Austin Meeting—P2Rx News Project Proposal
Update February 2003
Committee: Andy Bray, Laura Estes, Chris Wiley, Rick Yoder
Background:
All but one of the P2Rx centers develop a minimal level news content
in the way of story summaries, both as a service to center users
and as one element of marketing outreach. At least one of the centers
allows NPPR to capture story summaries and to post them on the NPPR
site as part of a news publication web page.
Opportunity:
A distributed collection and publication effort offers an opportunity
for P2Rx to collaborate in order to build a larger, more diverse
news publication through combining multiple efforts and/or to reduce
duplicative work currently taking place when two centers refer to
the same story.
Purpose: A P2Rx news collection serves the following purposes:
- It provides a national distribution mechanism to build awareness
of the new products or services offered by and for the P2 Specialist
community.
- It provides news service readers increased awareness and knowledge
that can help them in delivering P2 technical assistance or in
implementing P2.
Project Description:
Planning the development of a news service continues. The users
and functionality are described more fully in the attached Functionality
summary. Briefly, the news project is intended to create a news
collection and story distribution software application that would:
- Allow for a centralized or shared collection of P2 stories developed
by P2Rx centers,
- Allow existing P2Rx center story development staff to publish
stories from that collection of story summaries already written
by peer P2 editors, and
- Allow for increased distribution of story developed/identified
by centers to more audiences.
Work elements (1-6 current, 7-11 future):
1. Determine scope of existing news production within P2Rx.
2. Define scope of P2 news collection (Purpose above & Publication
Policy below)
3. Describe desired functionality of a P2 news service (See last
page)
4. Review existing data standards for news items, develop and pass
new data standards as necessary. Current suggestion for news descriptor
categories (? Indicates that it may be different data input method:
a, b, or c):
a. Data automatically entered
by input form: Headline, Body; Date of publication (?).
b. Data selected from dropdown
box with preset values: Location/Geography, Tagline/contributor,
Copyright owner.
c. Data a free text input: Subject
Heading (topic) (?), Source (?), Byline/author.
5. Invite comments on P2 news data scope, functionality, and data
standard
6. User feedback to prioritize proposed publication functionality
choices
7. Offer solicitation/RFP
8. Construct news data collection and distribution application
9. Train users, divide news collection tasks among Centers choosing
to develop news
10. Collect and publish news
11. Identify sources and opportunities to build partnerships with
others who have similar or complimentary goals
Project Contribution to P2Rx Goals:
The news project offers the benefits of providing marketing of P2Rx
centers to their target audience and of target audience products
to other audience members. It also provides a way to add more news
with existing resources. Finally, it meets the P2Rx goals in the
following ways:
P2Rx Goal 1: Serve as the "first-stop" for pollution
prevention (P2) information for environmental service providers.
Activity measures: Email distribution copies and readership by links
to stories. Web page impressions and user sessions. Outcome measures:
Web site where user exits site. Comments about usefulness by readers,
numbers of readers who are referred to by story summaries. Number
of partner publishers/news service users.
By its very nature, news implies immediacy, or a first-ness, of
the information. Story summaries will use a tagline to identify
news story contributors such as P2Rx centers, and centers will serve
as the initial publication venues for the service. By sharing the
workload of story development, centers can publish continually,
even through breaks in resource capacity such as those brought about
by staff absences. The following draft publication policy will provide
the quality dimension necessary to retain a readership:
Draft Publication Policy: P2Rx uses the following guidance
to direct the collaborative effort to identify and publish news
for the P2 Specialist community. News items, be they complete stories
or story summaries, need to offer information that raises awareness
or understanding about an P2 issue and also have the following features:
- Timeliness. This is what makes news new. The likelihood that
most of the readership will not have heard of or studied the story,
or will not have seen it considered from a P2 perspective.
- Newsworthy or Relevant. It is Newsworthy if the subject is something
worthy of a press release and it pertains to marketing for peer
P2 program services or products. Stories are Relevant if they
cover either something readers need to know to effectively do
their jobs or something they may find interesting as a function
of their positions. Example: someone working in P2 needs to know
about a change in environmental regulations or waste reduction
technologies, as it may impact their daily life; they may find
interesting - though not life-changing - a story about an enforcement
action or a change in the mercury level in fish in the Atlantic.
- Non-partisan and unbiased. To ensure that information is portrayed
as accurately as possible, stories must be neutral in tone and
reflect the diversity of the readership. Timely opinion articles
can be included for publication, but must be labeled as opinion.
- Concise. Recognizing that readers are busy, coverage must focus
on only the most important issues in a particular news story,
separating the key facts from extraneous details.
P2Rx Goal 2: Increase the awareness, accessibility, and
usability of P2 information. Activity measures: Number of stories
published, number of regional stories published outside the region.
Outcome measures: Feedback from users.
- A P2 News service can raise the knowledge and accessibility
of P2 information in the following manner:
Awareness:
- Crafting news stories that emphasize a waste reduction viewpoint
emphasizes a P2 viewpoint and helps stimulate a demand for P2
information.
- Forming strategic formal partnerships with those that may already
be collecting & publishing certain types of P2 news (NPPR,
etc.) can provide wider distribution channels.
- Forming news partnerships with other service providers (regional
programs, trade associations, etc.) who are reliable sources of
news in their area and who may not be currently receiving P2 news.
Accessibility:
- By delivering a news service, accessibility is enhanced through
the direct promotion of each story, and also indirectly though
the marketing of the service provider, P2Rx.
Usability:
- Ability for users to choose the types of news they receive
- Ability for users to choose how they would like to receive the
news (i.e., email news snippets, automated email distribution,
or notification of new additions to a website)
- Ease of use by a variety of platforms
- Networkability (i.e. news entered through any point on the network
will be accessible from any point on the network)
P2Rx Goal 3: Facilitate dynamic, regional P2 networks. Activity
measures: Number of non-center items posted to news application.
Outcome measures: Number of publication partnerships.
Two levels of regional dynamic networks are provided with this
project:
1) Improved collaboration of the P2Rx network through
- Forming strategic formal partnerships with those that may already
be collecting & publishing certain types of P2 news (NPPR,
etc.) can provide wider distribution channels.
- Forming news partnerships with other service providers (regional
programs, trade associations, etc.) who are reliable sources of
news in their area and who may not be currently receiving P2 news.
- Existing P2Rx centers will enjoy a more efficient development
of news story summaries by avoiding duplication.
2) Improved collaboration of the regional networks through
- Increased awareness of peer projects & services within the
region
Proposed Project Deliverables for 2004 and Estimated Resources
Required:
Suggest work plan elements 7-10. For those on the committee/workgroup,
~ 40 hours to finalize attributes and functionality yet this year.
A primary author will need ~ 20 hours to draft and administer an
RFP. Cost of the coding unknown as yet < $5,000? Standard development
will take a primary author ~ 20 hours to draft and administer. Individual
center tasks once the application is in place will be <10 hours/center
of coding to install and training to operate. Other work distribution
< 5 hours/center. Story sourcing and publication once the application
is in place will be up to the centers, from 0.05-0.25 FTE.
Functionality DRAFT - 02/03
The P2 news summary service user type determines the functionality
elements. Users are described, along with a bulleted list of the
features they desire.
Subscriber/reader - the intended audience, the target audience
of whom the news summaries should raise awareness, increase knowledge,
or provide access to resources that will help them do their P2 job:
- Choice of format (email or web page)
- Choice of delivery time (email periodicity)
- "Old" news archived and searchable by attributes
- Browsable presentation of web-published news - by attributes
such as type, category, chronology, contributor (this would allow
a P2Rx News on demand feature)
- Choice of particular topics for news items received
News Service Providers (publishers, system output) - the
P2Rx center (or fellow news outlet) from which the subscriber/reader
receives their news.
- Consistent with other (P2Rx) products
- Complements and references other P2Rx products (Topic hub integration
example - but the Hub a hub and News is news)
- User measurement shows that news product is used
- Choice of particular topics for news items received
- News described well enough to offer useful partitioning by publishers
- Copyright resolved prior to receipt - republishable content
- Either cached copies available for archives or more complete
bibliographic citation to avoid dead links
- Information useable as content for email, web, or hard-copy
publication
- Editor can peruse story collections and choose which stories
will be included for "local" publication
- Asynchronous publication by different publishers
News Aggregators (summary author, system input) - the P2Rx
center (or collaborators) that identifies suitable stories, describes
them, and inputs into the news system according to agreed-upon standards.
- Readers/Publishers can recommend stories
- Author can enter story on-line (using forms)
- Usable/sharable standard that integrates with other standards
(reselling content)
- Defined sources reviewed for news to foster division of labor
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