This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
03/15/2016 12:00 AMFront page headlines: “Madison’s Changing Face,” “Youth Respect A Problem,” “Madison’s Cooking: Recipes, including one from Madison’s famous Chef Jacques Pepin.” And one more: “New Newspaper To Go To Every Madison Home.”
In March 1996, Madison readers got their first look at The Source, the first newspaper from Shore Marketing (later changed to Shore Publishing). And if the above headlines seem like they could’ve appeared in this issue, it’s because, while the company has grown from a handful of staffers working from dorm rooms printing a monthly paper into a media company with seven weekly papers, dozens of magazines, and a regional website, the idea that started it was a good one: Be a part of the community you write about.
From Idea to Success
The Source began right here in Madison, the brainchild of two Daniel Hand High School (DHHS) kids with a vision. James Warner and Ryan Duques were already famous—or infamous, perhaps—for their youthful entrepreneurial endeavors. Perhaps you were one of about two people who bought a Charlie Brown-ish Christmas tree from them, or maybe you purchased a tie-dye T-shirt from another extremely short-lived Madison business.
More of you, such as Paul Lirot, remember their restaurant guides—collections of local menus funded by ads from local businesses, including Paul C. Lirot Jewelers.
“We knew James’ father, Jim Warner,” Lirot commented. “We were kind of involved with them from the beginning.”
It certainly helped that Duques and Warner, whose father was the president of the Madison Chamber of Commerce, already knew every business in town when they founded Shore Marketing in 1994, at age 18. It was the business owners themselves, their advertisers, who suggested the two start a community newspaper. In 1996, Shore Marketing became Shore Publishing and launched its first newspaper, The Source, in March.
“We didn’t have enough money to pay for reporters at the time,” said Warner in his explanation of the paper’s name. “We had the concept [of] why don’t we go directly to the source for the articles: first selectman, chief of police?”
The businesses paid up front for advertising in a paper that did not yet exist, and key members of the community contributed articles. Without that initial support, The Source would never have come into being.
“It was really amazing how the community accepted us,” said Warner. “The local businesses were incredibly supportive.”
In the early days, the company operated out of the Warners’ family home in Madison, then Warner’s and Duques’s dorm rooms. It was more a labor of love than a business.
“For a long time Ryan and I didn’t take a salary,” said Warner. “We had to basically do it on a shoestring and it was more important that payroll went out than that we got paid.”
“The early days were thrilling and at times, really hard,” Duques said. “We also found a great number of talented people that would help round out the initial team at The Source, helping to shape the paper that it would become. These people include Jill Bowen, Suzanne Martin, Dale Moore, Kathleen Bishop, Abigail White, and of course, Alan Ellis, who is still the production director at Shore Publishing.”
Ellis joined the newspaper in its first year thinking it would look good on a résumé.
“We worked out of James’s parents’ house because his parents were running a business out of their house, so that gave us access to a fax machine,” said Ellis, who graduated from DHHS just before Duques and Warner. “I wasn’t thinking at the time, ‘Oh wow, this is going to be a huge success.’”
However, the newspaper took off, gaining ad revenue—and more pages. Soon The Source moved to an office on Wall Street, eventually ending up at its current downtown location. The newspapers’ current publisher, Robyn Collins, grew up working alongside Duques and Warner in Madison. She joined in 2000 as a reporter, when the newspaper group consisted of four bi-weekly papers running out of the downtown office.
“When I asked about a job, they said, ‘Sure—we’ll make you an editor or something,’” said Collins, noting that in the small company, that meant she’d continue to write stories and take photos, too.
Shore Publishing’s current editor, Brian Boyd, also joined in 2000 as a reporter.
“I’m pretty sure I got the job because I wore a blazer to the interview,” said Boyd with a laugh. “It had aspects of a dorm room—in my early 30s, I was a grand elder here. Most people were substantially younger.”
Each employee at the burgeoning company felt they were in on something special—and subsequently pulled long hours to get the papers out.
“We’d walk in on a Wednesday morning and work all night and then all day Thursday, and at the end of the day on Thursday we’d have to copy it all to disks and drive it to New London because we were printing at The Day,” said Ellis. “We were pulling 65 hours in four days. They were lucky to get a lot of people to work for them that just loved their jobs and the paper.”
Duques and Warner also count themselves lucky for finding people who had the know-how to build a successful newspaper from the ground up, even if it took a little trial and error.
“Our distribution model, sending the newspaper to each home, certainly led to the paper’s rise in popularity and advertiser effectiveness, but without the work of talented journalists and columnists, the paper would never have succeeded,” said Duques.
“It’s almost an incubator to develop talent,” said Warner. “Ryan and I had the vision, but they’re the ones that executed it and I can’t say enough about them.”
Growing into the Role
From the initial success of The Source, Shore Publishing expanded to seven newspapers covering 13 shoreline towns, and acquired two additional newspapers. In 2008, Duques and Warner sold the profitable company to The Day of New London for an undisclosed sum. The newspaper group is still going strong—and like his fellow employees who’ve stuck around since the day they joined, Ellis still loves the job he fell into.
“It’s just amazing, absolutely stunning to see how far we’ve come,” said Ellis. “It’s totally just the energy—people like what they’re selling and what they’re creating and what they’re covering.”
Beyond their passion for the product, staffers say community involvement drives the papers’ relevance and the company’s continued growth.
“Every person who worked here has some role within the town that they serve,” said Collins, who recently participated in—and won—the Clinton Chamber’s Dancing with the Stars contest. “We’re at every event we can possibly go to across the shoreline. They think of Robyn or they think of Brian; they don’t think The Source, they think our names. I don’t think you could get more ingrained in the community. People ask all the time why we’re so successful and I think that’s the biggest thing.”
“Everybody out there knows somebody at the paper and it’s because we are out there,” added Boyd, who also serves on the board of the Valley-Shore YMCA. “[The papers] have done well because they’re the readers’ paper. It’s just the greatest thing when people talk about ‘their newspaper.’”
For Duques and Warner, it was a tremendous achievement, and the first of many successful ventures.
“Until I became a father, I couldn’t replicate the feeling of creating something from nothing and watching it flourish,” said Duques. “The value of The Source will last well beyond last week’s edition as generations turn the pages of past issues to learn about our community; extreme gratification comes with that.”
As for the paper’s future, well, believe it or not, they’re not too worried.
“We’ve heard in the past decade that print is dead, and some print definitely is hurting, but the type of print that we’re doing—hyper-local, targeted, in-depth print—is doing really well,” said Boyd. “We had two 104-page issues last year. The press at Providence Journal had no idea how to set that up. They had never seen an issue that large.”
While the company’s leaders are now looking at Zip06.com, Shore’s regional website, as the area of greatest growth, the newspapers on which the company was founded will continue to be the backbone of the organization for the foreseeable future.
“They were gifted, smart entrepreneurs, and to see someone so young start out with that talent—it was a great thing to see evolve,” said Eileen Banisch, executive director of the Madison Chamber of Commerce. “It’s such a great local success story.”