There are moments in our lives when a single decision leads to seismic personal change. Wilton’s Heather Borden Herve experienced such a moment in 1997 while working as a producer at Entertainment Tonight in New York. At the time, ET was the leading entertainment news source in the country, so her life was fast-paced and laser-focused on popular culture. “I had to know everything about everybody – who Naomi Campbell was dating, where Carolyn Bessette Kennedy got her hair colored, who was in the latest blockbuster movie.” Producers were expected to be aggressive, get the story, and always be first. The job was intense; the pace – relentless.
After three years at ET, (following stints in publicity at Self Magazine and TV Guide), Borden Herve was a seasoned, in-demand media professional in the midst of renegotiating her contract. During a critical network television Sweeps Week, she developed a noticeable eye twitch. After taking a much-needed vacation to Club Med in Turks and Caicos, the twitch disappeared. But back at work, the second she heard the distinctive ET theme song, the twitch returned. It became clear to Borden Herve that her high-pressure lifestyle was unsustainable. She called her lawyer and instructed him to stop the contract negotiations. “I quit and went back to Club Med, this time in Florida, where I worked for two years and met my future husband.”
This one decision (dubbed her “quarter-life crisis”) set into motion a series of events – marriage, motherhood, and a move from Chicago to Wilton in 2007 – that altered the course of Borden Herve’s life. Once in Connecticut, she launched a new career as an opinion columnist for Patch, a hyper-local, online news organization. Eventually, Borden Herve’s thrice-weekly column was syndicated in 40 Patch news outlets.
In the ensuing years, Borden Herve realized there was a lot going on right here in her own town and that she could use her talent and skill to create her own outlet for local news. She wanted to focus her energies on Wilton – the town she had grown to love. The seed for creating her own online daily news outlet became firmly planted and in August 2013, GOOD Morning Wilton
was launched.
It was a steep learning curve but Borden Herve learned by doing. “I couldn’t pay anyone. Every day it was, ‘I’ll figure it out as I go.’” More than a decade later, GMW is thriving, has three steady freelancers, and gets up to 5,000 views
a day.
“Everything I did in my life came to this. It’s a synthesis of doing the work I love and always wanted to do,” says Borden Herve who reports daily on anything to do with Wilton – the people, businesses, non-profits, local politics, and events. The job is all-consuming but in a way that offers enormous personal and professional satisfaction.
“News never stops so it’s hard for me to,” admits Borden Herve, who has trained herself to function on only four hours of sleep. “If I’m on vacation and a news story breaks, it takes priority.”
“I don’t make everyone happy,” acknowledges Borden Herve. I get the occasional, anonymous e-mail and nasty, hateful things sent to me. There are people who shun me and yell at me in grocery stores. Sometimes my husband says to me, ‘could you be a little less principled?’ but it’s hard because that’s the very definition of what I do.” Over the years, she’s developed a thick skin. “The good outweighs any flak and criticism that comes my way.”
The reward? Seeing a measurable and positive impact on the community: higher voter turnout; successful fund-raisers; the outpouring of support for a local family who lost everything in a fire; former GMW interns landing their media
dream jobs.
“A lot of people don’t know what’s involved in putting sourced, reliable, accurate news out there – and that’s not to say we don’t make mistakes.” Borden Herve is fiercely committed to keeping the news reported on GOOD Morning Wilton free and accessible to everyone. It is still a business though, kept afloat by regular advertisers and readers who voluntarily buy annual memberships, allowing GMW to flourish.
“Wilton is a unicorn town,” observes Borden Herve.“It’s the right size for this kind of publication. I live here, my kids go to school here. I bend over backward to be as rigorous and principled as I can be and do my very best to be objective. Providing good quality writing and journalism in a place that I love and in a way I can feel respectful of when I look in the mirror is everything.”
