RITT: QUICK CHANGE FOR NEW CAPE MAN

By: Wayne Robins Community-building For Mass. Appeal



Many editors dream of building a community. Glenn Ritt is trying
to live it, bringing his newspaper and new-media savvy to old
Cape Cod.



Ritt, the former vice president for the Internet at The Record
in Hackensack, N.J., (The Record Online at http://www.bergen.com),
and architect of its community-linked site, made such a sudden change
of geography and lifestyle earlier this year that even some friends
lost sight of him.



'I made the decision to leave in a two-week period, with as little
due diligence as anything I've ever done,' Ritt said from his
office in the town of Orleans on Cape Cod, Mass.



He is now the editor in chief of The Cape Codder, a semiweekly,
and three weeklies published by (drum roll) the Community Newspaper
Co. (CNC), as apt a company name as there could be for one with an
editor in the vanguard of the public, or civic, journalism movement.
Much of Ritt's energy has gone into redesigning TheCapeCodder.com
and relaunching it, alongside CNC's regional community hub site,
Town Online.



'Glenn was one of the first people to grasp a portal strategy, with
making the newspaper site a community site,' said Jay Rosen, a
journalism professor at New York University and author of 'What
Are Journalists For?' 'Instead of just dumping content online, you
are a connecting device through which community groups build and
link their Web sites.'



About 20 different 'channels' at his new portal each represent
essential segments of the local community: education, health,
seniors, houses of worship, environment, recreation, and others.
Any nonprofit or community organization can create its own free
Web site using the newspaper's easy-to-follow digital tool kit.
(NJ Community, at http://www.njcommunity.com, his old site, now
has more than 2,000 affiliated community sites.)



The Community Connections online manual shows how to build a site
outline and diagram, customize the look, and add text, images, and
links.



CNC provides free training sessions at its Needham, Mass., headquarters.
Community Connections groups now online include everything from the
County Line Quilters to the Bay State Bandits 10-and-Under Junior
Olympic Fast Pitch Tournament Softball team.



The Town Online Web sites are editorially independent from the
newspaper. But Ritt has said such detailed cataloging of small
community-interest groups can be helpful in providing leads,
contacts, and information to reporters on various beats.



'We want to align the news and information of the newspaper, the
support groups of the larger organizations and the interests they
represent, and individuals with their own Web sites,'' Ritt said.



Before moving to Cape Cod, where he had been visiting for 18 years
and was already in the process of building what had been intended
as a vacation house, Ritt was on the verge of accepting an endowed
chair at a major university to deepen and refine his exploration of
public journalism and digital technology. Moving to Cape Cod allowed
him to embrace his enthusiasms in what he calls a 'living laboratory.'



'The cape fascinates me because it is a dynamic, highly democratic
community-based place,' he said. 'It is extremely volunteer- and
community-oriented. There are so many year-round community-based
organizations and issues related to education, the environment,
affordable housing, development vs. open space, water quality, the
fishing industry ... the place is truly committed to its own future,
so it is like its own laboratory.



Yet it's not all New England town meetings and clambakes. In May,
a reporter for another paper was frisked by police while doing an
interview on the side of the road. A passer-by thought the tape
recorder was a gun; the reporter was black. Racial profiling had
not been left behind in New Jersey.


'We covered it as a community story, not just a police action,'
Ritt said. 'We opened the paper and online site to our readers
to express themselves on the story, about what it means to the cape.'





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Wayne Robins (wrobins@editorandpublisher.com) is an associate editor
for Editor & Publisher magazine.










(c) Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher