Walking the streets

Yesterday I stayed off the Internet as part of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protest and walked the streets of Rutland. I really should have brought a camera with me because what I saw was good art: the photographs would have mixed natural beauty, artificial beauty, ugliness, the shadows of the past and the hopes for the future. While walking Rutland and, in particular the Gut (the neighborhood that forms the southwestern part of the city. It's very old, with most of the construction dating back to the nineteenth century and was a mix of industries served by the railroad and the homes of people who worked in those industries), which has always been very working class, but became particularly run down in the second half of the 20th century. Now, my family has never lived down there, but I did go to school on Meadow Street, I had friends from the area and I'm sure my Dad knows plenty of people who live and work there, but the emotions I experienced while walking those streets really brought to life the central quandry of hyperlocal journalism: being too close to your sources.

The good journalist strives to be objective, to write about issues using the empirical data and letting interviewees spin it, but a hyperlocal journalist lives with, next to and around the sources and is personally affected by what he or she reports on. I suppose it's true of a lot of journalism, but the hyperlocalist isn't insulated the way someone who works for a newspaper is. I can't ask my editor if I'm being too biased in an article because I am my editor.

The Hardest Thing

Being an entrepreneur is the hardest thing I have ever done. Learning new web design skills has been easy, think up stories has been okay, but getting started and doing it is difficult. I can think of plenty of rationalizations -- it's very cold at the moment, I'm naturally shy, the website isn't ready yet -- but I know they're just rationalizations because I have done journalism before and I know that it's a wonderful, exciting thing to do. But it's making the call, it's schlepping down to city hall to interview people and taking a bunch of pictures of Rutland for stock purposes that seperates the journalist from the blogger.  My journalism teachers would have torn me apart over being too sheepish and did on occasion.

Doing journalism in Rutland ought to be easier than in Amherst because I've grown up with this city, I went to school with the daughter of a previous mayor and both children of the current treasurer and my Mom, my Dad and my sister are all fairly active in the community. Everyone in this community ought to recognize my last name even if they don't recognize me or The Rutland Advocate. On top of that, I know from personal experience that Vermonters are friendly people and Vermont politicians are much more accesible than in many other states -- I know because I've tried to talk to Massachusetts legislators and been very unsucssesful when it's not near an election. Massachusetts PR people have blown me off wheras I could ring up Pat Leahy or Bernie Sanders' staff and arrange an interview with a spokesperson at least if not the senator himself.

I've also been thinking about branding a bit more than I usually have, which is not at all. I've always regarded advertising and marketing as something to be contemplated in theory (i.e. the techniques used to build brand loyalty and make things attractive to buy), but ignored in practice (I don't care that they put the most expensive stuff in a supermarket on the top shelf because men will be more attracted to it and spend more, I can't afford it anyways). Fortunately, it turns out that identities are created in opposition to something and The Advocate is very much in opposition to The Rutland Herald, with its slowness and mistakes. It was founded in 1794 and has been the main newspaper of Rutland ever since and it is every inch a dinosaur and is very wrapped up in the "establishment" around here, which The Advocate won't be. For a locally owned newspaper, I'd estimate that around 70 percent of their daily content is off the AP wire and they are one of the reasons for the perception that "Nothing happens in Rutland" because they don't bother to publish any of it. In fact, I think I might make that The Advocate's motto: "Something's going on in Rutland."

Why?

As much as I think becoming an entrepreneur will help me get a job and get out of Rutland, I do have some better reasons than that for doing this.

There are reasons why Rutland has such a bad reputation throughout the state, why "there's nothing going on in Rutland," why none of the projects that are ever talked about get done, why businesses flee the city for the town and why Rutland has been getting smaller and poorer while the rest of the state has seen population growth and greater wealth.

Rutland is the state's historic center of Republican politics and conservatism. For most of the last several decades the Republicans have been ascendent in city politics. The current mayor, Chris Louras, is a Republican who has served since 2005 and Republican Jeff Wennberg was in office from 1987 to 1999. I have heard so many stories about people who wanted to bring businesses to Rutland but couldn't because the city wouldn't play ball with them.

Sometimes the state has blocked growth in the city even though similar developments in South Burlington are greenlit and sometimes the town's own unfathomable reasons have played a role, but we here in the city can't control what the state does and we can't control what the town does, but we can change the way things are going in the city and make it a better place to start and grow businesses.

Protip

Everything is needlessly more complicated when you don't read the introductory "Thank you for choosing our service, here are a few things you should know" e-mail. After you read that it's just needfully complicated.

Good News

I talked to my Dad, who, in addition to being a lawyer, works by himself instead of as part of a firm (he's actually a PC -- a personal corporation) and he said that I have no legal responsibilities to the state because I'm below their tax threshold. I also have no employees and I don't have any property or rents to worry about.

Over under

I'm starting to teach myself CSS (and it doesn't help that I'm coming down with a cold), but learning this kind of stuff always makes me wish I were either younger than I am, because then I could take classes on it for credit, or that I had been more interested in computer stuff when I was growing up. Then I would already know it and be able to do what I wanted to do without studying a tutorial with a head cold.

Starting up

I settled on The Rutland Advocate after a long and fruitless Facebook discussion where I asked my friends for advice. My original choice was The Rutland Tribune, but that already existed, although it's now Green Mountain Outlook. Then I thought about The Rutland Post, but decided it was too staid. I also thought about The Rutland Vindicator (Youngstown, Ohio's paper), but decided it was too confrontational and my old editor at The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, Alyssa Creamer, suggested The Rutland Recorder, but I felt that was too neutral.

Other names suggested: Stuck-in-a-Rut Gazette, The Rutvegas Sun, The Daily Rutter, Robare's Rutting Rutland and The Rutland Universe.

One of the things that made me hesitant about starting a startup was the cost. Following startup news you see a lot of large figures in funding get thrown around, but so far (domain name registration and webhosting) the costs have been less than many popular consumer electronics. I haven't yet gotten to the filing process for dealing with the state of Vermont, which brings me on to an important topic: networking.

Starting a business in your hometown is a lot easier than starting one elsewhere. My Dad is a lawyer and has been practicing in Vermont since he passed the Bar Exam in the 80s. He has been to court in every part of the state and argued in front of the state Supreme Court (I took AP US History with the current Chief Justice's daughter in high school), so my name recognition isn't as bad as it would be in, say, Boston. On top of that, Vermont's small population and geographic proximity have meant that members of the state legislature are more accesible than in other states (Texas, the state with the second largest population has a legislature the same size as Vermont's and California, the state with the largest population, has a smaller one). On a more local note, I've known the current city treasurer since I was seven or eight. Most notably, former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin is a UMass graduate and even edited the Ed/Op section of The Collegian!

I've been at this for two days and already all my assumptions have been shattered into dust and blown away.