As well-known media consultant Juan Antonio Giner says on his fun blog, “we need more people newspapers, less building journalism, less institutional newspapers.

People, people, people.”

This is something we want the Voice to focus on. Real Harvard people.

Draft of Student Group Proposal Thus Far <— Click Here to Download

This is a draft of the proposal that we have been working on for the past couple weeks to attain recognition as an official Harvard student group by the Harvard College Student Affairs Committee. Acceptance as an official student group will enable us to apply for and hopefully receive grant money from Harvard. It will also allow us to use the official ‘Harvard’ name in advertising, as well as disseminating information and marketing materials on Harvard campus. We are confident that we will get approved, though we would like to smoothen the rough edges of the proposal; the ultimate hope, as mentioned briefly by Miran, is to use much of these materials for our media kit for potential advertisers and to develop strategic relationships.

A lot of people have asked us, when do you guys plan to launch this crazy project of yours?

As of now, the plan is to launch our weekly newspaper and interactive website before spring break. That means about a month and a half from today. Is that a realistic timeframe? Well, if we really give our best, it might be.

We’re currently in process of submitting all the documentation required to get approved as a student organization. After that, we’ll devote all of our energies to create a media kit, and develop the visual identity of the newspaper. Also, we’ll soon start marketing the project around the campus, and recruiting all interested students.

We want The Voice to be very different from all other Harvard publications.

In every single detail: photography, writing, layout, relationship with readers, connection with its online edition, editing etc. Design is one of the areas that we really want to put a lot of effort into, and produce something completely new and fresh.

During this last summer, I worked with a Spanish design company called Cases I Associats. Their small office in Barcelona was amazing. Just what you’d imagine a design studio to look like: large tables with nothing but iMacs on them, a lot of papers and sketches on the floor, people running around with different magazines and newspapers. Check out their portfolio, really cool.

A web design firm called “Information Architects” produced a case study of what would Washington Post look like if it were to be redesigned as a wiki newspaper / website.

The basic idea is that readers would get more involved in the editorial process, contributing their own content, communicating with editors, and choosing what should be in the next day’s print edition.

To an extent, that’s what we’re trying to do with the Voice. Through our soon-to-be launched website, we want to have the whole Harvard community talking with our writers and editors, contributing their own thouhts and articles, and thus “co-editing” the paper together with the newroom staff.

This is the proposal of our (ideal) managment & newsroom organization. Of course, it won’t be easy to achieve at first, but we feel it’s a good framework to begin with. What are your thoughts on this proposal?

No other Harvard College publication and/or media project has as significant a point of interaction between its readers and the publication’s contributors as what we propose to establish (see our entry: “The Project’s Model”). The Harvard Voice’s website concept is central to the project’s distinctiveness.

We’re finishing up our student organization proposal, hoping to have it all done by the end of this week. It’s pretty comprehensive, and includes the newsroom workflow, organizational structure of both the newsroom and the managment, our business plan etc.

With some tweaks, the proposal will be a solid basis for the media kit.