Adam Long is the co-founder of Campus Reader. He and the other two founders are high school friends and graduates of University of Michigan and Michigan State University.

How does news from college newspapers differ from mainstream news? Why would someone be interested in reading news specific to a certain college?

College news is an exciting front in the modern media landscape. I think college newspapers offer a fresh perspective on many of the things we hear and are inundated with everyday from common run-of-the-mill news outlets. Considering this, we believe users may want to use the site for something people don’t always immediately think of; and that is to track emerging trends at the campus level. We feel our site could be an invaluable tool for those who are trying to understand and map what the college demographic is thinking about and interested in. As you may know, the college scene is a rapidly changing environment and what better way to stay on top of it, than to read what young journalists are writing about.

It would seem that there are several reasons why someone would want to read news from a specific university newspaper. Our users may want to read news from their alma mater, or old rival school. High school students may want to dig into newspapers from future perspective colleges. Or maybe a college journalist wants to peruse some other newspapers to see what stories other newspapers are covering. During college sporting events such as March Madness, we’re planning on doing a special feature that will compare all 64 of the NCAA tournaments participants newspapers to see what each respective school is writing about.

What is the story behind Campus Reader?

Campus Reader was conceived by a good friend of mine named Carl Paulus. Carl brought the basic premise to Steve Richert and I, who have been engaged in startups for the past several years as well as running a Detroit area web and software development firm for three years. The idea was to somehow create a website where users could read content from college newspapers across the country. Steve and I started exploring the college media atmosphere. We began to notice that many schools offered free RSS feeds and realized that this would be a perfect delivery mechanism for a sort of nationwide college newspaper.

After several months of cultivating the idea and some extensive brainstorming we decided to start production on the project. We went through several iterations of how the site can and should operate and what sort of technical It took a little over 6 months of development to get everything up and running. As the site stands now, we’re still considering it a post-beta or release candidate. There are several additional features and improvements we’ll be rolling out in the weeks to come; after we make these updates, we’ll really feel comfortable calling the site a finished product.

The biggest challenge thus far was developing our list of RSS feeds, as well as dealing with the legal uncertainties of RSS feeds. From the outset, we decided to gather our own data, rather than sourcing it using a third party database. At the end of our initial research we ended up with somewhere around 320 schools and newspapers in our system. The number is currently hovering around 340, and we’re always looking for more newspapers to add to our rotation.

How much time, energy, and money is put into Campus Reader?

Campus Reader consumes a fair amount of time for each of us, and we hope that the project evolves into something that we spend more and more time on as things progress. But at this point I’d still consider it a part time endeavor. Steve has spent a considerable amount of time developing for the site, but as we move out of our current “post beta” stage he’ll hopefully have to spend less time maintaining and optimizing things. The project is currently funded out of our own pockets. We figured at this early stage we didn’t necessarily need seed money to get started since our development costs are so low. We may seek some angel level funding down the road, but that remains to be seen.

During the site’s development, we tried to make everything automated so that we’d have as little human editing to do as possible. Consequently, we don’t have any employees at the moment. We also tried to build something that will ultimately be community-driven and pushed forward by our users. In our opinion, the site will be successful if we manage to attain a large user base that begins to steer the site in some new directions that we have yet to imagine.