We were lucky to catch up with Michael Shapiro recently and have shared our conversation below.
MICHAEL, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Is there a heartwarming story from your career that you look back on?
In 2008, I was an attorney working in New York City and commuting from New Jersey and had been practicing law for almost five years. My wife and I found out that our 1-year old son, who is now 17 and in good health, needed open heart surgery. During his whole first year of life I barely saw him. I decided to make a change and wanted to do something where I could help my community, do something I was passionate about, and could be home to spend more time with my wife and son. I created an online local news site in New Providence, New Jersey. Soon people in neighboring towns reached out to me and asked me to start an online local news site in their communities, and I did, and I soon found myself running three local news sites. I then left my job to work on this new business full-time. My original goal was to grow those initial sites – their revenue, their traffic, and their content. We were able to build them to profitability within a few years but I kept getting more and more requests from people to launch local news sites in their towns and I had to say no because I did not have the bandwidth to expand. It got me thinking how could we expand yet keep providing original local news reporting every day and building relationships with local businesses in our towns. Eventually I came up with the idea of franchising local news. It was groundbreaking then and is still novel today. Using a franchise model, we are able to share services among many publishers, reducing costs and creating efficiencies. We are also able to drive more revenue for all of the publishers in the network. And through our custom technology, our publishers can seamlessly collaborate with one another regarding both content and sales. Today we have more than 95 franchised online local news sites in the United States.
MICHAEL, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Trust in news is at an all-time low. At TAPinto, our readers trust us because we are objective, transparent, ethical and truly local. Every day, we are making a difference in our communities by providing original local news reporting and telling stories that otherwise would never be told. We are also helping to hold our local governments accountable and enabling democracy to fluorish on the local level by increasing civic participation and reducing voter apathy. We are also helping countless local businesses be able to not only survive but thrive, as they compete against internet giants and big box retailers. While it is our business, it is also our passion.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Early on with the business, I was primarily handling content and was outsourcing sales. A few years into starting the business, and well before we were franchising, we were not yet profitable and I was running out of my personal funds to fund the business. I was meeting with one of our advertisers, who is still an advertiser today, and he said that I was the best salesperson the business had so why wasn’t I handling sales? I told him how I had never sold anything and had no background in sales. He said that didn’t matter, that I had the personality and skill set for it. I thought about it and decided to handle sales and outsource content to journalists and reporters. It turned the business around – within a short time, we were profitable and our content had also improved!
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
A few months after I started the business in 2008, a national corporation started a competitor with a national footprint and started in towns right near me. They were spending millions of dollars and many people were telling me to hang up my shoes. But I focused on my business and making it the best it could be, while I kept an eye on the competitor. I didn’t let my competitor distract me. And with a lot of hard work and determination, we not only survived but thrived. Around the same time we started franchising, they laid off 90% of their journalists and salespeople because they are burned through hundreds of millions of dollars. Soon we were dominating our markets and they were a shell of their former self. Today we are the market leader in all of our communities we serve.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://tapinto.net
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelmshapiro/
- Twitter: @michaelshapiro
- Other: https://hyperlocalnewsnetwork.com
