Sandeep Junnarkar has a great interview over at OJR with Debbie Galant of Barista of Bloomfield Ave.

From the interview:

OJR: What was the biggest challenge you faced when you first launched?

Galant: There were issues like it was a lot easier to get people to call you back when you could say "This is Debbie Galant from The New York Times" than it is when you say, "This is Debbie Galant from Baristanet." We had to explain it to every single person every time we made the call. That slows you down. But now there is a lot more name recognition for Baristanet but it is not universal.

But the biggest challenge is simply to become a real entity and keep running it. I said earlier that readers expect all this stuff of us that you struggled to build. To keep that going is a professional and personal struggle. I remember the first time we received an ad for a whole year and I gulped and said, "Oh, my God. Does that mean for sure I'm going to be doing this in a year." It was just hard to believe I had made that commitment to someone. You think this is cool, but, boy, I have just committed to being here next year, to being here on weekends, to being here when I don't feel like it.

It was like claiming the territory of being almost like a newspaper single-handedly. It's not very glamorous from the viewpoint of new media as a business and nobody talks about that. But it's absolutely important for Liz and I to rationalize it as a business and to make it work as an organism, so that we have procedures, we are allowed to have vacations and go out of town. So that when somebody has agreed to be an advertiser, somebody is making sure that the bill is sent, and the money is collected and all those things. Writing is natural since that's what we have done professionally, but it's a whole different set of skills that has to be learned to run a business.

Another person whose advice is to stick with it.

Lots to digest here. Good thoughts, though.

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