Tag Archive for 'podcasts'

November 8, 2009: NCMC09 recap

Another Sunday night, another team conference call. We skipped the week prior because some of the team was still traveling back from ACP/CMA. Joining me on the call were Greg, Miles, Sam, Andrew, and Lauren.

First at bat was a recap of ACP/CMA, what worked well, and what we want to do better next time. Andrew remarked that, for CoPress, the conference went as well as we could’ve hoped for. It would’ve been sweet if we had a booth, though. We learned from Logan while at the conference that the booths were only $650 and included four conference registrations. Originally, we thought that vendors were required to sponsor a part of the conference and that fee ran into the thousands of dollars (i.e. outside of our budget). The informal way we were there, though, was good for networking and being on panels was a plus. Andrew also remarked that at one of the panels he was at in the audience another audience member, unprompted, asked a question about us. Lauren thinks that, for next time, we should do more branding, have rack cards, etc. I’d personally like to be more “network-y” and talk with more people. In addition, I think it would be really cool to expand our coverage of the panels and make sure we have people covering each tech-related one. Last but not least, it would be really sweet to bring the entire team to the next conference we attend.

On the organizational side of things, I spent several hours on Sunday entering line items for invoices, receipts, etc. Our ledger should be completely up to date and, thanks to Albert’s efforts, we’ll be able to do up to date reporting on our revenues and expenses.

For the blog this week, Greg is putting together a post about how the Texas Tribune can be a model for student news organizations and Lauren will be writing one about transitioning your web staff from year to year. Lauren and I will also talk about the wiki, as we hope to start developing the content again.

 
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October 4, 2009: Introducing Will Davis

The biggest news of tonight’s call with Greg, Adam, Andrew, Lauren, Vanessa, and I was the addition of a new member to the team: Will Davis. Will is currently the Editor in Chief of The Maine Campus, a weekly paper in Maine that migrated to WordPress MU over the summer. He’s already an active WordPress developer and we’re stoked to have him join the project in a more formal way.

We also discussed the launch of our email newsletter. Andrew will be preparing a draft of the first one and we’ll be sending it out when Courier supports sending emails to existing WordPress users (which should be coming soon). It’s going to be a tool for pushing out emergency updates, as well as a regular summary of what’s going on with links to blog posts, a way to welcome new site launches to everyone else we host, and so on. It’s undecided as to whether anyone can sign up for this, or whether we’ll restrict it to just active clients.

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September 6, 2009: Keepin’ it quick

This week’s call was one of the shortest and to-the-point (33 minutes) we’ve had since I’ve been involved with CoPress thanks to our awesome timekeeper, Vanessa, and Daniel’s need to get to a family wedding. In addition to those two, myself, Adam, Greg and Andrew were on the call.

High priority: Reincorporation, design and evaluation

Daniel gave us the update on reincorporating CoPress as a for-profit organization. The paperwork was filed this week, so the next step will be obtaining an employer identification number from the IRS. And more good news: We don’t have to file a tax return until early next year.

Although we launched our site redesign a few weeks ago, there’s still work to be done. Notably, the hosting page needs to be tweaked to better reflect and explain what CoPress does. We’ll be shifting priority info “above the fold” of the page and including text about what you can expect during the transition, among other things.

In terms of evaluation, Daniel will put together a document about what goals we should be meeting and how we measure success, as determined by conversations he’s had one-on-one with members of the team this past week. One main goal, which we all agreed might be a bit too ambitious, is to get 75 managed hosting clients by the end of the year. Continue reading ‘September 6, 2009: Keepin’ it quick’

 
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Feedback for TWiC

I jotted down a few quick notes for TWiC after doing the show today that I thought I’d share. Sorry for coming off heavy-handed, I put my editor hat on for this one.

We need a brief written up well ahead of time. This can be a FreindFeed room, or a gDoc, but it should have topics, listed in order of priority. Sample questions wouldn’t be bad. Relevant links are a must!

DEADTIME DEADTIME DEADTIME. Brief Joey anecdote here. I used to work at a summer camp where we put on weekly campfires. (done laughing at the quaintness yet? Click that link. You’ll ROFL) Watch the first minute of this video.

Here’s the point: we were professional campfire-skit-doers. We were rockstars who are were just enfused with the zany power and …

…k, I’ll come clean: we practiced, a lot. Practice was tough because every moment that the stage is empty, where the audience doesn’t have something to look at, the guys in charge would shout “DEADTIME, DEADTIME, DEADTIME.”

Here’s how this gets back to TWiC: campfires have visuals and audio to work with, TWiC has just one. Deadtime is even more noticeable on a podcast. It just sounds bad to have anything more than a second of dead air. Talking in the text chat is not a good solution. You’re doing something but the audience here’s nothing.

Someone needs to be in charge. If conversation dies, that person must move on to the next topic, keep it lively, keep it engaged.

There’s lots of CoPress folk. Don’t get me wrong. I like doing TWiC, but 3 CoPress peeps to one or two guests doesn’t help our tendency to turn the podcast into an interview session. Perhaps we should cut back on the number of folks and try to encourage discussion.

Tech issues on our end is in-excusable. We need to have voice, from everyone, 10 min before a call. This also should mean having guests on the line 10 min before. Communication with the guest should be done well in advance, with a quick follow up the day of. They’re our guests, but they need to be on time.

Offer to post on copress as a reward. If we liked what the guest had to say, we should offer them the opportunity to write a post for CoPress. It’s actually PR for them – we’re doing them a favor.

August 30, 2009: We can haz Skype fail?

Skype is real convenient, but wow can it suck. We had a few crashes and dropped sessions during our call today. Which was attended by Daniel, Adam, Joey, Miles, Andrew, Lauren, Vanessa and excitingly, Bryan.

We’ve been using our new system of breaking down topics to be covered into 3 priority levels and endeavoring to keep the calls to 30 minutes. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s working well. We’re always sure to cover the important stuff, and get off the phone much faster than our old hour and 30 minute standard.

Site Design (fixing the 2am half-assing)

Today’s call started off with a full acknowledgment that our hosting page, while updated, is not nearly what we need it to be. Feedback provided:

  • It’s not entirely clear that by signing up for hosting, the client should also be signing up for Priority Support. I don’t think we should manage hosting accounts if they don’t have priority support
  • Signup form needs to be updated a bit so that we make sure we capture required information.
  • In the school size calculator, Staff Size, can be mistaken for University staff, as in faculty, staff, etc. not newspaper staff.
  • We should review why we limit database restores to 3? If the DB crashes or breaks after that we won’t do anything? It might become unlimited, as its a service that people are likely to never use, hopefully will never have to use, but should always be there for safety’s sake.
  • Include a badge with “Prices starting at $50/month” that leads into the pricing page
  • We should consider raising the basic setup cost to $200. $150 seems low
  • Maybe make the graphic only over the left column, and move the links to the top of the right column.

Adam is going to take the lead on mapping out what we need to do, and Daniel will help with execution if needed. Any other feedback? Let us know in the comments.

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August 23, 2009: We’re now a for-profit enterprise

This afternoon, the CoPress board unanimously voted to switch from a nonprofit to a for-profit organization. It’s a big deal and a new direction for CoPress.

So why did we do it? It opens up a lot of expansion opportunities we wouldn’t have had with a nonprofit status. The move allows us to share equity with the people who have worked so hard to build CoPress up, and it opens the doors for investment opportunities. Though we lose the tax benefits and the warm fuzziness of being a nonprofit, we think CoPress has the potential of being a self-sustaining business in its own right.

Members in attendance:

  • Daniel Bachhuber
  • Joey Baker
  • Ryan Sholin
  • Suzanne Yada
  • Jackie Hai
  • Andrew Dunn
  • Bryan Murley
 
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Logistics of moving to for-profit

On Thursday, I had a meeting with Carolyn Duncann of the Portland Ten in regards to some of the logistical questions we’re facing as we try to switch from non-profit to for-profit. Joey and I had a short conference call this morning to debrief on that, and then plan our next steps.

For the text record, on Sunday our board will meet to vote on whether we have permission to move the project from non-profit to for-profit. We need a board vote on the record to make sure that everything is legal. Depending on whether that passes or not, Joey and I will then work on refiling on Monday with the State of Florida. We’ll continue with Florida over Oregon or another state because Susan Linch is kind enough to be an excellent resource. Once we get the filing done, we’ll wait as close as possible to September 15th to file for an extension on our tax return. The next month will also hold the project for us of figuring out how we split up equity amongst the people who going to be doing the work this fall. Neither Joey or I are qualified to comment on how this will be done (yet) and plan on talking to knowledgeable people within the next week to figure out the most equitable way to do this.

Thursday’s meeting with Carolynn was mostly focused on investment, when you seek it, what investors are looking for, etc. Most of the information isn’t applicable to us currently, and might not ever be applicable to us. The upside to external investment is that you get an infusion of cash with which to scale your business. The downsides are that you lose ownership/control of the company, the investors generally want at least a 20x return, and they might be looking to take your company public or sell it off to get that return. If we can scale such that the team starts getting paid based on their work without having to take external investment, I think we’d be better off.

My notes from the meeting (page 1, page 2, page 3) are moderately informative.

 
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August 17, 2009: Back to the weeklies

It’s good to back in the swing of things with our weekly group calls! This one was chock of full goodness.

Before I get into the details, I’d like to welcome Vanessa Bezic, who is joining me as a co-host on This Week in CoPress, season two. Vanessa is a recent graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, where she studied broadcast journalism. She learned about CoPress this spring from David Cohn, who is now on our board of directors.

Now, on to the call:

We first discussed the Web site redesign, which will launch on Monday. In addition to a post about the redesign on the main blog, look out for another announcement about hosting.

The next item involved an informative video Lauren Rabaino created about innovation. She’ll soon be working on another one as part of our new educational video series.

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August 9, 2009: I ain’t no spaghetti

On the call this evening were Adam, Joey, Greg (although we, humorously and sadly, forgot to add Greg for the first 30 minutes), Miles, Andrew, Lauren and myself. Andrew Dunn and Cody Brown joined us until they mysteriously disappeared from the internet.

We started off the conversation by running through the website redesign we’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. For history and posterity, this is where we’re at (although both the images and copy are not set in stone; we’re having an epic Basecamp conversation about the merits and demerits of our proposed slogan):

Click on the image for a higher resolution screenshot

The original, original goal was to relaunch last Tuesday or thereabouts. After we completely blew through that, I moved the draft day to Thursday and then launch over Saturday. That didn’t happen either. Our goal now is to launch as soon as we put the finishing touches on a few last things.

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Rebooting the News and virtual assignment desks

If you aren’t subscribed already, I highly recommend listening to the most recent version of Rebooting the News. Dave and Jay talk a bit more about the concept of a virtual assignment desk, something I very much hope the Edit Flow Project can be a foundation for. If we can get newsrooms to manage their story assignments within WordPress, then it’s a more logical step to offer the ability to open that information up and have the community contribute to it.