Keith Rella, newsman in a hurry.
If all goes according to his remarkably hasty plan, this time next week, Keith Rella will oversee a bunch of teenagers in newsie caps calling out “Extra, extra!” while distributing first editions of a new tabloid on the streets of downtown Red Bank.
Assuming he doesn’t run afoul of any ordinances — Rella says he has to check with the borough government to make sure his plan is copacetic — that should be the easy part. The bigger challenge is likely to be producing the 16-to-20-page newspaper in the first place.
For starters, Rella’s got an office on Linden Place that’s yet to be set up, no staff to speak of, and he’s had the job of publisher and managing editor of the Red Bank Monitor for all of — let’s see, today’s Friday? — eight days.
He’s not too worried, though. Rella, whose last job was as press spokesman for then-state Assemblyman Mike Panter, says he built the local news operation at the Breeze (107.1 and 99.7 FM) radio station when he was 27 years old. Now, five years later, he says he’s keyed up to replicate the effort, on an expedited basis, in a media-saturated town.
“I’ve been looking for my next professional move for the past seven months,” Rella says, “so I’m ready.”
The Monitor is the brainchild of Vin Gopal, a former deputy national campaign chairman for Dennis Kucinich and, judging by Rella’s description, a serial entrepreneur who’s started “a couple of print ventures” in the Freehold area. He owns Direct Development LLC, which in turns owns the Monitor.
Rella came in on a handshake and agreed to ramp up and launch a newspaper in two weeks when Gopal thought that waiting a month was long. The paper is set to debut next Saturday, August 16.
“Sometimes I think he’s crazy,” Rella allows, while saying he’s up to the challenge.
The Monitor will be published twice a month. It’ll be “100-percent objective” and focus exclusively on Red Bank, covering the gamut of politics to schools to sports, says Rella. It’ll carry breaking news, or as much as it can for a bimonthly. There will be an occasional “Variety” page that features the artwork, poems and other creative efforts of readers.
“We want the paper to be a direct reflection of Red Bank itself,” says Rella. “So there’ll be that kitschiness, too.”
It’ll be printed in color and feature a masthead reminiscent of the typeface from Poor Richard’s Almanack
After three issues or so, the paper will be mailed, subscription-free, to every home and business in town, Rella says. And every issue will be put up on the web.
Most of the effort of making that happen will fall on Rella, who’s also responsible for selling ads. At the moment, his staff consists of a high school student who goes into the office for a few hours a week and enough freelancers, recruited via Craigslist, to get the thing started, Rella says. As the paper gets established, he expects to rely more on reader contributions.
“I would rather have a student telling us about a program at a school than a reporter who has to absorb it,” Rella says. He’s also soliciting contributions from local professionals and business owners.
At the risk of appearing to ask a question with a self-preserving aspect to it, is he crazy? Launching a newspaper in a town served by a daily, four weeklies, a magazine or two — not to mention this little hyperlocal online entry known as redbankgreen?
“It’s not so much of a gap as that I think there’s enough happening in Red Bank to sustain a paper that’s focused solely on Red Bank,” Rella says. He’s been making the rounds, introducing himself to community groups, “and the response hasn’t been, ‘Oh, another paper.’ It’s been, ‘Oh, we can use that.’ “
As for starting a newspaper in an era when print giants are being laid low by the mass migration of readers and advertisers to the web? Well, for all the talk about the demise of print, he says, “people still put their feet up on a Sunday and read the newspapers ritually.”
Rella lives on East Bergen Place with his wife, Ann Marie Rella.
