No fancy office, no bustling newsroom. No staff, no deadlines, no advertisers calling with demands. Trish Riley leads a nation from her desk overlooking the living-dining room of her 1970s cottage in North Central Gainesville. A mug filled with pens and pencils reads "Do What It Takes." A wall of sliding glass doors shines tree-filtered light onto gray concrete floors, warmed with area rugs of all sizes, patchworked throughout the cozy rooms.
This is where GoGreenNation.org first began about a year ago. It is fed and sustained by the single hand of Riley, its mastermind, and the site itself was designed and built by a hired Web designer, Alex Parkinson. It's a community-based but globally minded news aggregation site focused on environmental issues. Stories are pulled from sources such as The New York Times,The Huffington Post and Gainesville's own student-run The Fine Print.
"Part of me doesn’t feel as compelled as I once was to just report a story and put it out there," said Riley, a former travel writer, travel guide book author and freelance writer of about 2,000 stories for the Miami Herald. "I can’t write all the stories I consider to be important. I feel I can be a greater service to people by gathering that information and putting it out there."
That information is Riley's product, and the subject is something she's been writing about for over 20 years, although not always directly. Living in South Florida, she said, allowed her to take advantage of her geographical location to write much sought after travel stories and infuse them with shades of green. She would suggest visitors tour the Everglades, for example, or she would warn snorkelers not to touch the coral because doing so can kill it. Although the purpose of her writing was to attract tourists, she is wary of tourism's effects on the local environment.
This imbalance between personal beliefs and professional duties is one of the things that led Riley away from what she considers the feigned impartiality of traditional media. "The whole objectivity thing is kind of a sham," she said, citing the hypothetical example of having to get a pre-packaged, PR-ed response from the chemical company that producesBisphenol-A (also called BPA) for a story about how bad Bisphenol-A is.
GoGreenNation.org caters to a niche market and bypasses the sometimes unrealistic mission of providing balanced coverage of intrinsically one-sided stories that traditional newspapers and general news publications work to achieve. Not only is the topic and coverage narrowed to a targeted audience, but the main drive in the creation of the site was geographically narrowed to connect local community environmentalists in Gainesville and equip them with information relevant to their lifestyles or businesses, while providing networking opportunities to other like-minded local residents.
Riley first realized the need for an environmental community site during a book signing for her how-to guide, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Green Living," at Goering's Book Store in July of 2008. She had just moved to Gainesville because she considered it to be forward-thinking and welcoming to green ideas. Gainesville's residents do have these ideas, she discovered, and they're living green lives on their own. As she talked to people at the signing, she realized that what was missing was a unifying force between individuals that would allow for the sharing of ideas and provide a place where accurate, current environmental news could reach the people who care about it.
Thus, GoGreenNation.org was born.
Aesthetically, the site is transfixing. An artistic yet simple masthead inspires thoughts of pristine oceans and healthy forests. The prominent feature on the home page is a stream of headlines from publications all over the world, accompanied by a dek-head teaser and maybe some comments from Riley about an issue that affects Gainesville directly. Users must click the teaser, which takes you to another page from which you can access the article on its original site. On the right is a side bar with a list of local environmental events and featured links, including an icon to follow GoGreenNation.org's RSS feed. Every article is indexed in a side bar on the left with popular sections such as Business, Food and Health, and travel. A topical archive of sorts takes the form of a list at the bottom of the home page, a feature Riley's Web designer came up with that she isn't fond of, but she lacks the technical know-how to fix it herself.
"What's frustrating is I don't have Web skills," she said.
Riley has to hire people to handle the Web-based aspects of her site, and it's draining her financial resources.
"My savings have been tapped now," she said.
For all the ideals it can cater to, online media has its share of pitfalls, and a lack of "green"backs tops the list. Riley experimented with advertising, but discovered it was difficult to ensure that those who advertise with her also follow the environmentally conscious practices the site seeks to promote. It also takes time and a saleswoman's attitude, neither of which Riley has much of.
"Marketing isn't my thing," she said. "I'm so not into driving people anywhere. It's just not in me to push market. I'm not even going to hire anybody whose real drive is to market."
She has a Facebook page, which she updates when she remembers to, and a Twitter account, which tweets to her followers every time a new article is posted on the site. Although she recognizes the potential to drive up traffic and increase Web hits, Riley is reluctant to spend a lot of time on social networking sites because they come and go and change so quickly, she said.
"For me, it's got nothing to do with journalism or the importance of the information," she said.
Her stance on social media tools is "more of a personal thing than a professional thing," she said, but she knows her loyalty to her personal values is coming at a cost. She is not making any money on the site, so she plans to make it into a nonprofit with the help of a lawyer in Tampa who agreed to help her with the paperwork, who she found through the Online Media Legal Network, a program that helps online journalists find pro-bono legal help.
Eventually, Riley would like to see GoGreenNation.org expand to other cities, with former journalism colleagues -- some now laid off, and of those, some contribute articles to GoGreenNation.org -- spearheading the same community-building effort in their areas, from California to Indianapolis.
But that dream will remain far off until Riley can turn her brainchild into a profitable adolescent, especially if that means she has to change her traditional journalistic and personal standards to focus on social networking and new media tools.
But right now, the site is successful given its limited resources. Riley recently co-directed the First Annual Gainesville Environmental Film and Arts Festival, which was in collaboration with GoGreenNation.org. She admits she was so overwhelmed with festival-related tasks that promoting her site fell by the wayside. But the festival embodied the greater mission of GoGreenNation.org: to build a community of concerned citizens with a heart and a sharp, informed mind for all things green.
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