CoPress

Recommended distractions for a Sunday of homework for those of you already back in school:

• The Center for Innovation in College Media is now accepting applicants for their fall internship. We’ve worked extensively with Bryan Murley, one of CICM’s directors, and can assure those considering the position that you’ll learn a tremendous amount. The work will primarily focus on producing a variety of editorial content for the weblog, including “podcast interviews with media movers and shakers, reviews of college media online initiatives, and maps and databases of college media online sites.”
• 5 Steps to Increase User Contributions to Your Community Site – Solid synopsis of involving your community from start to finish. Understanding how to incentivize participation, as well as how to foster and educate it, are keys to success. On a related note, Jackie Hai’s new project, PEG Point, is on its way to becoming a highly-recommended read.
• Dan Gillmor has a list of 11 things he’d do if he ran a news organization. Numbers two and three: leverage the intelligence of your community, and make transparency the default. It’s good to see these ideas consolidating; let’s start learning from more experiments.
• andrewspittle: Heading into the first weekend of the @whitmanpio‘s new web-first workflow. Waiting for the first, inevitable quirk or bug.
• Max Cutler is looking for a Web/UX designer to assist in the implementation of Nando, the editorial admin interface for Courant News.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• So Long Sections? – Joey sez: Amen brother! I’ve been saying this for years: drop the damn confusing, non-made-for-web nav bars on newspaper sites in favor of a web-first methodology.
• Last minute summer internship – Daniel sez: Still looking? Oshkosh Northwestern is wants a multimedia intern for the summer. Also related, the Seattle PI is looking for an intern/interns.
• Rebooting the News #10 – Daniel sez: Thought-inducing discussion about building a bug-tracking system for journalism. It would be really sweet to see something like this experimented with.
• Marketing Talks@Google: Fred Wilson – Daniel sez: Wilson talks about the internet and disruption in regards to the industries it has already hit, and industries it will hit in the future.

Around the network

Not too many conversations on the forum this week, although Joe Moore from The Snapper made a request for a weekly email for the people who don’t necessarily live on the web day in and day out. We’re taking this one to heart; this new email newsletter might be an evolution of our Google Group, or a standalone mailing. In some regards, this weekly post is intended to be a synthesis of what’s going on, but it sounds like other formats might be appropriate tool. If you have a preference, please indicate such in the comments.

On Thursday, Emily Babay, Jake Paul, Ethan Klapper, Jessica Luthi, and David Estes joined Andrew Spittle for the first session of College Web Design Camp 2009. He’s putting together a post on the sesh, along with a recording of their introductions, that should run early next week.

Mark Briggs at Serra Media is taking a forward-looking approach to finding summer interns: have them pitch their projects. From the announcement:

Instead of a specific, rigid framework of duties, tasks, hours and pay that you try to ply yourself into, we’re inviting you to make a pitch on the assignment as if you were an entrepreneur. (Because you are.)

These are paid positions, but the amount we pay and the number of hours you work per week are flexible. So, instead of applications for a set position and fixed number of hours, we’re looking for pitches from people who are interested in working with us to develop our ideas and see their own brought to market, no matter their situation.

In short, in addition to working on the projects Serra Media has already started, interns will be afforded the opportunity and resources to initiate their own. One concern that comes to mind was about who has ownership of the project after the internship is over. Mark told me through email that he’s “open to discussing some equity share in addition to pay, too, though.” Deadline for application is May 22nd, 2009.