Built from scratch

Which beats would you cover right off the bat? Would you cover club sports and campus sustainability, or the common news the student newspaper already covers?

I’d cover the club sports/sustainability/arts stuff. The key is to get an audience, and you won’t get the duplicating their contact.

What form would your content take? Would you focus on text, images, audio, or video? For video, would you put together technically high quality multimedia pieces, or stream via Qik? How can you balance quality and quantity?

Pick one thing, and do it well. Text is the easiest (and more people read text than do anything else. Text IS king on the internet.). Doing multimedia is time consuming … but if you have the staff for it, awesome.

How quickly would you try to scale? What benchmarks do you have for your organization at one month, three months, and six months? What would you do to advertise and get the community involved?

No idea. Sorry.
I would advertise though—you need to get a community. I think your main priority should be getting people to comment.

What would the business side look like? Where would your funding come from? Would you sell advertising and/or have premium features? How much would you pay your staff?

I wouldn’t start with premium features. I wouldn’t pay staff at first unless you have to. And don’t sell ads until you actually have an audience (adwords at first?). You might get people used to paying v. little.

How would your platform compliment the stories you’re trying to tell? Would you start off simple with WordPress, or launch with something Django-based?

Depends if you have a tech guy. If you can do Django, go for it!

What type of features would you want in your site to increase engagement with your product?

COMMENTS! Maybe a wiki or forum? Polls are always popular.

Would you offer RSS, email newsletters, or content through social media?

RSS and Email at minimum.

Most importantly, what type of people do you look for to help you build your vision?

No idea.