2001
Connie Camp, Online Editor
The Rutland Herald/Times Argus

VMD: As online editor of the Rutland Herald and the Times Argus, what are your responsibilities?

CC: I’m responsible for all the content that isn’t advertising on our Web site. This means looking after the two new sites — the Rutland Herald and the Times Argus — and creating and maintaining special sections. I’m also involved in developing resources such as our "See Vermont" guide, which we hope will help people live in the state, explore it, and enjoy it. My desk is in the Herald newsroom and I attend daily news meetings, but I also work very closely with the four other members of the new media department and we work with the editors of the two papers. Much of work now is devoted to planning for fairly substantial changes that we hope won’t be too far down the road.

VMD: How long has the paper been online?

CC: Both papers have been online since September, 1999.

VMD: What made the papers decide to go online in the first place in 1999?

CC: I think the papers felt the way most papers feel; that we have no choice now. In Vermont I think more than 50 percent of households have computers and almost 50 percent have access to the Internet, and we want to serve those people.

VMD: It obviously seems fairly ubiquitous these days for a newspaper to be online, especially the major ones. What do you think the availability of the online newspapers will do to the print world? Do you think printed papers will become a thing of the past?

CC: I hope not. We like to think that our online edition might actually generate interest in the printed publications and that there will be some back and forth. The print will drive readers to the online resources we provide that the papers don’t, and we hope that we can drive readers back to the print editions. But I love papers, and I can’t bear the thought that they will disappear.

VMD: Can you go through some of the extra things that you do offer online that aren’t in the papers?

CC: Well, this interview is taking place in the middle of major planning, so what we offer now is not what we hope to offer even a few months from now. At the moment, we’re pretty much tied to the cycles of the two newspapers. That means we update the Herald site at night and the Times Argus site in the early afternoon, but to be really vital to our readers, we want to respond to breaking news as well, and we want to give them more than just a story. We want to add audio and visual elements and more interactive components of the Web site.

So bearing that in mind, I think already we’re a valuable site for Vermonters. We have special sections: archives, for instance, on the Legislature, on the election, on civil unions, on certain major stories that we create and maintain and readers have told us are very useful to them. One of our most popular features is our search function; readers have access to everything we’ve carried online since September 1999. The papers are available in the library — you can go through back issues — but when we first went online we didn’t have the search, and we heard from a lot of readers asking for back issues, and this one feature is probably one of the most popular things we do.

One of the other things we do is "See Vermont," which is a very labor-intensive guide. When we expand it we hope it will be a much more complete, Vermont-wide searchable directory that will really help people stay in touch with their communities in terms of entertainment and all kinds of other resources. All of our sites fall under the umbrella of "Vermont Today," which we hope will become the home page for Vermonters, and it will give visitors access not only to our news and classifieds sites, but to a wealth of other resources and information about their communities.

So these things are in transition right now; we do some of this already on our Web site, but we plan to do it in a much bigger way down the road. We also plan to strengthen the community component — we want to be a base for groups that want to connect with each other and connect with our readers. Mostly, we offer additional resources, and links to resources, and archives of stories all in one place.

VMD: Do you know how the online readership compares to the total print circulation of the paper?

CC: I think it’s about a quarter — I’m talking about daily unique visitors — of our newspaper circulation, which is about 22,000. But our readers come from a much wider territory. I hear from people every day who don’t even live in Vermont but have some connection to it — they once lived here, they miss it, they want to move here. People from all over the country, and from Canada, are in touch with us. I think we even had people writing us from Australia.

VMD: Do you try to direct people from the Web site to the paper and vice versa?

CC: We do. I think you might have noticed during the coverage of the election — the Gore/Bush election — we were constantly referring readers of the newspaper to a place on our site where we kept all the legal documents, all the court briefings and court rulings, plus day-long updates of that story. In terms of the other way, we don’t do it as much. Certainly our calendar listings on our Web site are not quite as complete — they don’t go as far ahead as the newspaper does — so we refer people to the newspaper if they want to know what’s happening a week from now.

VMD: I’ve noticed that not every story that’s in the paper appears online. So how do you decide which stories to put on the Web site?

CC: We do try to put everything that’s on our front page — all our local stories (that means all the stories from southern Vermont and Rutland County) and all our state stories, including those added from the wire — to our Web site. What we don’t add, unless the stories have been on the front page, are international and national stories. We give readers access to these through the Associated Press, because often these stories are developing, so we think that’s a better solution at the moment. Pretty soon we’ll probably have the AP updates right on our Web site so they don’t have to click too many times to get to the AP sources.

VMD: Are all the things that you mentioned on the archives as well?

CC: All our local stories are, but not just our stories — our obituaries, our editorials, letters to the editor, columnists, everything is available through our search function.

VMD: If a PR person has a story idea for the online version, should he or she contact you directly, or do you always go through what’s in the paper?

CC: At the moment we don’t have the ability to do stories ourselves. For the most part, we take stories from the newsroom that have been edited and we add them to the site. That’s not how we hope to do things down the road. But if public relations people have a story idea — and people do send story ideas directly to me — I pass them on to the newsroom. Everything that comes into our site eventually gets to the editor responsible.

We are planning a better contacts section that will allow groups to send their releases directly to the editors and reporters that they think might be interested. Right now you can send releases to us through the Web site at info@rutlandherald.com, and that’s one single address, but soon we’ll have a number of addresses and we’ll have a guide to tell people how to reach us.

VMD: What would the format be for sending those kinds of things?

CC: We prefer not to get attachments, because we have to run every attachment through a virus check. I think most people just copy and paste their news releases, which ideally are fairly brief anyway, and send them right to us as regular e-mail.

VMD: What is the mission of your news organization?

CC: Our mission is to be the leading online source of news and information about Vermont.

VMD: Thank you.