Editor’s Note: This is an IM interview with Adam Long, one of the founders of Campus Reader, a news service that aggregates content from college media outlets through RSS feeds. #

Murley: First off, describe what you are trying to do with Campus Reader. #

Long: well, the premise of the site is obviously to aggregate content from college newspapers across the country. We want to bring together digital media from different schools so that our users can come to one source to view and read content. in addition, we want to provide schools and aspiring journalists with an opportunity to gain some national exposure #

Murley: so what has been the response so far from college media outlets? #

Long: I’d say overwhelmingly positive. We’ve received numerous responses from newspapers in our network that are excited about what we’re trying to do. Since we’ve received some press lately, we’ve had a handful schools that weren’t in our databse originally asked to be added. To date, we’ve only had two schools request removal from the site. #

Murley: Where do you get your list of schools? #

Long: When we decided to move forward with starting Campus Reader several months ago, we began scouring the web for schools and their respective newspapers. We’d simply locate the newspaper and then store the newspapers URL in a database. We actually started by using sports divisions (Big 10, SEC, etc) as a means of making sure we weren’t missing anyone. So, to answer your question, we put the list together ourselves. The initial list of schools that we came up with was around 320. #

Murley: What is the list now? Because I know there are a lot of smaller schools out there who might not show up. #

Long: The current list is around 340. I’m not the database guy here, so I can’t login to our server and get an exact number. You bring up a great point though. We’re hoping that through our ever-increasing exposure, smaller schools around the nation start to take notice and end up getting involved with us. One of the goals I mentioned above, giving young journalists a platform for national exposure, includes another important component. And that is, that we want our the Campus Reader platform to be the most level playing field possible. We feel that everyone out there should have an equal opportunity at having their articles read by people across the nation. The ultimate hope is that the talent rises to the top, and someone gets opportunities that they may have not otherwise had. #

Murley: So what are the challenges you’ve run into so far? #

Long: The big challenge is the elephant in the room; the legality of republishing RSS feeds. Unfortunately this is an extremely cloudy subject on the legal front. We agonized and debated over the subject when launching the site. It’s complicated by the fact that many schools don’t publish, or publish minimal acceptable use policies to accompany their feeds. However, some legal advice, which is very expensive for a few recent college students like those who run Campus Reader, indicated that publishing headlines and what’s publicly available in a feed is not currently considered a copyright violation. In the two cases where universities have asked to be removed, we’ve willingly complied within 24 hours of receiving notice. Other than this, the biggest challenges have come from common business startup stumbling blocks, such as time, costs and lack of knowledge or expertise in certain areas. #

Murley: So what is your take on the RSS feeds? Obviously you have an interest in getting the feed, but what is your argument to college media who say that you are taking their content? #

Long: Well, our position is that we’re driving traffic, and by extension revenue, to that newspaper’s website. Keep in mind, this is traffic that the newspaper or college would have otherwise not seen. The amount of data found in these feeds is so minimal [typically 100 words or less] that users can’t really get a feel for what the author’s position or conclusion will be. So, if the work is compelling, they’ll almost certainly visit the newspapers website and read the entire article. This goes back to our goal of giving journalists a bigger audience than what they’d typically get from their own newspapers site. We definitely don’t want to be seen as stealing content; we hope the newspapers understand that our intent is genuine. #

Murley: what is the traffic right now? #

Long: As of today we’re averaging about 2000 hits / day of which Google Analytics tells us that 85% are unique users. This is roughly a 400% increase over our first month’s traffic data (September 06). If we can continue growth at a relatively rapid pace, we’re hoping to hit 10K / day by early 2007, and be near 50K / day by the end of 2007. These are just our early goals. I think we can surpass them, but time will tell. #

Murley: so what is the business model, if you can share that? #

Long: For right now it’s to pay for everything out of our pockets and try to keep our day jobs, haha! The revenue model is pretty standard; we’re serving Google ads for now, and are lining up some other monitizers to get some additional revenue streams coming in. Eventually we’d like to either sell ad space ourselves, or source it to a company other than Google as we feel we can work to target advertisements even more than they are now. We’re waiting until at least the new year when we have a larger recurring user base to start exploring other advertisement options though #

Murley: Turning to the issue of recurring users – that brings up the “social networking” aspects. what are you guys doing hoping to build a social network so users will come back? #

Long: We wanted to build the site so that it gets driven by both a community of users, and by the contributing newspapers. We built in some simple features into the site now, like a commenting system and ratings system, that hopefully will be the foundations for a society of “campus readers.” We’re also rolling out some new features in the very near future that we feel will continue to build on these principles. We’re working on things like, customizable user profiles, article tagging, customizable home pages, and possibly in the future original content and contributions from users. Additionally we’re starting to explore bringing in some light utility content such as weather, music and possibly video, to give the site a little bit more life. The additional content would probably come from another established source and be optional for users on their homepages. We’re throwing a lot of ideas around in this arena. Our first goal was to get a functioning news site built; now we’re starting to shift our focus to developing a place where people come to read the news and interact with each other. #

Murley: What has been the response of users? (i.e., not the publishers) #

Long: The overall reception has been good. We did some beta testing before taking the site live to try and anticipate what exactly we’d need to do to make the site both user friendly and functional. Quite a few of the planned improvments I mentioned above are responses to feedback we’ve received from users. We want to make sure our users know that we have an open-door policy, so we’re trying to respond as quickly as possible to their suggestions. #

Murley: so what are your next steps? #

Long: Well, our first priority is to continue improving and optimizing the site. We’re also going to pursue as many business relationships and partnerships that we can that will allow us to stay true to our mission. And we’re going to keep promoting ourselves so we that can start to really offer newspapers and journalists the extra exposure they need and deserve. #

Murley: are you looking beyond aggregation? #

Long: The only thing we’re considering beyond aggregation at this point is producing some original content. What we’re envisioning right now is something where we feature a particular college journalist or newspaper and have them produce a series of original articles for publication on Campus Reader for a week. We’d hope that we can devise a way to cross promote this with the paper, so that both parties benefit equally. We’re not sure if we’re going to pursue this yet or not, but it’s definitely an idea we’re strongly considering. #

I should add something that we’re not ruling other media out, we just haven’t necessarily found a way to integrate it with Campus Reader as of yet. #

Murley: How are you promoting the site on campuses? #

Long: Right now, we’re not doing much. Since we’re a startup and funding this ourselves, the only thing we’ve been able to do is send Campus Reader stickers out to reps at different campus locations and ask them to distribute the stickers, preferably near newspaper distribution, and put them up in both discrete and legal locations. We had a bit of an issue with this where one of our reps had some stickers end up on public and school property where it shouldn’t have. I’m hoping that we addressed this, as vandalism is not our intent. Other than this, we’re not really able to promote on campus right now due to cost. We’re planning on doing quite a bit more in the future though. #

Murley: Any final thoughts for our audience? #

Long: We want to be sure our users know that they can and should feel free to contact us at any time via the website. We also want to encourage any papers out there that aren’t a part of our network to contact us to get set up if they’re interested. It’s completely free and extremely easy. We feel that the more papers we have in our rotation, the better off everyone will be. #

If you have questions or concerns about the Campus Reader product, Adam’s e-mail is adam -at- campusreader.com. #

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