL’s attempt to reinvent itself (now that people don’t need AOL dial-up to access the internet.) It’s a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all stab at “hyperlocal” news, generally managed by someone AOL “parachutes” into a community from elsewhere. And by most accounts (except AOL’s account, whose chairman — the guy who sold them Patch —defends the “experiment” and swears it will work) it’s been a dismal failure: losing an estimated $148 million in 2011 and causing a shareholder uprising for AOL in 2012.

The results of AOL’s Patch experiment has some industry pundits pontificating about how “hyperlocal” news can’t work.  But folks like NYU’s Prof. Rosen and Michele McLellan at the Knight Digital Media Center believed otherwise, and that’s how BxB was born, with generous support from the Patterson Foundation, Reynolds Journalism Institute and KDMC.

AOL and other big media corporations didn’t invent what we’re doing. Maybe they gave it a new (and in my opinion, stupid) name, but they didn’t invent it. 

Journalists have been doing what we’re doing here at RiverheadLOCAL since the beginning of time — OK, that may be a mild exaggeration, but seriously, it’s been hundreds of years. Community journalists continue to do it this way: reporting for their communities, rather than about them, because they live in their communities, they raise their families there, they pay taxes there… it’s home.

The new thing is the medium of delivery. Certainly that’s no small thing. The new medium, the internet, requires immediacy to be relevant. It requires being able to operate on a shoestring budget — because online ad revenues don’t support “legacy” media’s business model. (In plain English, they can charge a whole lot more for print ads; online ad dollars won’t support large organizations.) It also requires a journalist to be an entrepreneur — more so than all but the tiniest of traditional community newspaper operations.

But with those new twists, RiverheadLOCAL is providing good old fashioned community news for the community we  call home. 

And that, in my opinion, is the secret to our success, summed up in one word: community.

Community isn’t something you produce in far-away corporate headquarters.

It isn’t something that’s the same from town to town — despite the national chains’ attempt to homogenize us and make us all look the same, with the same chain restaurants and big box retailers. Community character and identity is more than how a place looks.

Community is what’s inside. 

Denise Civiletti, reporter, editor, digital maven and former newspaper editor and publisher, lives and works in Riverhead. She vaguely remembers having a life away from electronic gadgets before being consumed by her role as a digital-hyperlocal-news-entrepreneur-pioneer — lol— publishing RiverheadLocal.com with her husband Peter Blasl.

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