Inside CoPress

A few weeks ago, I put together a Google Docs survey as a sort of internal reflection for the end of the school year. Five people responded out of a total of 11 people that are on our internal list. For each question I presented in the survey, I’ll add several of what I think are the most telling and useful responses.

What are a few of our strengths?

• Core team is dedicated, puts a lot of energy into content, new ideas.
• Amazing group of people with a diverse range of talents and abilities
• Our services are clearly needed and in high demand
• We’re high profile; there are a lot of people aware of and interested in what we’re doing
• We’ve started to recruit new blood; we need to keep that up

What are a few of our weaknesses?

• Too much talk sometimes, but usually better to have more than less
• A little too much bickering at times, but that goes with the territory. Too much content to sustain.
• WAY too many unnecessary tools and arbitrary deadlines
• Delegation and responsibility of tasks. There’s a certain percentage of tasks that either don’t get done or are passed from person to person
• Stackoverflow is dangerously close to what we want to build, the good news is that they’re proprietary, and run on a MS stack – we can be the open source alternative
• We don’t have a clearly defined future

What is the challenge in college media that we specifically are trying to solve?

• First thing that came to mind when I read this question: isolation.
• College media (and mainstream media) lack a clear vision on how to expand/survive online. Our job is the counsel and support them to achieve increased engaged users and revenue through better design, strong code development, and community support.
• Most student newspapers are technologically ass-backwards. We’re trying improve their capacity to maintain and develop their web presences (most specifically their websites at the moment) because we believe that their capacity to do so is intimately tied with their ability to transition and succeed.
• Lack of tech savvy students, trying to take college media into 21st century
• Connecting a disparate group of media students to help transition college media into the new age.

Where can we improve?

• Bringing on more Drupal, Django, PHP people.
• We need more committed members, specifically developers on staff. Oh, and paying the staff sure would be nice.
• I think we can improve by being less self-promotional and focusing more on providing quality content, being helpful, and building cool tools.
• More contact with clients
• More focus on solutions, networking, recruitment, a little less on “content.”

What would you like to see CoPress do or build in the near future?

• We need the Connection Engine and the Revenue Platform.
• Depends on the funding. Strengthen the hosting platform, expand the base of students involved, find way to sustain the organization, build a cool plug-in for WordPress.
• Think the design camp is a good idea.
• Be a go-to resource for college news orgs, large and small. They would also all contribute to and benefit from the community and knowledge base.
• I think the design camp over the summer has a lot of potential. I think that we need to rethink our editorial strategy because it seems as though we’re always rushing to come up with ideas. I think we should consider spinning off “This Week in CoPress” to become a co-branded podcast with CICM on student media in general. I also think we should rethink our community strategy with a focus on bringing a more diverse array of people into the conversation

In short, there’s a lot of information we can work from. We’re going to discuss these results more at our Board meeting and weekly team call, but feel free to leave comments as well. I think we’re in a good position to translate these concerns and ideas into actionable work.