Vision for the City College News student paper

1. CITY COLLEGE NEWS
The Next Generation

2. Reality Check
Creative growth is vital to our success: we need to take risks in
order to be innovative
Part of these risks include learning interdisciplinary skills:
everyone needs to know how to write/edit and record/edit
photo/video/audio for stories; have basic web design skills
This is the direction journalism is going in and we can’t turn back
The newspaper website is no longer just a fad, it is all we have
As a small student paper, we can easily beat the professionals

3. What’s Wrong?
Nobody wants to write for us
Nobody reads print edition
Nobody visits our website
Nobody advertises with us
Nobody knows we exist

4. What Can We Do?
Connect people to each other
Content found nowhere else
Generate excitement &
involvement within MCTC
Stay cutting-edge with a user-
friendly website utilizing
equally user-friendly software

5. Community
For engagement to occur, it is necessary to go into the
community, establish relationships, build trust, work with the
formal and informal leadership, and seek commitment from
community organizations and leaders to create processes for
mobilizing the community.
—“Principals of Community Engagement,” Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, 2009
Reed’s Law: exponential scaling occurs with subgroups
Social capital must be spent, cannot be saved, b/c it disappears
after non-use

6. Transform CCN.com
Dead tree newspapers are dying & news websites are coming of
age
Connect our readers to each other and their surroundings
Cellphone version site: many students have internet-enabled
phones they use for web browsing
Multimedia inclusion will both simplify & flesh out stories
Audio/visual combination grabs interest in a way that print can’t

7. Why WordPress?
Independent: no corporate interests at stake, just ours
All of the creative control without any of the work
Functionality governed by “plug-ins” you drag & drop
Intuitive, without the current learning curve and frustrations
No technical knowledge required; if you can blog, you can do it!
100% flexible and built for the future, whatever it may hold

8. Why Not College Publisher?
Corporate interests at stake, Even CP uses WordPress for
not ours! their own blog!
Restrictive & inhibiting Papers on CP use WordPress
for their “multimedia”
Sites have long load times sections!
due to their poorly written,
proprietary & inflexible Let’s take those primary ads
software spots and sell our own ads...
and keep all the money!
Nonexistent customer service

9. Multimedia
Video cannot be aggregated in the way that written word can be,
people have to watch entire video in order to understand it
People will watch sub-par video if the audio is great: “If content
is king, audio is queen,” says Jason Barnett of The UpTake
Connect with the film and photography programs, not only for
the students whose interests lie in the documentary
Putting multimedia created by students on website increases
page visitors, profits

10. CCN Student Bloggers
Student bloggers for each program and clubs; nursing,
barbering, GLBT--you name it, within reason!
Multiple bloggers per area blog to insure new content
Bloggers apply for position and are vetted by us
Opinions (informed or not) are perfectly acceptable in blogs
Possibly paid; maybe paid by amount of page views (a la Gawker)
and other incentives such as contests, et cetera

11. CCN Comment Policy
No hate speech, profanity, libel, or general stupidity allowed
Possibly turn off comments on sensitive stories
Facebook Connect plug-in used for accountability & ease
If you use Facebook, you can comment w/o signing up for CCN
Everyone knows who you are if you use Facebook & act stupid
Designated comment moderators vs. group effort vs. curation

12. How Do We Make Money?
Sell our own ads online
Google AdSense, etc.
Tap into Muslim community
with targeted advertisers and
Arabic-language page
Adopt a sponsorship model
Local media partnerships

13. Cost
WordPress: free
One-time $6.99 domain transfer to GoDaddy, which includes
free year of registration
Hosting: $8.98/month for unlimited bandwidth & space when
paid yearly to PHP Webhosting (my reliable web host for 5+
years)