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AllPrinceton Progress Report to J-Lab

AllPrinceton is taking the “agile development” approach, which is to say the site was live long before it could be considered finished.  Sometime in July, 2010, AllPrinceton.com went up very quietly, with barebones content and a few e-mails to beta-tolerant friends who would be willing to kick the tires.  I don’t expect to ever be able to call the site “finished”, because the point of agile development is to be constantly responsive to the changing needs of the users, and the point of a community site is to evolve with the community it serves.

Progress So Far

AllPrinceton is taking a multi-pronged strategy to developing this site. The first three prongs:  (1) website development;  (2) community relations; (3) editorial content — are already well underway. The fourth, (4) commercial sustainability, is still in the planning stages. The feeling is that we need the first three in order to develop an audience, and we need the audience before we can approach the commercial sector for support.

Website

Because AllPrinceton is going to depend on a community of users, we wanted to make a Beta version available to the public as soon as possible. That led to the decision to adopt OpenPublish, an out-of-the-box Drupal profile especially geared to online news.

Why Drupal? After considering Joomla and WordPress, I chose Drupal because it has a track record with other hyperlocal news sites, it has a large online support community, it is relatively easy to implement, but also because of certain details, such as: Drupal has an elegant solution to granting different levels of permissions for different user profiles.

Why OpenPublish? Because it had already integrated many Drupal modules that we would have wanted anyway: Blogging, Topic Hubs, More Like This, Calais, Flickr, GMap APIs, Feeds, Apture, etc. It is free and supported by an active online user group. It is, however, not bug-free.  Nor is it that intuitive to customize. So after a steep Drupal learning curve on my part, I had to acknowledge that I had learned just enough to be a danger to the site, and thanks to the J-Lab grant, was able to hire a part-time Drupal developer. With his help we are tweaking the site to include additional features such as Organic Groups, which will give sub-communities the option of creating their own online Groups within the AllPrinceton umbrella, and a more robust community Feeds option, which will enable community websites to update to AllPrinceton without having to upload twice.

We are also in the process of developing an iPhone app for AllPrinceton. This side project will involve two stages of development: (a) a read-only app for users to receive notification of updates; and (b) the more complicated development of a read/write app that will enable users to upload from their phones.

Community Relations

Participation in AllPrinceton can occur on several levels, each of which corresponds to a user role on the site: Read-all for the general public; Registered User for the right to comment, add events and classifieds; Author for a group of so-called “trusted authors” — members of the Princeton community to whom AllPrinceton has reached out for regular submissions to a community blog.

AllPrinceton’s partnership with our fiscal sponsor, Princeton Community TV (PCTV), is a natural extension of the principle of community access media. That partnership plays out on many fronts: PCTV programs are immediately integrated into the AllPrinceton site via their Vimeo feed; PCTV broadcasts of civic events such as an ongoing tax uprising can complement our coverage; we will be co-sponsoring pre-election debates for local council candidates in October; PCTV is offering AllPrinceton the venue and support to host the first reporter training session; and the community partnerships already established by PCTV form a good starting point for online community collaboration with AllPrinceton.

These partners are the first to have been offered the role of Trusted Authors, and include representatives of organizations such as the local governments (there are two), library and arts councils; environmental groups; educational institutions; environmental groups; the League of Women Voters; Princeton University’s journalism program, etc.

Editorial Content

The model for AllPrinceton is to present several flavors of editorial content. Articles written by AllPrinceton, whether by me or by designated reporters, appear on the left side of the page. The central column is devoted to community submissions, whether these are blog entries or feed items. Blogs and Feeds are not edited, but their source (trusted author) is curated. The right column, at the moment, is simply a live Twitter feed based on the keyword “Princeton.” It gives an interesting and constantly changing view of the local buzz.

Interestingly, the local newspaper, the Princeton Packet, was eager to allow AllPrinceton to aggregate their news feeds.  This would seem to be an indicator of a shift in attitude on the part of Web-based news sites, foregoing exclusivity in favor of driving more viewers to their site.

Still at an experimental stage on the site is the concept of “topic hubs”, which is a feature of OpenPublish, and which brings all related content together into a single dynamically-updated page.

Commercial Sustainability

The only advertising vehicle currently available on the site is the classifieds category, which we offer for free.

We will eventually add banner ads, and have signed a letter of intent with GrowthSpur to help us negotiate the online advertising tools. But Princeton (population 30,000) is unlikely to be able to support a news site at the current CPM or CPC rates, if only because we will never get enough click-throughs to pay. We will have to either offer fixed banner ad rates based on need rather than numbers, or reinvent the commercial model for online news.

We are considering the creation of a “commercial circle”, in which participating merchants, for a subscription fee, will be able to post to their own group blog, touting daily specials, deals, events, etc.

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