Here’s What I’ve Been Doing Lately

Screenshot from WarwickPost.com

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been helping my friend, Rob Borkowski — who’s also the guy who hired me for Patch — with getting a new website up and running.

It’s called warwickpost.com, and it’s something that Rob and I had been discussing since my layoff from Patch last October.

As I like to tell it, Rob challenged my manhood one Friday night by asking me why I should settle for working for someone else if I could run a site of my own.

Essentially, my answer was: Lack of money, not lack of ideas.

So, come up with the idea, Rob replied. And by the next morning, I had the concept and rolled it out to Rob in a 30-min. phone call.

Once Rob was laid off in February, he decided to get the ball rolling for real, by underwriting the start-up costs to bring my concept [which, over the course of several more conversations, truly became our shared concept] to reality.

Now, we’re not the first former Patch employees to start a website — quite a number of “Patch Alumni” have created sites in the towns they were covering for Patch, and a couple have even joined associations of online journalists in their states — but we seem to be the first ex-Patchers to have put together this particular kind of website in a new community.

What do I mean by that?

For starters, Warwick is a city that neither Rob or I have covered to any great degree in the past, except for when I did some fill-in reporting for the Warwick Beacon in the late ’90s.

Now, that may seem like a counter-intuitive plan, since Rob and I reported on a few Patch towns — Johnston, Smithfield, Woonsocket, East Providence, Bristol, and Warren among them — and could have, arguably, launched a new site in any one of these.

But after considering the possibilities, we decided on Warwick because 1.) there was no online-only news source there; 2.) the other communities were either crowded with news sources, or potentially unprofitable for our business model [or both]; and 3.) Warwick offers the diverse business community and status as a travel hub for Rhode Island and New England that, we feel, can support a new website like ours.

And where other recently-laid off Patch editors are trying to raise money through display ad sales or sponsorships, we’ve integrated a business directory into Warwick Post that we think will generate a good portion of the income for the site.

In practical terms, we’ve put together a site that allows business owners to create free basic listings and purchase upgrades for $199 a year so they can add their website addresses, Facebook pages, and other information.

We’ve also made the listings self-serve, meaning that if someone can place an order on Amazon, they can set up a Featured Listing for their business — which could overcome the obstacle that some former Patch editors seem to be hitting in raising money for their sites.

As far as we know, Warwick Post is the only site among those started by ex-Patchers that integrates the news and listings pages in this way.

It took a lot of back-end work [and I owe Rob a huge debt of gratitude for doing it], but by creating the structure of a news site combined with a directory of revenue-generating listings, we think we’ve found an answer to the question of how to make money with our site without having to hire a sales team.

The other half of this equation, of course, is the potential audience — and here, we also think we’re onto something with Warwick.

So far, everyone we’ve met in Warwick, including Mayor Scott Avedesian and a few officers with the Warwick PD, has told us that the city is ready for a site like ours.

By being new to the city, Rob and I can bring fresh eyes to what’s happening in Warwick, and potentially bring a new perspective to the issues there.

And if the early results are any indication — we collected 50 Likes for our Facebook page and almost 200 views on a story we posted there within a 48-hour period — there really is a groundswell of online readership in Warwick just waiting to be tapped.

Whatever happens from here, the fact that we’ve brought this site from concept to reality in a short amount of time — Rob actually built it in 50 days, give or take — is an accomplishment, one which I hope turns into success for the Post.