Our Proposal

Describe your project (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

The staff of the UCLA Daily Bruin would like to make a new Web site that would incorporate features of social networking and community generated news – providing an innovative way for readers to better interact with the paper and each other. One of the core values of the Daily Bruin is fostering community involvement and civic engagement in and around campus. We hope to be able to accomplish this with technology to bring together the newsroom, student government, student organizations, and the campus community into a digital “Town Square.”

The Town Square would utilize content generated by our community – through features like social networking, social bookmarking, and user-generated stories – to better inform community members about local happenings. And as the community begins to utilize the site, the staff of the newspaper would be allowed to further its mission by having easier access to the information. And knowing how difficult it is for collegiate journalists (including us) to organize themselves, we would incorporate a strong back end to the Web site that would offer a digital solution to story planning and content organization. This would essentially be a mobile, digital newsroom that could be used to plan, organize, and assign content such as stories, video, photos, and other multimedia for the paper.

These features would allow the newsroom to expand further into the community, providing access to calendars and profiles created by student groups, insight into what readers are looking at and enjoying, and relevant sources for stories. The site would be able to foster meaningful interaction between readers and allow them to report their own news, organize a rally or group meeting, and get caught up on relevant legislation. We think the campus community would engage with this project because it would provide a much-needed local place for students and student organizations to organize and publicize themselves that does not currently exist.

Who would want it to use and why? (830 characters maximum, approximately 125 words)

As a free and open source project, this framework would be both marketed and available to other college newspapers. According to a College Publisher survey, over 500 collegiate newspapers have Web sites, and 90 percent of those papers say they need a better one. The demand for a well-programmed, functional, customizable and free site that integrates many Web 2.0 features is pretty clear. We have been to a dozen conventions over the past few years – some more local in scale, and some national – and a common theme our representatives hear about is lack of organization. We have discovered that the sad reality is that most college papers don’t have the resources to buy or program their own content-management system – this could dramatically increase communication and collaboration in collegiate newsrooms everywhere.

Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

The Daily Bruin is a group of forward-thinking college students who share a vision for how newspapers will engage their communities. We’ve been working on aspects of this idea for years and already have a portion of open source code developed on the Django platform. We know full well what we are getting ourselves into and have already worked out the kinks in many of the programming, structural and organizational issues that accompany a project of this nature. We have all of our bases covered – except the funding we need to really move forward.

We are a financially independent campus newspaper and are already well positioned to become a hub for community members to exchange information. We know what resources student leaders and community members need to be more connected with not only the newspaper but the community as a whole. This puts us in the perfect position to develop the technology.

But in addition to that, we are one of the premiere collegiate newspapers in the nation. We have won the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence award two of the last three years, we won the Pacemaker in 2005, and we have been a finalist for the past several years. We hold ourselves to the highest professional standards and fiercely maintain our independence from the university.

We also have a staff of excited, passionate and creative young people who are ready to create a Web site to propel newspapers into the future. We are all experts in the joys and difficulties in running a college publication and, having been very successful, we see ourselves as a group that can really reach out and make a difference in the lives of our colleagues at other schools. And in addition to our staff of excited and creative students, we have staff advisors who fully support this project and are willing to help us where we need it and provide long-term support and guidance.

What do you guarantee will happen if you complete the activities in this proposal? (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

If we complete the activities we describe here, we can only guarantee that code will exist for a very innovative Web site. We cannot guarantee its success, and we certainly cannot guarantee our readers will use or appreciate it. But we think they will. The demand is there, and we think the journalism industry is more than ready for a push to help jump start increased commitment to Web 2.0 technology.

We can also guarantee our commitment and enthusiasm for the project and we will do everything conceivable to make sure it comes to fruition as we envision.

What potentially bigger thing might happen if everything went perfectly and the stars all aligned? (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

At UCLA, the best thing that could happen is that we create a space on our site for every student and student organization to come, learn, teach and exchange ideas that are relevant to the rest of the community. Other student, local and potentially larger newspapers would take up these types of ideas and integrate them through our open source code.

Once we had a success story and finished beta testing the full product, we would market it to every other college paper we could find. Since the stars have aligned, all of those papers would see the beauty in what we are trying to accomplish and change their Web sites to adopt our code. All of a sudden, college papers would become more relevant and well-read on their campuses, and students would begin to take an interest in these papers because they had taken an interest in them.

Because college newsrooms are the training ground for many professional journalists, a whole generation of people would go out into the world having worked with these ideas and having seen how successful they are at generating real community interest in the news. And a generation of readers will be interested in this type of content delivery and expect it from their papers.

Instead of using the Internet to further their journalistic mission as well as their business model, newspapers have been using it as a place to deposit their print content. This idea is slowly changing, but our framework could help answer this essential question that has been plaguing the industry for over a decade: How do newspapers use the Web to further their mission rather than hinder it? Through a site that allows readers to organize themselves around and educate themselves with the content of the paper, rather than simply reading it.

Once readers are more engaged in a newspaper’s Web site, traffic would increase tenfold, and ad rates would increase helping to bolster the financial solvency of the industry – all helped along by a few thousand lines of code courtesy of the Daily Bruin and the Knight Foundation.

How will you be able to measure whether or not your project has really made a difference? (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

In the short term, we will be able to measure how many people are registered users on the site and how many student organizations are utilizing the profile-making services we will offer them. We will allow users to friend each other and view what their friends are reading, enjoying and commenting on – and all of that activity should be measurable in a very quantitative way. It’s also easy to measure site traffic, including overall statistics and specifically what people are clicking on.

Beyond the strict numbers, as journalists, it’s our job to have an ongoing understanding of the inner workings and outward opinions of the community as a whole. We have regular meetings with student organizations and student leaders, and we would be able to easily receive community feedback on the site’s functionality.

Through the qualitative and quantitative methods described, we should be able to understand the needs of the community during the period of time the Daily Bruin will be beta testing the framework. Before we release the code, we will revise and rewrite it as necessary, based on the feedback we receive during the testing phase.

Once we publicly release the code it will be easy to tell how many people are downloading and implementing it – a good indicator of its popularity. The final measure of success is how this ultimately affects the industry.

What unmet need does your proposal answer? (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

To use the Daily Bruin as an example, we have story planning software that was programmed by a student that graduated over five years ago. Many of the functions have ceased to be relevant, and there are many more features we would like but don’t have. As a result, our staff uses eight different white boards, several sheets of paper with different formats that need to be stapled to other sheets of paper and turned in to one of four different boxes, three different clipboards various people have to initial throughout the day, four calendars, and a bunch of text documents on a server that may or may not be working at any given time. And we’re one of the lucky papers.

Other schools stay organized without any kind of central planning system, and some don’t even have a standard format for photo or graphic requests. The organizational difficulties of college newsrooms are systemic, and student editors and reporters barely have time to try to stay in touch with the campus community as it is. If we were able to provide this Web site, which could be used on the back end to organize a newsroom and the front end to organize a community, it could be a very powerful reporting and publishing tool.

At UCLA, the majority of the student organizations don’t have the resources to create a Web page of their own or market themselves or their meetings and events. Imagine if a student newspaper could meet those needs by providing profile pages to student groups where they could update a calendar, have other students join the group or an e-mail list to stay updated, or even post news bulletins that could wind up on the front page of the Web site or even the print newspaper (redesigned to incorporate this content).

The staff of the paper would have the resources to keep track of community events, and the community would have a central place to come for information. Both sides would be able to use the same communication features to help them stay organized and focus on what they want to be doing.

What specific, unique opportunity do you see that will make this project more successful than others trying to fill that general need? (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

Over the past decade, the UCLA Student Media department, an umbrella organization that includes the Daily Bruin, several newsmagazines and a small social networking site, has been working on and developing this technology. Bruinwalk.com is a site that our department developed, before MySpace started, which includes a degree of social networking, dating and professor reviews that is very popular on campus.

We have demonstrated an interest in developing this technology and the ability to implement it. The site is programmed completely open source and already has many of the features we want to incorporate into our newspaper. The features of Bruinwalk.com and the Daily Bruin site could easily be combined and, with additional programming, have much of the functionality we want to develop for this project.

Bruinwalk.com is a site used by nearly 10,000 UCLA students daily and has become the singular resource on campus for professor reviews. It is also used as a site to exchange textbooks, research housing options, and create groups and post to a campus-wide calendar. Many of these features need to be upgraded and refined, but they form an essential infrastructure that can be adapted to the site we want to create. Because we already have some of the technology in place, programmers familiar with it and a staff of young, creative and knowledgeable editors, we are the perfect organization to develop this code.

How will people learn about what you are doing? (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

If we get the money, one of the first things we’re going to do is set up a separate Web site for the project so we can direct people there for information and place it there for easy download when it is done. Throughout the process, we will update the site with information as it becomes available, and as we get closer to testing it live, we will update our readers through the Daily Bruin on what new things they will be seeing in the paper.

The site will also include a place to submit information so interested parties can be updated on the progress of the development and request a copy of the code once it becomes available. In addition to finding people who want to use it through the site we will be contacting every college paper editor we can find to tell them about what we can offer. This would include travel to, at the least, the Associated Collegiate Press and Society of Professional Journalists conventions with the product and informational materials to market to interested parties.

We will also design envelopes and brochures to mail the code out to other papers, and we would put it on either a CD or flash drive so it is easily accessible. We will create at least a basic guide for people who are interested in using the code to help them set it up on their servers and get everything up and running smoothly, and we will provide what customer support we can.

Do you have any other funding or investment? We’re interested in knowing who else is interested in your project. (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

Other than the considerable time and energy we have already invested in this project with little financial support, we have no outside help.

Are you working with anyone else to complete this project? If so, please give names and what they would do? (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

David Martin and Weston Nielson are both student programmers who have been working on this for a while and are willing to stay on and help lead a larger group of programmers and Web designers to complete the project. Machiko Yasuda is the Daily Bruin Online editor, and she will help keep the project organized, offering feedback and testing features along the way. Since the Bruin will be testing this system before it is released, Machiko will play a vital role in facilitating that process.

Anthony Pesce, Daily Bruin News editor, and Dharmishta Rood, Daily Bruin Photo editor, will continue to lead the project and provide ideas, direction, organization and insight throughout the process.

Arvli Ward, the Student Media director at UCLA, and she will offer his support, oversight and advice throughout the process, along with Amy Emmert, our staff advisor. Saba Riazati, the Daily Bruin editor in chief, and Ken Robinson, the Daily Bruin managing editor, have pledged their support and will provide an additional layer of oversight and help facilitate staff collaboration in the process.

Who else is working in this area? How does your work fit into the larger context of work in this area? (2075 characters maximum, approximately 325 words)

College Publisher is an organization that provides an easy to use and off-site Web solution for quite a few collegiate publications. But in our opinion, there are many problems with the service that come with its benefits. The sites are not very attractive, and they offer only a limited bank of cookie-cutter features. On top of that, College Publisher takes much of the online advertising revenue away from the staff of the paper because it sells much of the ad space on the sites to national advertisers.

Facebook is very popular among college students, and the site is promoted as a place for students to gather news about their friends and community. But one of the chief problems with Facebook is that it is not directly plugged into all of the communities – or “networks” – it lets its users join. Because Facebook does not have a staff of several hundred devoted to each network, it relies solely on user-generated content and misses much of the community as a result.

Digg.com is doing some of what we are working on, which includes the ability to rank stories based on reader preference and minimal social networking. We like the principle of Web democracy Digg operates on and would very much like to be able to include more meaningful reader “ranks” of stories (rather than the stock most viewed and e-mailed) as well as customizable interface on the site for each reader.

We are taking ideas that are already out there but fixing many of the inherent problems we see and bringing the features all under one roof. The way the Web has grown and adapted itself to newsgathering is fascinating, but unfortunately it takes much of the credit for original reporting away from newspapers. Bringing readers back to the sites of the papers in addition to the blogs and other news aggregators is vital – and if papers want to continue to survive, they must embrace a concept we call “community networking” and use the latest in Web technology to foster and develop readership.