Editor’s Note: I met Eric Eldon at a CMA convention two years ago, and have been following the evolution of this company since that time. I have provided feedback when asked and presented at a Canadian University Press convention along with Unimedia/WriteWith developer Phil Kast. #

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WriteWith started out as a “whiteboard” system for college newspapers to plan their editorial workflow using a web-based system. Over the past few months, it’s evolved into a more broadly-focused collaborative writing environment. The potential for college media, however, is still there. #

If you want a broad overview of the software, TechCrunch has a nifty rundown of where WriteWith is positioned. #

ICM: Describe WriteWith in a couple of sentences? #

Eldon: Writewith is a new way for people to work together on documents in one online place — it started as us building software for our college newsrooms, so we could handle writing, editing and communicating in one place. We’re aiming to solve a couple of big problems in newsrooms, and elsewhere. 1) When people work on Word documents together, they end up creating a bunch of different drafts that they then have to spend extra time organizing. 2) When people work together on documents, they need to communicate — right now that happens via email, IM, phone calls, etc… conversations that get lost. The features we’ve built help people write together easier. #

ICM: What are the advantages of WriteWith in a college newsroom environment? #

Eldon: Since we’ve been testing an early version with college newspapers over the last few months, here’s what we’ve heard from people — what we’ve also seen in our site traffic statistics. Having one page where everyone can work on a story together saves the entire newsroom time. Writers and editors can see changes between revisions, assign deadlines and responsiblities to each other, leave notes about changes to a document and see a history of everything that anyone has done. #

We replace kludgy processes like emailing Microsoft Word documents around and keeping track of assignments on a whiteboard (which is hard to see when you’re not in the newsroom). #

ICM: you mentioned that you’ve tested an early version of this software with college newspapers. what has the response been like? #

Eldon: Overall, very positive. #

Eldon: From Frank Ragulsky, the adviser at Oregon State’s Daily Barometer — in this context, testing with the other paper he advises, The Torch, at Lane Community College: “The Torch loves Unimedia. We have used it for the last four weeks and we have beat deadline by about two hours every issue. We were finishing the paper at 10 or 11 p.m. and now we are done by about 8:30. Last week, we sent the pages at 7:25 for an 8 p.m. deadline. I know we are going to propose some new features to Unimedia. These are little things that will improve the product. We genuflect to Unimedia every time we publish a paper! We owe you.” #

Now would be a good time to note that we’ve changed our name from Unimedia in order to avoid a number of potential international trademark issues. #

Basically, papers are telling us that being able to work on their stories in one online place helps save them time and energy organizing themselves. #

Frank and a number of other people have told me that they’d be happy to talk to students and advisers at other papers that are interested in using our site. #

Like Frank mentioned, there a ton of ways for us to keep improving the software. Since we’re a startup, we’re focused on doing this. #

ICM: How much does the service cost? #

Eldon: For now, it’s free — and we’ll always have a free version. At some point pretty soon here, we’ll implement an inexpensive subscription fee for larger organizations, as well as some premium services. Our main goal for right now is making something that people want. #

ICM: what would be an example of a premium service? #

Eldon: Well, some organizations we’ve talked to have asked about being able to control the server where their data is stored. For them, we’d provide what’s often referred to as an appliance server, where they control it but we get access to it in order to introduce upgrades as we have them ready. #

ICM: Your software right now is geared mainly to text articles, but media organizations use much more than text these days. how do you handle tasks like “take photographs,” etc. in writewith? #

Eldon: This is a great question — one that we’ve gotten a lot from our users so far. Since we’re a 3-person startup, we’re not in a position to build a new Photoshop, a new Final Cut Pro or other software that’s been developed by some of the largest and best software companies in the world. So we’re focusing on text for now. Our plan is to integrate — as we’re able — with other software products that people use for photos, video, etc. Also, in the earlier version, we actually had a way for people to dish out photo assignments and upload photos in conjunction with stories. To be blunt, people didn’t use that feature all that much. #

So, our first step is to make a writing/editing/communication tool that really works right for people, then we’ll see where we can go after that. Dear Writewith user: your feedback, please. #

ICM: A lot of newspapers work with College Publisher and InDesign – in different platforms. How can they get their material from your site into these two different environments – web and print? #

Eldon: Since we’re focused on the editorial process, we’re looking to connect with CP’s more comprehensive system to help papers publish to the web quickly and easily — having the newsroom online is another step towards helping papers get the most out of their web sites. Readers really want to see fresh material all the time from news sites, so people will be able to use our system to publish to the web as soon as a story’s ready. Note that they can already do this with the WordPress and Typepad blogging platforms. We want to help papers become more web-centric. #

Eldon: We’ve also been playing around with Quark and InDesign integration. The print edition is going to matter for years, so we’ll support easy export to these systems… problem is, doing so is a rather complex technical challenge, and we have many other feature requests to follow through on, as you can imagine. #

ICM: How has the response been since you launched? #

Eldon: It’s been going well over all. Thanks to the Internet, all sorts of random people have been finding our site, using it and blogging about it. We’ve actually had more traffic come in from del.icio.us than from Techcrunch, for example — which was surprising to us. The usual troll-like behavior has popped up in some places. You know, people not actually looking at our product then leaving mean comments on blogs about us. But whatever, that’s just another aspect of how the ‘net works (and we have pretty thick skins, anyway). #

It’s funny, even foreign language blogs have written about us — though we’re only in English for right now. One French blog even called our software “seductive”. Haha. #

ICM: are there any schools already using the most recent version? #

Eldon: Well, we launched less than 24 hours ago and we’ve been pretty busy just keeping the servers running, fixing bugs, etc… so I’m not sure. I’m going to be getting in touch with papers over the next few days to get more feedback. #

ICM: Some people are worried about security on web-based software sites. What steps do you take to protect the security of data on your site? #

Eldon: You need to have an account to use the site, and only people who are invited to a particular document get access to it. On a more technical level, we have things set up so that the bad guys out there can’t hack into it — they’ve already tried and failed, in fact. #

Personal computers and office computers are generally more vulnerable than a professional web-based application like what we offer. Web-based software is a growing trend; the barrier right now is in how people perceive the risk, not what the risk actually is. People used to have the same concerns about email. Then Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail came along and everyone got used to it. Over the next year or so, I expect the same change in mentality to occur for work-focused applications like our’s. #

ICM: One of the things I’ve noticed about web-based software applications is that it’s hard to get people out of entrenched ways of doing things. they’ll try something out and then, after a couple of weeks, go back to doing things the old way. is that a concern for you? #

Eldon: Oh yes. That’s my biggest concern. Even if the way people work now is inefficient, it’s the devil they know. To illustrate that, over 450 million people use Microsoft Office, including Microsoft Word. While online word processors (Google Docs, Zoho Writer, Thinkfree, etc.) have been around for well over a year, their combined usage is — from what I’ve seen — around 1-2% of that market. #

However, from what we’ve seen from the papers using our software so far, they try it out and stick around. That’s been very encouraging. We just have to assume that we won’t get 100% of the people who take a look, but that’s okay… we’ll just keep improving our product. #

One of the biggest problems we saw with our old version is that we made it hard for people to get started. We had 5 or so steps that an editor-in-chief or adviser had to follow in order to get started — set up the newsroom, invite people, etc… we wanted to make it way easier for people to try us out, so getting started is a 2 step process in the new version. #

ICM: I was thinking just now about how this might be useful for other parts of a news organization (business, advertising, etc). are there plans to add other “office organization” like features? #

Eldon: We’ve gotten that question from people. In my opinion, there’s a lot of great business-focused software out there already. For example, I know a lot of papers are really happy with Eclipse. Just as we’re going to integrate with other applications that people need in the newsroom — like video editing and web publishing — we’re also going to integrate with business-focused software. The technology coming out now is making that easier and easier. One view of the future of enterprise software suites is that it won’t be just one company’s products that everybody uses, but a bunch of different companies that each specialize in their own niche, and integrate together seamlessly. That’s where I see us fitting in. #

ICM: So your story deadlines will eventually be exportable to iCal? #

Eldon: Oh yes. Phil has been talking about doing exactly that as soon as he gets the chance. We’ll probably be able to stick story deadlines into students’ Facebook news feeds, too. We think that people should be able to get their data in and out of our software as easily as possible. #

ICM: In an earlier version, you mentioned the aspect of social networking as something you wanted to work into your software. is that still in the offing? #

Eldon: We want to experiment with it, still. When I started out with this whole thing, I was really interested in connecting college newsrooms to each other as a way discovering interesting stories that the mainstream media misses — college campuses tend to have some universal issues (student governments being ineffectual, administrations not liking student papers/freedom of speech, plus your usual protests, strikes, etc.). #

There’s a cool new site out that’s acting on this idea of bringing together a bunch of people who want to contribute to good reporting, called Newassignment.net — I’d like to connect people using our software with what they’re doing. There are a ton of possibilities in this space, and we’re just going to have to see what our users actually want to do. #

So that’s three different kinds of software that we want to connect with: #

1. The other tools that people use in their newsrooms.
2. Business-side software.
3. Social networking. #

Our niche is making collaboration work better for people who need to write and edit together. #

ICM: that’s a lot of connecting. You’ve just come out of a long development period with the launch. what can people expect over the next few months? #

Eldon: To be honest, we built most of Writewith in the last 6 weeks. #

What I think really held us back before was that we spent a lot of time agonizing over features and design before really being able to see how people used the site. By launching Writewith now, we’re going to put the horse before the cart, so to speak — see how people use the site, then build out additional functionality based on that. Over the next few months, people can expect rapid development. #

ICM: what would someone have to do to set their newsroom up with writewith? #

Eldon: 1. Go to: http://www.writewith.com #

2. Upload a Word document of a story that they’re working on (includes entering a username and password of choice) #

3. In the new document they’ve created, invite whoever it is that they want to work on the story with. #

It is seriously that easy to get started. #

ICM: okay. any other thoughts you’d like to add? #

Eldon: We started from scratch a couple of years ago, and it’s been a long process in getting to where we are now… I guess that’s not too surprising considering we graduated recently and didn’t have many connections (or much experience) to begin with. But a lot of people in college media have supported us over the years and we’re here to return the favor by following through on what we set out to do… build software that helps people write and edit together easier. The fact that we’ve stuck around this long shows that we’re committed — and we’re constantly improving. #

Also, check out blog.writewith.com for more about us. #

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