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In the Trenches with Debra Galant
by Silissa Kenney
 When freelancer Debra Galant lost her New York Times "Jersey" column to another writer in 2003 after five years, she faced "the lack of control you can have as a journalist." In an instant, it seemed she'd lost her platform, her audience, her voice--and she wanted them back.
It didn't take long for her to regain them, albeit through an unexpected medium. A birthday gift from her husband--the domain name DebraGalant.com--quickly transformed her into an online publisher. One thing led to another and she started a personal blog, Debra Galant Explains the Universe, before launching a more ambitious project, Baristanet.com, in May 2004.
 Today, Baristanet is a noted hyperlocal news site covering Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield, New Jersey--an area Galant calls Baristaville. It captures 9,000 to 10,000 hits a day and boasts six-figure annual income. For her part, new media experts have crowned Galant "queen of hyperlocal blogging."
"It really had to do with branding myself," said Galant. "People knew me as a writer and I didn't want to lose that. I realized I could leverage that and get my readers back by creating something myself."
Allison Lehr, a faculty member at The Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College in NYC and an MBA in entrepreneur management, says creating a recognizable brand is increasingly important as companies and individuals vie for the limited attention of overwhelmed audiences. "People are bombarded with so much information these days," she said. "You have to make it easier for your readers to find you and cut through the clutter."
The Baristanet brand is part local news, part entertainment. Posts can be glib and humorous. As its About Page declares, the site aims to be "a true online community and the destination for breaking local news, airing opinionated views, and yes, poking fun at suburbia whenever possible."
The site often breaks news ahead of the weekly newspaper, The Montclair Times--thanks in part to dedicated readers' tips--and covers stories that would never make it into the paper. In a single day, Baristanet posted about a reader's frustration with a confusing parking ticket and a local heroin drug bust. And when the article "Does The Recession Make My Butt Look Big?" asked if tough economic times lead to more high-calorie food consumption, 92 readers weighed in.
Baristanet started small with Galant writing all of the stories and a partner handling the business side. In the first few years there was really no money to speak of. It helped that costs were low. Contributors worked from home and the site was hosted on a $15 per month platform. Freelance work and her husband's salary and health insurance bought Galant time to let the site grow.
"It was kind of a Tom Sawyer model," Galant said of the site's early reliance on unpaid user-generated content. "People would come play with it because it looked like fun."
For Galant, though, the goal was always to build a profitable business and she began building a team to support that ambition. In the fall of 2004, Liz George, Galant's current partner, joined after Galant's initial partnership dissolved. George, an NYU J-school graduate, writes and edits posts and answers requests from readers. Today 11 part-time employees man the site in rotating shifts.
The site turned a profit by 2006 with the help of strong advertising revenue brought in by the sales team. Now the popularity of the site does much of the selling for them. Advertisers from local businesses to arts institutions to colleges and universities all seek out Baristanet inventory. Sales slowed a bit in the spring and summer, hurt by the sputtering economy, but have resurged this fall.
Galant's ability to churn profit out of local news prompted interactive journalism expert Jeff Jarvis to call her a "walking, talking example of hyperlocal working" at the New Business Models for News Conference at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism in November.
But Galant says this is just the beginning. "We're just starting to look strategically and get beyond the day-to-day--who's in charge, who's writing--to try and think a little global," Galant said of the enterprise's development. "We're beginning to ask: What is our property, what have we created, how do we protect it and how do we grow it?"
Part of the growth challenge is management. Because each team member works remotely, email is a major means of communication, which can also make it difficult to always be sensitive to feelings. "People want to be praised when they do something right, and sometimes you're just trying to get through the day, make your phone calls and catch up on your own thing," Galant said. "It's a lot to juggle."
Another challenge is sustainability. Frequency of posts is a key aspect of success. Readers expect the site to be updated continuously and Baristanet has a minimum of five posts per weekday, with many days seeing upwards of 12. They limit weekend posts to one or two a day.
"If you are planning to hang up your own shingle, then you better have a bunch of different articles," Galant said. "If you're an expert in canine depression, you want everyone with a depressed dog to read your site. You can't have that same article about the depressed basset hound."
But all of that content isn't posted without risk. It spurs reader engagement of the positive--and negative--varieties. "I actually had a dream one night that I was murdered by one of my readers," Galant said. "There were 340 comments and I was trying to click on them but couldn't get in."
Five years into her publishing career, she doesn't lose much sleep over comments anymore. "You just learn to be very quick about making decisions and just figure whatever happens it'll move down the page and tomorrow it will be another day."
Plus, she has another audience to think about. In addition to Baristanet, Galant has gotten two novels published by St. Martin's Press, "Rattled" and "Fear and Yoga in New Jersey," with a third, "Cars from a Marriage," coming out in April 2010. |