Guest Speaker- Eugene Driscoll

Who says Journalism is a dying breed? Not Eugene Driscoll!

The Valley Independent Sentinel is a privately-funded, non-profit, localized online news source that covers 5 counties in/around Naugatuck Valley, CT. Mr. Eugene Driscoll is an editor there who believes that people who think "journalism is dying" are "idiots." The website/news source was launched 8 years ago, and already has 2,000+ readers a day to the site, which covers mainly local news out of Ansonia, Derby, Oxford, Seymour, and Shelton, CT.

One of the questions I asked was whether he and his associates can cover stories that are outside of their jurisdiction/coverage area. He replied that due to other competeing papers in CT running the same stories, it would be difficult to be "exclusive," and in the end, everything would become "repetetive." He went on to say that "you would end up reading the same story in five different newspapers or web sources." When talking about his competitors, he mentioned a particular news source, which I will not name, that offended it's readers. "That's one thing you can't do," according to Driscoll, "you can't hate your readers."

What interested me most about his speech wast that the reporters at the Sentinel were constantly trying something new; they were always on the move, freelancers always on the go with their police scanners and keeping updated on, of all places, the social-networking site, Facebook. Now, the fact that he mentioned Facebook as an outlet for free advertising was unique in the fact that it generates a reader-base and gets people to come to the site. If you broaden the "word-of-mouth," you will eventually gain more respect in the community, although, it already appears that they have a pretty solid and dedicated following. Advertising on Facebook and social networking sites was just another way to get the word out there. That was a smart move on their part.

One of the words Driscoll used quite frequently was "hyper-local." I interpreted it as local media and news, but at a constantly fast pace. News is always happening all over the covered counties, and he and his team were always on top of it. "It's all about covering the news at the moment," Driscoll says.