At the Guardian, where I worked until the end of March (I took voluntary redundancy, a buyout), we had internal hackdays that brought together journalists, developers and even commercial staff. We had 24 hours to produce something. It was helpful from the journalists side because it helped them understand the development process more. Commercial staff brought knowledge of the market and also some knowledge of how to bring an idea from concept to market. Developers also got an insight into the editorial mindset. The Guardian Datastore and Datablog came out of the first hackday. It was a useful way to work.

I'm not a developer, and my skills in terms of development are pretty limited. I wish I knew more. However, I have been a digital journalist of some sort since 1996. Bringing together people with a range of roles and skills in journalism and development can bring about some great learning, not just in specific skills, but also in terms of helping projects get done in organisations.

Kevin Anderson

80

One way, I think, might be to let topics bubble up from folks through a process something like this:

1. Person posts code on github/other "social" repo site to tackle some needed task or issue.
2. People try it out, write about it, fork it, ask questions, ask for features, etc.
3. Through step 2, a smaller community of ppl who can demo and answer questions about it forms.
4. Allow for some kind of voting mechanism to propose/choose what topics/issues to work on, with the requirement that there must be something (code, a demo, a document to discuss) behind it. Not simply an idea, but a work in progress.
5. Top picks become sessions at conference, with some "wildcard" or lightning sessions for newer ideas/topics/code.

For example, for NICAR this year, Ben Welsh didn't just prepare a handout on GeoDjango, he prepared an app. Imagine if people interested in that session got the opportunity to try it out beforehand, and came to the conference with that experience - it could advance the discussion at the conference beyond basic questions and contribute to further development and learning.

This would give something of an advantage to those who had existing code for projects, but we could balance that out with the "I have an idea" folks as long as they document it well and have some kind of roadmap.

In other words: projects with a purpose.

Derek Willis

305

MailChimp is free if you stay under certain usage limits (believe it's 500 people on the list and less than 3,000 sends a month). You can pay as you go if you run over those limits. I've been using it and the interface is quite nice, although sometimes a little slow in some browsers.

Burt Herman

385

Once you get above a certain list size, you really want to outsource it to a 3rd party service. Or else you're going to be spending far too much of your time dealing with spam filters and block lists.

Eli Dickinson

90

As someone who has organized a journo conference (BCNI Philly), I strongly considered incorporating some sort of hackday element.

The problem is that a hackday for journalism needs to be pretty specific and have a stated goal, and that degree of specificity would be tough to draw over 15 people as the journo/hacker word is still in its infancy. The varying skill ranges can be tough to overcome as well.

For BCNI's case, I thought that if a hackday were to happen it would have to be a dedicated event, not an "add-on."

seanblanda

30

My nonprofit uses Constant Contact. It's under $50 a month with full feature set, reasonably easy to use, very member-friendly (unsubscribe, web form signup, etc), cloud based. IF you don't need to match it with a relationship manager, it's a decent light-n-fast option.

For more money, there's Emma. Good on layout, branding etc. Probably not for you.

For Salesforce integration, there's Vertical Response.

If you go all the way up to a relationship manager, there's CiviCRM and others.

Jonathan Eyler-Werve

45

Aweber seems to be another commonly used service.

Rick Martin

247

Also, Constant Contact and Blue Sky Factory. Pricier, but allegedly with analytics.

andriak

80

I was kind of disgusted by Mailman's antiquity, too, until I started looking at the trade offs with the alternatives. It's a surprisingly complex problem.

IFF you're using Drupal, however, I can advocate SunMailer, which might be a good solution in terms of automatically aggregating and prettyfying content with some degree of granularity. If you're not, I would try and find some launch sponsors to absorb the cost, buck up and buy one of the more professional mailers.

If you have a large audience, in particular, the blacklist problems gets to be very large very quick, doing it yourself might mean even your basic individual emails start getting bounced.

Michael Morisy

241

I've used http://www.phplist.com/ with pretty decent success. No worrying about number of emails or contacts, host on your own server.

Also, FREE as in beer.

Megan Taylor

263