Local real estate developer Eric Bussell was a longtime contributor to follower of IlliniPundit (and a one-time op-ed contributor to this site), and had been looking for a way to promote his business, or supply “content as an affordable way to market your expertise,” as he puts it.
When IlliniPundit founder Gordy Hulten was appointed to the Champaign City Council earlier this year, he decided to step away from IP, and Bussell thought that could be an opportunity. “I actually called up my friend Gordy to ask if [IlliniPundit] was for sale,” Bussell related, “and he said there was already a buyer.” IlliniPundit has since transitioned to ChampaignPundit.
So, instead of purchasing an established brand, Bussell decided to forge his own path by founding Halfway Interesting, which describes itself as “A Champaign County Community Blog.”
Halfway Interesting aims to provide content of interest to the business and professional community, and it debuted on August 16. Bussell knew he’d need a large pool of writers to supply fresh content for the site, so he “called up my friends and friends of friends, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” he recalled.
Bussell has 30-40 contributors lined up so far, and the plan is that each of them will write one story per month. He explained, “At a minimum, we want to have one post every weekday. Eventually, we’d like to have one post every day of the week.”
So far, contributors have included former Champaign Mayor Dan McCollum, Urbana City Council member Heather Stevenson, Champaign City Council member Karen Foster, among others. Content has ranged from exposing myths of real estate short sales to a discussion of the proposed Urbana gas tax from Stevenson, as well as the Friday Funnies that longtime IP readers will recognize. There’s even been some discussion of the location of the Big Ten football title game and where to grab a drink in C-U.
Bussell has also enlisted the help of “Hit Girl” to regulate the comments section. “We want the conversation to be about the topics, not the banter between the commenters,” he said.
Halfway Interesting doesn’t plan to sell ads or compensate writers financially; rather, “we’re going to allow contributors to promote their business and one non-profit that they want to promote,” Bussell said.
Bussell feels that the focus of his web experiment has changed from its initial conception. “Even though this started as a business-minded venture, it’s been completely transformed to a community-minded one,” he claimed.
Bussell added, “I think I’m going to be criticized for picking only friends or having an unbalanced group of people writing. We are going to be recruiting a diverse group of writers. People may think that we’re balanced like Fox News, but we’re aggressively working to recruit people on all sides.”
Halfway Interesting is such a young site that it’s tough to say what it will develop into, but it’s certaily worth keeping an eye on as it grows.