CoPress

Hosts: Greg Linch and Emily Kostic

Guests: Howard Owens (@howardowens), publisher of The Batavian, Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) of The New York Times, and freelance writer Jonathan Fitzpatrick

Summary: Howard Owens and Brian Stelter discuss along with Jonathan Fitzpatrick discuss how to train a web savvy staff, how to wain your readers off the print edition and how staff members should see themselves as circulation managers.

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Max Cutler asks one of the big questions on everyone’s mind these days: how do you recruit technical talent to your student news organization?

I’ve often been asked by my colleagues at the YDN what we can do to recruit more people to the web team. There are clearly people with the requisite skills on campus, but running house ads, putting up posters, and sending campus-wide email blasts have been completely unsuccessful this year.

Many college news orgs pay their student staff, which is one way to incentivize work, but the YDN is a volunteer-only organization. No one gets paid, and that’s really not even an option, no matter how desperate we may be. So if you won’t get paid, why would you work for us?

I’ve struggled with this question over the past year or so. There are a number of intangible advantages of working for a news org, especially one with a powerful list of alumni like the YDN, but it is hard to convince people on the basis of intangibles alone, especially when it is so easy to get paying jobs elsewhere on campus or online.

There aren’t any sure fire answers at the moment, but I’ve got one idea: we generate a big ol’ list of possibilities on the wiki, the community adds to the list over the next several months, and then each news organization runs experiments to determine recruitment campaigns work best in which scenarios.