Hey college news, it’s your older brother: hyperlocal.

We’re not so different, you and I. We’re both industries dominated by the inexperienced. We both have to cover a specific community. In fact, it could be argued that collegiate journalism is a subset of hyperlocal.

Fortunately for you this means that we all share the same problems. Both college newspapers and hyperlocal sites are figuring out the best ways to monetize a geographic area of like-minded people, often through the Web.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis and the folks at CUNY, we know that some hyperlocal sites are pulling in $200,000 a year. We also know of some college newspapers that are self-sustaining. There are successful companies in both our spaces, yet many of us struggle to grasp the fundamentals of the business.

That is why the team behind Technically Philly has proposed News Inkubator, a shared office spaces and business services hub for hyperlocal news sites in Philadelphia. Picture a shared office space and a shared sales staff that help hyperlocals generate revenue ideas together, while still maintaining their editorial and business independence.

News Inkubator is also about bridging the entrepreneurial and media communities in Philadelphia to help foster a working relationship were each side learns from the other. All of these concepts can translate to benefit your college publication. In fact, here are three of our ideas that I hope you steal:

Use the existing bureaucracy

Universities have already separated students by interest. The computer science students often belong to a different school than the business students that belong to a different school than the journalism students. Why not bring all three of these sides together?

Each can have a project for the semester and learn from the other students. To survive in 2010, journalism grads are going to need to know how businesses work. Business grads are going to have to understand new media and computer science students need client work to showcase when they graduate.

If time becomes an issue, lobby to create a new class. Department heads love to show each other how innovative they are, so ask them to help.

The space is cheap

Many college newspapers rent (or are given) office space from the university negating one of the biggest hurdles in legitimizing an online hyperlocal entity. Use this to your advantage. Host speakers that are business leaders from local companies. You could even spring for some pizza and host a hackathon or barcamp open to all majors and career paths to build products for the paper.

Spoke, meet hub

Many college have student-run blogs or organization websites. Aggregate and create content partnerships with everyone who also covers what you cover. There is no need for overlap in your college’s media market.

As the college newspaper, you have an established editorial process and revenue streams, so offer to be the hub for your local sites and maybe even work out a revenue sharing plan. It will be good training for covering any niche after you graduate and can free up your paper’s already limited resources to pursue more in-depth journalism and even work on new revenue models together.

The three founders of Technically Philly met at the Temple News, and we use the skills we learned there everyday. Use your time at a college newspaper to not only flex your reporting muscles but also see if you can start a side project that makes a little more money for the paper. Your wallet will thank you when you graduate.

Be sure to give our application a read and offer any criticism. The harsher, the better.

Contact Sean Blanda at sean@technicallyphilly.com or follow him on Twitter, @seanblanda.

George Mason University has an interesting community; with many of the students living off-campus or attending classes at one of the four satellite campuses, finding a way to reach out to and work with them can be difficult. We are always looking at what’s going on online to figure out which tools can help us best.

With that in mind, we’ve launched two websites, Mason Votes and onMason, in the past year and a half. We’re also in the midst of a second redesign of Connect2Mason, our convergence website which pulls content from all of our other student media outlets. We’ve also been pretty serious about expanding our social media presence to cover the needs of our diverse community.

onMason

At the beginning of this semester we launched a new site called onMason. During the last two years, we’ve noticed that a lot of students are out there, blogging, sending pictures from their phones to the web and creating websites. We felt that we were missing a serious opportunity to bring student-created media to the forefront because, even though we run searches, there’s always going to be a huge amount of stuff we’re going to miss.

We created onMason as the solution. The site is a WordPressMU platform for anyone with an @gmu.edu e-mail to sign up and get their own yoursite.onmason.com WordPress site. Each site comes with built-in mobile compatibility, SEO optimization, a Creative Commons license and a ton of themes and plug-ins. In addition, users can friend each other from the backend and set up their blog as a Facebook app. The user base has been growing very quickly, especially with professors using Scholarpress tools to run class sites. We’re in the midst of upgrading all our plug-ins so that they are 2.8 compatible, but we’re going to be re-rolling out a bunch of great features, including the ability to see a feed of all the blogs on the site and parse it down by tags.

There’s a lot of great potential there for crowd-sourcing events by having users blog about them and mark posts with a tag. We hope to provide the many Mason students already out there creating content and posting media with one home where they can get together, use the best tools, and provide their own view on Mason.

Right now, our focus is making sure everything is working, however, we’re looking at a number of monetization strategies for the site. We can set up ads that only display to non-users on every onmason.com site. We’ve also got the tools to set it up so certain plug-ins or expanded space is only available with a premium membership. Another possibility is providing local advertisers with the option to get their own sponsored  onMason site, I think that the opportunity to interact with students in a small hyper-local network like onMason would be a valuable one.

The advantage of this tool is that we can converge student-created content into our own. We also use onMason as a platform to host a number of our outlet sites, allowing our official front to join in with that community.

Mason Votes

Mason Votes was a community-backed project that the Office of Student Media launched for the national presidential election in 2008. The site allowed us to cover news with tools our office hadn’t used before. The original site was based on WordPress and had a static front page, in order to get the site up quickly. It integrated with Google Calendar, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and Delicious.

We were able to use a number of very cool tools over the course of the election. We covered the debates with CoverItLive chats and streamed live events using Livestream. We were able to make all our content, on both the site and social media, searchable using Lijit.

We found two great ways to pull traffic into the site. The first was through co-sponsoring community events. We worked with the College Republicans and College Democrats, various offices and other student groups to bring their events to the forefront in exchange for having a presence at those events. This came into play with live tweets and photos from student-run events, as well as with the live chats that played alongside video of the debates.

The second way we drove traffic was by putting everything under a Creative Commons license. Our articles were out on the web for people to use and our photographers photos were on Flickr and the people who used them (including Wikipedia) linked back to our presence.

The site continued to cover student and state elections and was moved to onMason and redesigned. It now has a Facebook app that lets people display the latest stories on their front page.

Connect2Mason

Last school year our Drupal-based convergence site Connect2Mason was redesigned and upgraded. The new site features a more dynamic front page and integrates in advertising and classifieds.

Connect2Mason’s role is to converge content from all the various student media outlets at GMU. They pull in podcasts from our radio station WGMU, video from our cable station MCN, text and photos from the student newspaper Broadside and enhance it with their own content and breaking news coverage.

Connect2Mason reporters use YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to post and broadcast content. The site is able to showcase the best of what student media produce.

We’re now redesigning the website with a more modern, less blog look. Our group is using Google Code to create requirements documents, track bugs and issues, and coordinate our activity. We’re making sure to do testing and really drill down on our requirements for version 3.0 of Connect2Mason.

Social Media

Our goal is to be the face of George Mason on social media, especially when it comes to Twitter, and we’re constantly garnering feedback and expanding our presence. My team runs 12 Twitter accounts along with their own personal identities. We have one for each of our major websites, news feeds for each  area where George Mason has a campus, and three accounts that pull from Twitter and other feeds to advertise local jobs. None of the job feed accounts would have even happened if it wasn’t for our regular interaction with our Twitter audience. At the end of the last school year I asked the people following the@FairfaxVANews account what they were interested in seeing us provide and a number of students looking towards graduation suggested the idea of a local job wire.

We feel like a big part of our role when it comes to Twitter is helping Mason students and faculty find each other, not just listen to us broadcast our own work. We created a Twitter directory that anyone could add to so that Mason users could list themselves and find each other. When the function came out, we created Twitter lists, so that people could follow all the orgs, offices, staff or students with a single click. We also monitor for mentions of GMU and engage interested high school students, professors and both grad and undergrad students. We also try to interact with the local community outside of the University’s boundaries, sending representatives to social media meetups and the recent DC Twestival.

We’ve found that this level of interaction allows us to push our content farther and get feedback. Not only that, but because we are out there talking to students, they sometimes come to us with tips that turn into new stories.

Overall tools

For Twitter, we’ve been using CoTweet and Seesmic Desktop to share access to the various Twitter accounts, follow mentions and engage our community.

The WPBook plugin allows any onMason user to make their site headlines a Facebook app.

We’re transitioning some of the older advertising over, but soon all of our graphic and text ads will be administrated by our OpenX ad server. OpenX provides a free ad server which we installed and run ourselves. It provides all the tools to set up and administrate ad campaigns on multiple sites.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is the Technology Manager in the Office of Student Media at George Mason University. He can be reached at azuckers@gmu.edu.

From linking out and social media to video and liveblogging, student journalists often hear advice about steps their individual news organizations should take to succeed today. But we often neglect to take a step back and consider different models from which college media can draw inspiration.

So, we’d like to examine those with some depth in a new series, offering a different twist on the usual coverage. Specifically, focusing on news sites that began online. There’s a ton of great work being done online by print publications across the country, which we often cover, and this series is intended to help everyone.

Why this approach? Because good things can come when your news organization thinks like a startup. Also, these sites are unencumbered by legacy costs or structures related to a long-standing print publication.

We already know of a few good examples within college media:

• NYU Local — an independent site at New York University
• Amherst Wire — a magazine-style site at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• Connect2Mason — a convergence site that partners with existing college media on campus
• The Bwog — a blog run by the undergraduate magazine staff at Columbia University
• Onward State — a blog covering the Penn State community
• Daily Colonial — online daily news site for George Washington University and the surrounding areas

And even some outliers like The Daily Gazette, a daily news site at Swarthmore College that started as online-only and then added a print edition.

The most well-known of these sites is probably NYU Local, which has been covered by MediaShift and College Media Matters, the latter of which profiled founder Cody Brown. It’s even been linked to by The New York Times. Previously, CoPress spoke with Cody and Miles Skorpen, a CoPress team member then of The Daily Gazette, about online-only student news organizations last year.

We’ve also spoken with Jackie Hai and Richard Caesar of the Amherst Wire for a podcast (Jackie wrote a post about their economic stimulus coverage) and Whitney Rhodes, founding director of Connect2Mason, on a different podcast.

If you know of other good examples, drop us a link in the comments and let us know why they’re interesting — we’d probably like to talk with them. We’re particularly interested in student-created, student-run college news sites (i.e. not ones under the university or j-school).

Basically, we’re looking to write in more depth about startup, blog-style and other models of interest to college media — both at the college and professional levels. Also, we’d be open to submissions for posts, as always.

With these posts, we hope to offer lessons and advice that all college news organizations find useful and, perhaps, provide ideas to inspire others to start similar sites.

I’ve already started drafting a post about the Texas Tribune‘s model; until then, check out this interview with one of their developers. I also have ideas swirling in my head after attending the New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit last Monday. Stay tuned!

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.

Courant will not really be ready for actual use or consumption upon its open-source-ing. The core set of functionality is essentially complete, which means you can build a news website which functions well for the visitors. However, we still haven’t had time to implement our vision for the admin interface, which is really the whole point of doing a specialized “news CMS.” It’s currently just a more-or-less stock Django admin, which, while functional, is far from ideal and really only marginally better than using Drupal with CCK or similar options.

As I’ve said publicly and privately in the past few days, the acronym “CMS” stands for Content Management System. That implies that the purpose of the system is actual management of content, which for a website would be through an admin interface. So I claim that the most important part of a CMS is the admin interface, and thus I can’t consider Courant ready for an actual site until we’ve taken at least our first pass at a news administrative interface.

Needless to say, we’ve very excited to see a nearly final product of what Max and company have been working on for 9+ months. There should be a spec out for community review later this week.

The background

College news organizations need to move beyond advertising. Now.

Hold that thought.

Some background: The topic of generating revenue to sustain news organizations has begun to consume my thoughts about journalism. There are a number of reasons why, but this mostly came after a little meetup last Saturday in DC called RevenueTwoPointZero (Rev2oh on Twitter).

This isn’t the first time our humble CoPress crew is talking about the business side of journalism. Namely, check out Joey Baker‘s post from December, “But we make all our money from newsprint!”.

But why? Aren’t we just about technology and college news sites?

No. That’s a main theme, but we would be remiss if we left revenue off the table. It’s hard to run a news site without money, unless you’re an exception.

Actually, one of our three main goals directly relates to making money: We want student news organizations to generate more online revenue by having full control over their sites.

Getting back to my opening thought…

The reality

College news sites have mostly been playing catchup to the pros. OK. “College students still read campus newspapers,” according to a 2008 Alloy Marketing study. No real harm done by being late to the video game, for example.

Student media are also looking to the Web as a way to generate revenue, mostly through different forms of advertising. This could mean banner ads, contextual ads, floating ads, video pre-roll (cringe), pop-ups (double cringe) or something else. Nothing innovative, from what I’ve seen. Nothing that’s resulting in a possible paradigm shift, such as the buzz from Russ Stanton’s LA Times onlne revenue revelation.

“But we’re getting along OK online, right?” you might ask. Probably. But the point is that we cannot wait until we need solutions to devise and implement them. Unlike some metro papers, college publications can’t afford to lose a million a week (scroll down halfway).

We need to be proactive. We need to be at least two steps ahead.

The proposal

And those first two steps are really not hard. It’s could be as easy as changing the mindset of the business office and bringing in new people. OK, the first one can be really hard.

In the context of college media, where print revenue appears to be holding up better than the big metro papers (with exceptions: “College papers cut staffs, Friday editions due to lagging ad sales”), there’s still plenty of room to grow online advertising. With this in mind, “an estimated 1-2 percent of total revenue for many college media outlets — if that,” says CICM’s Bryan Murley.

Beyond that, there’s an immense opportunity for generating revenue in other ways, which is the second step. That could be anything from offering consulting on how clients can more effectively reach the 18-24 demographic to selling baked goods in the student union.

So who’s responsible? Everyone on your staff, from editorial to business. That doesn’t mean news reporters will be selling ads, just that everyone should be part of the solution. Contributions could be as simple as brainstorming or as hands-on as consulting in ways that don’t conflict with one’s news role.

“But I’m not a business major!” Rev2oh comprised only non-business people. Participants had a variety of backgrounds, but it was primarily a design-oriented group. At least one person asked why there weren’t any business/advertising people. Alan Jacobson, who organized the event with SND president Matt Mansfield, basically said: They’ve had their chance, they haven’t done enough or haven’t been successful and now it’s up to us.

That doesn’t mean you should “go it alone,” but you don’t need that crowd to get stuff done. In many cases, I’m sure they would provide excellent insights.

Just like we need to take lessons from outside of news in order to improve news, we need to take lessons from outside the normal news organization business office to keep the money flowing.

The idea

We need revenue, not just advertising.

I like many of the ideas Steve Outing has discussed (check out his business model-related posts). Instead of rehashing them here, I’ll just say that all of the following thoughts developed after listening to him on the Journalism Now podcasts and after hearing a number of similar ideas from the small business group at Rev2oh, namely Scripps Interactive’s Jay Small.

• Your college news organization’s newly renamed “Revenue Office” no longer focuses solely on advertising, nor does it serve a single customer — your news organization. It should offer specialized services for off-campus clients.
• This could include everything from helping them establish a Web site and online brand to helping them promote their product or service on campus.
• Regarding setting up a site, there is certainly demand. I couldn’t find reliable statistics, but it’s safe to say that many small businesses in college towns could benefit by having (A) a Web site, (B) a freshly redesigned site, (C) a more interactive site, (D) presence on appropriate social media and (E) better presence on social media, for example.
• Another idea would be to have the revenue office offer research and data that would help the client, from student surveys to conducting focus groups. Basically, as Outing and Small separately referenced, this staff would be like an advertising/marketing department for the client.
• An important note: they would NOT be public relations.

There are so many possibilities, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel as a starting point. Yes, we need to look for new models and think outside the box, but we can start by adapting existing models in different fields.

I’m going to be speaking with The Miami Hurricane‘s business manager about these and other ideas soon. The adviser for the yearbook asked me to meet with those leaders to discuss ideas. I implore you to do the same, even if it’s just to get the conversation started.

Final thoughts:

• Open your mind.
• Listen to any and all ideas.
• Don’t be afraid to fail.
• Read Alan Jacobson’s initial posts on Rev2oh. Contact him. Find others like him. Their out-of-the-box thinking will open your mind. I certainly didn’t agree with Alan on every subject, but within half a day I saw the business side of news — and the possibilities — in a whole new light. He and Matt didn’t simply put us in a different pair of shoes. We were in a whole different outfit.
• Live long and prosper.

UPDATE: Check this out, Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet.

Link-tastic

Here are some links to help provide more context and background on Rev2oh:

• RevenueTwoPointZero » March 21st Manifesto
• RevenueTwoPointZero » The Opportunity
• SND Update – An effort to find new revenue models launches

The results on Rev2oh site:

• Display advertising solutions
• Classified solutions
• iPhone solutions
• Small business solutions: Beyond the click

More details about the results on SND Update:

• Small business solutions: Beyond the click
• How news organizations can take back classifieds
• Rethinking advertising + the homepage experience
• Mobile: Paying for functionality in news apps

Other related links

• Putting the search for a business model into perspective – Visual Editors
  
• RevenueTwoPointZero posts prototypes – Visual Editors
• Day after Revenue 2.0 #rev2oh – Patrick Cooper
  

Links that were passed around before and after:

• Online Payment Plan? How About a Print Print Payment Plan? (Matt Mansfield) – requires free registration
• Huge New Ad Unit Spotted In The Wild At NYTimes.com (Patrick Thornton)
• 27 Huge Publishers Join To Replace The Banner (Patrick Thornton)
• iList and Micro iList (William Couch)

Podcasts about revenue for news

• This Week in CoPress: Monetizing Online Student News
  
• Journalism Now Podcast – Making Money without Micropayments

Around the Network

We kicked off a lively discussion in the forum on Monday asking, “What are your website goals for the rest of the semester?” A number of great ideas have surfaced from the community. Some highlights from Josh Halliday‘s response:

• Work on cross-promotion of our student-run University radio station – perhaps an app on the homepage, or even its own separate page?
• Print more posters for on-campus advertising/recruiting
• Greater attention to our online community – MORE CONVERSATION, perhaps recruit a ‘community manager’ to maintain Facebook page, Twitter account etc.

There were dozens of other goals posted, so be sure to take a look.

Also, on the forum, we have our first discussion in the WordPress section:

• Users: How to deal with them year-to-year?

Wiki-tastic

Not much to report here, so let’s change that for next week! We want you to help add to our knowledge, which is also YOUR knowledge base.

A couple quick notes:

• After discovering mass quantities of spam, we’ve decided to require a basic registration to edit the wiki – just so we can make sure everything is kosher.
• We’ve added the Simple Press plugin (which we use for our forum) to the appropriate page.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• San Francisco Post-Chronicle wiki – @alexismadrigal and @sarahrose have started planning for the new SF Chronicle.
• How college media uses Twitter – this follows a list of student media in the Twittersphere compiled by CICM. No surprise with the results: 40 percent of student media on Twitter has “mostly or entirely RSS feeds.” On the plus side, at least they know about RSS.
• Bring a professor chat wrap-up – from our good friends at CollegeJourn. Congrats on a successful event!
• Interview with Marc Andreessen on Charlie Rose - Marc says that newspapers should shut down their presses today. The whole video is worth watching.

And a bonus link:

• CSS presentation for online journalism – from the Amherst Wire, which is offering a series of workshops for staff.

This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform; and while the Web can do that, the idea of re-purposing news content had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild. It permitted the press to delay the date of migration.

– Migration Point for the Press Tribe, Jay Rosen

Newspapers got it all wrong when the went online—simply shoveling their content from the print product into a template Web site and saying, “There, we’re online.”

They’ve never really been ‘first class citizens’ of the Web, however. Newspapers are still not doing simple things like linking or tagging or using social media. They’re online in that they have a Web site, but they’re still using a print mentality to maintain it.

I propose that this is because news organizations still haven’t realized that the Internet has changed the definition of a journalist. During this week’s #collegejourn chat I proposed that:

“Journalists, at least in the new media sense, are nothing more than experts in a field that have the ability to create mass media based on that expertise.”

Based on this definition, journalists should be viewed as community leaders; people that know a lot about a topic and are therefore respected enough by the community to inform others. This makes them something of a mixture of a columnist (read: blogger), a reporter (read: blogger), and a content creator (read: photographer/videographer/designer/infographics-maker/databaseminer/developer).

If we extrapolate this out to the newspaper as a whole, the future might very well be an organization that consists of many journalists who can provide mass media to a relevant community.

Newspapers are used to being limited to geographic communities because they were limited by their physical product that never could reach outside that demographic. The Internet gives us a publish button that puts content up for the whole world to instantly see. The word “community” is no longer limited to geography; it can now apply to any niche of information.

The company Gawker Media has taken advantage of this new definition: they host nearly a dozen Web sites that cover a specific niche. From tech news to celebrity gossip, each site has its own coverage of a particular type of information. This includes both original content and aggregation. Anything—just so long as their site gives a complete picture of the niche they’re covering.

A Geographic Niche

With that model in mind, let’s get back to newspapers, who are best at covering the geographic niche. There are ways for newspapers to turn their Web sites into first class Web citizens and stop re-purposing of print content, because that doesn’t do a good job of serving their community.

The goal is to become a platform. In Web speak, that’s a dubious term that has come to mean just about anything. For our purposes, let’s make it simple: newspapers should strive to become the online entry point for their community.

If Google is the entry point to the Web, then your news organization Web site should be the entry point to your community. Taking a page from Jeff Jarvis, the first step to Googlifying news sites then is to index everything.

That means taking lessons from Gawker, Slashdot and the New York Times, and aggregating everything. If there’s a story online that’s relevant to your community, link to it. Who cares if you wrote it or not? The idea is to be the source of news. If people know to just come to you first for their information, it doesn’t matter if they eventually click off your site. They will keep coming back to you for more.

The flip side of that coin is to serve only news that is relevant to your niche. Slashdot, still considered to be the geek’s corner of the Web, rarely ever has any news on politics except where it would directly affect the life of a technology-minded person.

That is true hyperlocal. It’s okay to link off to relevant national news stories, but certainly don’t devote your resources toward covering them. Even coverage from a local angle may be a waste of time. Largely, assume that if a reader is coming to your site, they want local news.

Becoming a platform is good news for your advertisers too. Ads are almost guaranteed to be relevant because you know that only a select audience is interested in looking at your site. Selling ads to local vendors becomes easier. How great is the line, “Everyone visits our site.”

Being the local platform for information means more than just a Web site. It also includes your organization sponsoring and running events that are relevant to the community—hosting local political debates or providing moderators for a town hall meetings or holding a conference for the local dairy farmers. The idea is to keep your customers thinking about you as the source of information around the community. What better way to put yourselves forward as experts who are knowledgeable about the community than to actively engage it.

Don’t try to run the community, facilitate it. Let the users add their own content to you sire. From a Craigslist list/aggregator to a Flickr pool for community events to a Yelp-like service, recognize that as a platform you’re there to serve the community in the whatever capacity they need. Chances are good that they know what they need better than you.

Becoming a platform represents a radical rethinking of the way your organization views itself. You’re less of a business, and more of a community advocate. Which is not to say that you can’t make money—Google does.

Relevant Links

25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers

A suggestion for The New York Times: Monetize your superior platform by sharing it with smaller news outlets [video]

update:

Another related link: SEO is still job number one at newsites.

John Bryne had a great tweet during #editorchat, “Ultimately, I think local newspapers can only largely survive if they become local Googles. #editorchat”

Unfortunately, no one from CoPress could travel to Mizzou, but we’ll be there virtually.

Be sure to participate in the chat and ask questions – we’ll answer as many as possible.

Please share the link via Twitter, Facebook, IM, e-mail, etc. Thanks!

This is cross-posted at Greg Linch‘s site.

“What’s that?” you say.  Sign up and check it out.

Until Tuesday, the group was mostly a listserv for keeping members in the know about CoPress. But Alex Klein (@alexklein), editor for new media at the Duke Chronicle, added a new element that we’re very happy to see: member discussion and sharing experiences.

Here is what Alex asked:

The Duke Chronicle is looking to spend some money on our Online Department, because we currently have no office space, no special software, and no hardware of any kind.

I’m looking for a few items from anyone who’s willing to provide them:

1. How much does all your Online Department stuff cost? (hardware, software, even things like tables, chairs, etc.)
2. What do you have? (computers, audio/video equipment, software, gadgets, monitors, etc.)
3. Where can we find the most cost-effective stuff?
4. What are 3 things we MUST have?
5. How many people are in your Online Department?
6. How much space do you get in the office? (as a percentage or in square feet)

Thanks, everyone. Also, anyone who wants to provide strategies for recruitment is welcome to do so! A/V and developers are our main priorities.

If you work for a student news organization, I strongly encourage you to read the full thread. Nevertheless, we’re here to help, so here is a summary of the six responses:

1. Most organizations don’t know exactly how much their online department costs. It could a simple $300 monthly stipend for the Web editor or thousands in different pieces of equipment.
2. Almost everyone had Macs and Adobe CS3. Final Cut Express HD was the most common video editing software, but Adobe Premiere popped up in one.
3. NewEgg dominated for hardware suggestions, with B&H Photo in second.
4. Essentials were hard to pin down, but audio/video equipment, the proper computers/software and good people were the top three answers.
5. Online staffs ranged from two to six people.
6. As for office space (hey, where’s my stapler?), it varied from two desks to two offices.

Want to weigh in? Feel free to answer the question in a comment below. Or, better yet, join the Google Group and responded via e-mail to add to the thread.