Daily Voice (American hyperlocal news)

The company was founded in 2010 by Carll Tucker, a veteran of the community news business with Trader Publications (sold to Gannett Company in 1999), The company raised almost $4 million in its first round of private equity funding, The company's editorial director was financial commentator and author Jane Bryant Quinn, who is also a member of its board of directors. Main Street Connect first appeared as town-centric news sites in Fairfield County, Connecticut, named "The Daily [Town]", such as the first one, The Daily Norwalk for Norwalk, Connecticut. and Main Street Connect had 44 full-time employees as of mid-2010. The franchising structure of Main Street Connect was explicitly likened to that of the McDonald's fast food chain. There was to be no start-up fee, and Main Street Connect would get 17 percent of a site's revenue. The company's target for 2013 was to have 3,000 sites operating with some 10,000–15,000 journalists involved; It also competed with news aggregators such as Topix, event aggregators such as Eventful, and content creation sites such as Examiner.com and Yahoo's Associated Content. ==Subsequent developments==

In February 2011, Main Street Connect announced that the one million mark in visits to their websites had been passed, and subsequently said that the sites get about 110,000 unique visitors per month against an underlying population of some 420,000 people. In May 2011, Main Street Connect acquired CentralMassNews, which owned ten local news sites in Central Massachusetts. On June 1, 2011, the company rolled out 32 (one more than expected) sites in Westchester. In October 2011, Tucker was succeeded as CEO by Zohar Yardeni, formerly of Thomson Reuters, and experienced with financial and information start-ups. Tucker stayed on as chair of the company. Aside from the new name and logo, there were no other changes to business operations. The new name was purchased by Main Street Connect, and, therefore, was no longer affiliated with Keith Boykin or Malcolm J. Harris, the figures behind the 2008-begun The Daily Voice onsite news site for African Americans. In March 2013, Yardeni suddenly resigned. The company underwent a major downsizing, closing all 11 of its Massachusetts sites and laying off those employees. During 2018, the Daily Voice operation was taken over by Cantata Media, based in Norwalk, Connecticut. In 2019 Cantata Media formed an alliance with Westfair Communications, the publisher of the Fairfield County Business Journal, to form a subscription-based website, Daily Voice Plus, that would feature material from both organizations. == See also ==