Midweek update

[Suzanne Yada]

Hey everyone, here's a midweek update from me. Hopefully this will be semi-coherent:

* David Cohn and I had an interesting conversation earlier this week. We all know it's an uphill battle to get apples-to-apples comparison. Would it be more useful for us -- and for readers -- to start within our own countries and compare select universities, then only have a handful of statistics to compare internationally?
* The talk with David revolved around possibly using www.spot.us. Since Spot.Us is Bay Area-focused, we talked about having the very wealthy Stanford and UC Berkeley schools involved and comparing their results to the very not wealthy San Francisco State and San Jose State. But since this was an international project, we talked about using the site to fundraise reimbursements for *all* of us who have to pay for FOI, or perhaps hiring a professional part-time editor/mentor. Though the original idea was that the journalism professors would act as this. It's still all in discussions.
* I'm still negotiating with my student paper on the logistics of the project. We get bogged down with the day-to-day stuff just to churn out a paper four times a week, so it's not as easy as "hey, let's do it." But I'm pushing.
* I have reached out to the Association of Health Care Journalists at healthjournalists.org to see if they would be willing to contribute or mentor. Josh's HMI group has been quite successful with having the presence of a pro.
* Should messages in this Google group be public or private? How transparent do we want to get in this process?

I'd love to hear your progress so far. Have you reached out to others?

-Suzanne

[Greg Linch]

I think transparency should be the default, but sometimes things need to be private. Maybe make the group public and then use direct e-mails for private conversation.