Andrew Spittle gets a hat-tip for this link, although I could’ve sworn I saw it in the news earlier: Google is starting a venture fund. The application process is sending them an email with 3 typed pages or 20 slides, and the cool thing is that they offer a range of funding (I think we’d be most comfortable with seed funding). This is something we might consider doing, although probably in the two to three month range. I don’t know that we need to jump on it immediately.
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
A question for Greg or Adam: do you know how to put chapters in an audio file? I think AAC supports this, and it might be sweet to break our weekly call down into sections (i.e. so one can just listen to the hosting part, etc.).
Interesting would probably be the word I would use to describe this week’s team call.
Organization & Operations
Daniel has created a document outlining our strategic goals in each area, which builds on the first version we created. It’s fairly preliminary at the moment, but we will soon hash out goals for the next six months. Look out for more details.
We also discussed Ryan Sholin’s question on Inside CoPress about what is a student and what is college media. We concluded our definition for student would be an undergraduate, at least part-time, who is in good academic standing.
Also in this arena, we’ll be finishing up some Web site changes, starting a document for drafting our bylaws and sending thank you cards to donors.
Continue reading ‘March 29 2009: Starting to Detail Strategic Goals’
Jon Stahl posted some of ONE/Northwest’s (my former employer) evaluation criteria on the ONE/Blog the other day that I think we should consider adopting. This would be a checklist that we run though to try and assess the successes and challenges of the project. Such an action is useful for “personal reflection” but also for the team as a whole to progress with our services and have some sort of benchmark for service growth. Adam and Miles would probably be in the best position to put this together, and I’d be happy to help once I get our strategic goals put together for the next year and a half. Thoughts?
Hi all, Ryan Sholin here. I’ve been catching up with some of the TWiC podcasts and recently took a listen to the first board meeting conference call this week.
A few questions came out of that playlist, and I’ve passed some ideas back and forth with at least two of you already, but I’d like to throw this issue open for more discussion.
Regarding “student” status as a prerequisite for being a board member, officer (or really, for anything): I think there’s a nice big Venn diagram that you can draw to outline some of these overlapping circles:
- Undergraduate Journalism Students
- Graduate Journalism Students
- Journalism Students enrolled in a class that involves producing content for a student media outlet
- Journalism Students who produce content for independent student media outlets
- Independent Individuals employed by student media outlets connected to journalism schools
- Independent Individuals employed by independent student media outlets
- etc…
So, it’s not such a clean cut between “student” and “not a student.” And limiting “student” status to undergraduates counts out students from a few big grad-only j-schools like Columbia University.
Continue reading ‘A bit of definition: What’s a student? What’s student media?’
I have an idea for what our first live This Week in CoPress might discuss: the characteristics of a radical restructuring or redesign of a news organization. Building off the conversation we’ve already started in the forum, we could bring together some of the big thinkers in this space and have a discussion around the premise, “if you were starting your student news organization from scratch, what would it look like, how would it operate, and in what ways would it be similar to/different from what you already have?”
Thoughts?
Rob Curley is looking for students to apply for 3 to 9 month paid internships at the Las Vegas Sun. It would be sweet if we could get another CoPress Team member over to the Left Coast.
Since there has been a lot of discussion about making the podcast much more interactive, I have thrown out the idea of doing it on BlogTalkRadio.
For those unfamiliar with BlogTalkRadio, you have to schedule a date and time to record your podcast. You are given a hosting number and then proceed to call from your phone a 1-800 number to log into the show to start it. There is a device called the “switchboard” on BlogTalkRadio’s Web site where you are able to see what chatters are saying and when you have people calling in. To put them on air, it’s just a click away. There is a special call-in number for listeners, just as there would be for a regular talk show. I think it’s worth looking into for “This Week in CoPress.”
Here are my suggestions on how we can make this work:
One of the things Id like to accomplish this week is creating a formal categorization protocol for our two blogs: the CoPress Blog and Inside CoPress. At the moment, categories for both are haphazard and not very useful. The CoPress Blog has a couple of named categories, We Clicked On for instance, one called Commentary that Ive been filing most blog posts under, and several other miscellanous ones that are relics from our previous website. The categories for Inside CoPress are ones Ive made up as weve gone along, and Ive tried to stick with the type of post it was (i.e. an idea vs. a question vs. research).
My goal is to clean these up. Inside CoPress should be easy enough. What I propose is that we categorize based on priority; there will be three categories, high, medium, and low, which will dictate the timeliness of the post. This post will be filed under Low Priority, for instance. Well then use the tags to indicate the topics within the post. This post will be tagged CoPress Blog, Inside CoPress, logistics, etc.
I tag my email within Google Apps in a similar fashion. What will be really cool about this, if we adopt the team blog better, is that it will become almost like a shared email account. I really envision Inside CoPress to be the place where we have non-sensitive discussions (i.e. nearly all) in an open, indexed manner so that we can easily go back to and build upon previous conversations (instead of having them over and over). More on that later.
Categories for the CoPress Blog will be trickier. We have three defined ones already: We Clicked On, This Week in CoPress, and Annoucements (which will become Team Announcements). I think we should start Reports from the Field or From the Network, and a few others that will be like the sections in a paper. Im open to ideas as to what those will be, however. Thoughts? Emily, it would be great to hear your opinion.
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