Monthly Archive for February, 2009

Establishing our Board

Published
by
Daniel
on February 28, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 1 Comment

First off, the Wordpress iPhone app is really legit. I’m tapping this up at the moment because Stanford has their darn wifi locked down. The app does nearly everything I need it to.

Secondly, I’d like to think through categorization vs. tagging a bit more (although this is probably super low priority).

To the real point of this post: our first board meeting will be the 8th of March and there’s still planning to be done in preparation. I’ve personally never put one of these together before, so I’m going to open up the process as much as possible.

I imagine the first one will be about an hour and a half long. The goals will be three-fold (and I hope the app will accept my HTML formatting):

  • Establishing how the board will operate, including responsibilities of the chairman, how often they will meet, how long they will serve, etc.
  • Establishing the responsibilities of the board, including approving the budget, hiring the Exec Director, etc.
  • Giving feedback and guidance of the medium term goals of CoPress, including hosting services, building community, and this supposed advertising network.

Anything I’m missing? My hope is to prepare the agenda in coordination with Bryan, the unofficial chairman, but I’m not entirely sure of the process to do this.

One open question I have is whether we draft bylaws before or after the first meeting. My intiution, however, is that we should: have this first meeting, draft the bylaws based on conclusions from the first meeting, and then ratify the bylaws at the second meeting.

This is what failure looks like

Published
by
Joey
on February 28, 2009
in High Priority
. 1 Comment

I’m a big fan of the ‘reality check.’ Which is why the entire CoPress team, and anyone who’s about to take on a venture similar to ours, oughta read the following article.

http://calacanis.com/2009/02/27/what-to-do-if-your-startup-is-about-fail-or-dont-stop-believing/

Yes, I’m putting in the full URL so you can’t possibly miss it because this is what failure looks like.

CoPress has customers. We have a vendor (more soon likely). We have a reputation to uphold. We are all intimately invested in see that this project takes over the world. (or at least, saves journalism) (or at least helps a few newsorgs out) (or, ____insert lofty goal here_____).

But, we can fail. It could happen. It would suck.

Read that article . You need to know what we could go through. We need to be able to recognize what failure looks like. In part so we can avoid it, and in part so that if it gets down to that, we know what to do.

IT’S A MUST READ.

I’ve got questions

Published
by
Joey
on February 26, 2009
in Low Priority
. 2 Comments

Just some thoughts on questions and topics we could raise via Twitter or the forums:

a ~ means that the question has been asked, but not really answered

~ Does your paper use Text link ads? What are your thoughts on the ethics? Do you make money?

• How much does your paper maker per month off online?

• What’s the single most annoying thing about ur CMS?

• What’s the number one feature you’re looking for?

• How many people do you have on staff that can write code?

~ How many people on your staff laugh at the word twitter?

• How many people on your staff have their own website?

• Are you having problems recruiting a staff? What are your solutions?

• How’s the internship hunt coming for this summer?

• What are strategies ur using to recruit students to the newsorg?

• journos in a dying industry?

• non-journos?

• How do you use twitter? Do you read every tweet u missed? Read constantly?

February 22, 2009: We Need To Talk More

Published
by
Adam
on February 23, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

This week’s meeting was pushed forward half an hour from our regular time to accommodate CollegeJourn’s epic “Bring a Professor” chat. The usual suspects were in attendance, and we got started at 15:33 PST/18:33 EST.

First up on the agenda was Daniel with organizational stuff, the first topic of which regarded the creation of a board. The inaugural board conference call was pushed back a week to March 8, it was decided that Cody Brown’s venture was probably not a significant conflict of interest but it should be investigated further, and as an organization we need to address internal sustainability. Thus began the now-commom theme of “we need to talk more.” Continue reading ‘February 22, 2009: We Need To Talk More’

 
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College news sites in Canada

Published
by
Greg
on February 22, 2009
in Low Priority
. 0 Comments

Possibilities
Brock University – The Brock Press (CP)
http://www.brockpress.com/

Concordia University – The Concordian (CP)
http://www.theconcordian.com/

University of Calgary – The Gauntlet
http://gauntlet.ucalgary.ca/

University of Waterloo
http://imprint.uwaterloo.ca/

University of Ottawa – The Fulcrum
http://www.thefulcrum.ca

Mount Royal College – The Journal
http://www2.mtroyal.ab.ca/~journal/

University of Western Ontario – Gazette (gradients much?)
http://www.gazette.uwo.ca/

Langara College – The Voice
http://www.langara.bc.ca/voice/

University of Guelph – The Ontarion
http://www.theontarion.ca/

University of Toronto at Scarborough – The Underground
http://www.the-underground.ca/

University of Toronto – The Varsity
http://www.thevarsity.ca/

York University – Excalibur
http://www.excal.on.ca/cms2/

Mount Allison University – The Argosy (“Sackville’s fish wrapper of choice since 1875.” Nice.)
http://www.argosy.ca/

FYI
University of Manitoba – The Manitoban
http://www.themanitoban.com/

Simon Fraser University – The Peak
http://www.the-peak.ca/

University of British Columbia
http://www.ubyssey.ca/

University of Ottawa – Centretown News
http://centretownnewsonline.ca/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

University of New Brunswick – The Brunswickan
http://thebruns.ca/

University of Carleton (check out the clips feature)
http://www.carleton.ca/Capital_News/13022009/

Feb 15 2009: CRM, fundraising via The Point, and hosting affiliates

Published
by
Daniel
on February 17, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

On Sunday evening, Adam, Joey, Greg, Miles, Bryan, and Kevin joined me for the Sunday night conference call. We were quite successful is keeping it brief, especially because we were plagued with a series of Skype difficulties in the middle of the call.

For operations, Miles installed SugarCRM in the past week. It’s pretty darn powerful, but we should be able to grow with it.

On editorial, we talked about producing content the preceding week. For one reason or another we didn’t publish on Thursday, but I though it was alright if we miss occasionally. In the upcoming week, we’re going to run a post on topical wikis for student news (which I still have to write) and an opinion piece on why reporters should be allowed to comment on their articles (Joey). We also have two stellar ideas for This Week in CoPress including a discussion of monetizing online and also bridging the gap between print and digital. In the forum, we’re going to kick off discussion on tips and tricks to bridge that gap.

Financially speaking, we didn’t apply for the J-Lab grant that was due last week because we didn’t feel as though we fit the criteria. Signed contracts are now going to live in Project Pier. Our initiative to fundraise via The Point isn’t working so well, and Bryan suggests that we just ask for money in general instead of specifically for hosting.

We also covered community, hosting, and organizational stuff Sunday evening. Earlier we were interested in having the first CoPress Unconference associated with NewsInnovation Philly, but there are now concerns that it would be too close to finals and graduation for some people. A few people in the CoPress Network have suggested they would be interested in doing website critiques. We might schedule the first of these in the next couple of weeks.

For hosting, we now have 6 to 8 schools set to come on board in the next several months (I’m not entirely sure of the timeline). We’re also looking to set up a program where, if hosting isn’t really your thing, you can still support us by buying your theme with an affiliate program, etc.

 
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Possible Revenue Models for CoPress

Published
by
Joey
on February 15, 2009
in High Priority
. 4 Comments

Some rough ideas for the future of CoPress funding.

Hosting

  • If we can figure out a way to scale that is more economical than LiquidWeb, we might be able to turn a small profit once we get enough schools on board
  • Ideas include looking into Amazon S3, dreamhost, mediatemple, etc…

Support premium

  • We ought to start doing this anyway, but charging a monthly fee for additional support seems like a no-brainer
  • We can most of the monthly premiums to a student who is willing to take on the account. This makes us seem less evil, mitigates our risk, and keeps our own workload down.
  • We should also offer support on a hourly basis. And turn most of those profits over to the student providing the support.

Foundation/grant funding

  • initial startup costs need to be funded this way.
  • CUP: we’ve got similar goals, we need a contact
  • We’re still looking into the various funding methods

Cut of connecting developers with schools in need

  • CoPress gets to put the project in it’s ‘gallery of code’
  • CoPress provides a list of developers and their skills
  • Schools can list a project that they need done
  • Developer and school can match each other, or for a nominal fee, CoPress can match the two up
  • CoPress can suggest a cost for the project, or the two can figure it out on their own.
  • Fee ideas:
    • $25 to match a prog to a project
    • 5% cut of the total payment goes to CoPress
    • 15% if they don’t want to list the project in the gallery (opensource it)
    • Suggest rate of $200 for small projects (< 8 hours)… work up from there

Ad revenue sharing

  • CoPress developed tech that will cross post stories on sites that have relevant content.
  • Sorta kinda like what ICONN is trying to do, only we do first/better.
  • Any school can opt-in to the network, and can see a huge list of stories or search by keywords/location.
  • Fee idea: Running a story gives 60% to the content creator, 35% to the person running the story, 5% to CoPress

CoPress ad network

  • Leverage the power of the community to get a small ad network started that focuses on national, high-end ads, marketed toward alumni and students
  • We’d need to hire at least one full time person to manage this, and likely 2+ developers to code the backend framework
  • This has the potential to pool resources in the same way that we have with hosting. Think: unionizing the college media to get better ad sales. This is the one advantage the CP has that we don’t.
  • CoPress could take a very small, 5% cut of this.

Donations

  • via The Point
  • $750 by the end of Feb.
  • for seed capital

Spot.us

  • pitch a story on college media, this would be a collab. effort to write, and CoPress could take the fee.

VC Funding

  • Joey knows virtually nothing about this, but I see this as an option, especially if we decide to take on the ad network.

School Sponsorship

  • setup our own foundation
  • eventually run off an endowment

Look to expand our services to small, local papers

  • title says it all, but we could easily charge local papers 5 times what we charge colleges, and have them still think it was cheap
  • colleges are never going to have much flexible cash

Things to do regarding the website this week

Published
by
Daniel
on February 11, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 1 Comment

From our agenda at the last conference call, I think there are several things it would be sweet if we could add to the website this week. They’re open to whomever wants to take a crack at them, and I’ll probably take the leftovers when I’m done traveling. Speaking of, I’ve got an overnight bus ride tonight to Lima, and then a red-eye flight to Portland tomorrow night. I’m hoping that the airport in Lima has free wifi, but no certainties.

Here’s what we’ve got:

  • Metadata in the header is configured incorrectly. I tried sharing a link on Facebook and it doesn’t pull a summary, the title tag, or any images. This might be a problem with our theme or with the SEO plugin we use.
  • Switching out PodPress (if possible). I think PodPress is breaking with the theme too, and it might just be simpler to embed the MP3 file as an enclosure and use an audio player.
  • Make the blog headlines more prominent on the home page. I’m open to ideas as to how this might be done.
  • Revising the about page. I’m going to do some work on the bus on the copy, but we still need team bios and photos.
  • Adding to the blog sidebar. It would be sweet to have a list of our most recent links, and a player with the most recent version of This Week in CoPress. There might be a plugin that does this, or it might be a little bit more difficult.

I’m also thinking that we should change the URI structure of the website a bit (so that our blog lives at copress.org/blog and we remove the “category” slug). We can wait until Sunday for this tho.

Anything I’m missing?

Raising seed money for CoPress Hosting via The Point

Published
by
Daniel
on February 11, 2009
in High Priority
. 0 Comments

I don’t feel as though our fundraising campaign on The Point is going all that well. Personally, I think we should spell out our expenses a little clearer because $750 might seem like a lot of money. Any other ideas or thoughts?

Django shortens conference calls (apparently)

Published
by
Joey
on February 8, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

Today marked the first stab at our new conference call format: each director spoke on their area of responsibility for a time. Time limits were enforced — though this was mostly because we had scheduled another conference call with 7 django (and one ruby on rails) newspaper CMS developers. With that impetuous, we were insanely efficient on this call, which is why this summary will read as many short points — that was the nature of the call.

Hosting

Miles has been hard at work, and we expect to sign several new clients soon. The Whit transition went very well, and the support for them has been minimal of late.

Looking toward the immediate future, we recognize that the revolution theme we used for The Whit has limitations and probably ought to be re-examined for the future. This process might be rolled into an attempt on our part to partner with some theme providers.

Editorial

A pat on the back to ourselves on publishing all five days last week, that’s been our goal all along, and we’ve now officially done it, and we plan to do it again this week.

Noting that there is an AP style guide for print products, there probably ought to be a blogging style guide (mostly for links) online. CoPress has started a wiki page for this and hopefully it turns into a useful resource.

Operations, Financial, Community

The core team will be establishing office hours so that people on the team (and eventually the community) will know times when they are sure to be able to get ahold of us. 

We’re excited to have Drew and Jared taking a bigger role on the team, we’re looking forward to their expertise :)

CoPress is launching our first donation campaign tomorrow. We’re looking to get some seed funding to offset the cost of the hosting setup. The campaign is structured so that all you have to do is give a few dollars — anything helps!

One last quick note on the website: we recognize that the forum is too complex right now. We’ll be scaling it back to make it easier to use.

The call finished just before 8:00 EST — the fastest call CoPress has ever accomplished!

 
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