Cara Lemieux on Starting a Publication (Sort Of)

Cara Lemieux came to speak with the Ithaca College SPJ chapter this Monday and discussed with us about how she helped start the ShriverReport.org.

The Shriver Report website is the online companion of the actual Shriver Reports, which are lengthy published reports on different aspects of women in society. The Shriver Report launched in October 2013 and Lemieux helped make it happen.

She said that before the site even launched, she had to drum up interest in the social media world. Before it came out, the Shriver Report had around 2,000 followers on different social media. But how do you get followers without producing any original content yet? They retweeted other publications that had similar missions as they did and linked around to other sites like HuffPost Women.

Lemieux gave an interesting insight into Google +. Even though the service isn't nearly as active or popular as other social media like Twitter and Facebook, when people share stories on Google + it helps with Google page rankings in the search engine. Because of this, they focused a lot of attention on Google + and now have over 30,000 followers on the site, dwarfing their other social media numbers.

When I talk about "they," I'm referring to the three individuals who work on the website and launched it. Together, they help keep the site and social media running and come up with two to three pieces of original content to post everyday. The site gets submissions from a lot of citizen journalists who are not paid.

One of the most interesting things I learned from Lemieux was about fully understanding your idea before launching it. As Jeff Jarvis wrote in his piece about his entrepreneurial journalism class,

If you can’t describe what you’re doing — to customers as well as investors — in 17 words, then you’re probably trying to do too much or you haven’t worked hard enough to define what you are doing or you simply aren’t describing it well and you’re going to lose people.

Lemieux told us that at first, the site was way too broad. She had to sit down and come up with a mission statement that clearly and succinctly said what the site was and stood for. She then had to completely work the design and decide every single little piece of how the website worked.

If you can't stand behind and clearly explain your site to yourself, it's not going to sell anyone else.

It was so great to hear from someone who was an Ithaca College graduate that made it in the industry and even helped create a successful and interesting publication like the Shriver Report. From where they have come from and the number of people they have to make the site run, I'd say it's pretty successful. And it gives young journalists hope that one day they could make a successful website.