CODGERAMA

 

CODGERAMA!

JOURNAL FOR THE YOUNG AT HEART

 

 

CODGERAMA! is a new on-line media platform, purpose-built to meet the news, social and cultural interests of Australia’s fastest growing demographic – the codger/ina. Attentive to creativity in all its aspects, CODGERAMA! serves several functions. First up, it is a thinking person’s virtual news source – presenting the facts of what’s happening in the world in a concise and regularly updated front page digest. CODGERAMA! is, just as importantly, a venue for critical thinking and intelligent engagement with issues of the day. So editorials and in-depth columns are key. Unafraid to call out wrongs at home and abroad, CODGERAMA! nevertheless maintains a stridently positive attitude. CODGERAMA! won’t succumb to gossip, to witch hunts or mob mentality. And it will never shirk its duties to reality and to truth telling. The platform’s temperamental bias is to telling ways in which the world will be better, and to airing ideas about what can be done to make a better world. While challenging received wisdom as a matter of course, CODGERAMA! respects knowledge and expertise in all fields.

 

Beyond the news, through an intricate network of write-back blogs, CODGERAMA! rakes over the coals of popular culture and consciousness. Curated by experts in a range of fields, CODGERAMA!’s columns get into the nooks and crannies of an ever expanding range of interests. Our interactive blog-columns introduce the reader to a raft of ranters – from all walks of life and from around the world, with a sprint and often a dawdle across a wide range of interests. CODGERAMA! presents new ideas and invention, new ways of seeing and being in the world. A place where you can feel at home, CODGERAMA! brings to its reader/participants the challenges of a broad spectrum of opinion. Never afraid to over-egg it, CODGERAMA!  provides its reader/participants with a vital social network and light bulb of constant wonderment. 

 

Perhaps most importantly of all, CODGERAMA! functions as an ever-expanding circle of friends – it is a bubble of inclusion. The CODGERAMA! community functions in an ethically sustainable way under its own Charter of Decency, with love of the planet, respect for human rights and care for (especially vulnerable) others enshrined as core positive values.

          

The key focus of CODGERAMA! is on the environment, or rather on environments – natural, social, political, economic, international – environments of home and everywhere else. Tone is whimsical on wry. Piss taken as a matter of course.

 

Although CODGERAMA! will have no pay-wall barrier, it will allow (and encourage) various levels of support from the reading community.

 

Run on the smell of an oily rag (at least to begin with) CODGERAMA!’s operational /participation structure may be thought of as a set of concentric circles. Imagine them carefully laid out as shoestrings, as follows:

-          An inner circle of (between half a dozen and a dozen) salaried department managers – covering, between them: editorial and news coordination, blog management, front pagery, features, advertising, coordination, subscription and support and accounting  

-          A middle circle of columnists / bloggers – regular part time participants, who might be writing for CODGERAMA! monthly, weekly, daily or sporadically

-          An outer circle of reader / respondents / participants

In terms of financial/corporate structure these CODGERAMA! will operate as a profit-sharing cooperative in which need, effort and participation are rewarded with appropriate shares of whatever pie there may be (anticipated as mainly from advertising revenue). Accordingly, there will be major and minor shareholders in the enterprise. Appropriate legal structures will be put in place to limit liability of all involved. The bottom line financial aim of the enterprise will be to neither lose money nor acquire debt. This should be easy to achieve because there will not be much need to fork out for equipment. The platform will be low-cost, the investment needed is in time and skill and creative energy. It is envisaged there will be major and minor shareholders, with returns anticipated to reflect labour input.

 

Both the operational and corporate structures are intended to be flexible, allowing movement between the circles and levels of participation/investment.

 

Advertising carried on CODGERAMA! will need to meet criteria spelled out in the platform’s Charter of Decency.

 

CODGERAMA! will run on a platform and format that are low maintenance, largely self-generating and as DIY as possible for contributors. Centralized front page content will be       uploaded daily (or more frequently in the case of breaking news). There will be a certain amount of facebook or instagram style functionality with the blogs, allowing easy feedback and participation.  All columns will have automatic set vanishing points (probably a week for most material) to keep readers engaged and encourage new content from bloggers. 

 

Featuring new original poetry, fiction and artwork every day, CODGERAMA! will showcase talent from around the country and around the world, giving readers an insight into every kind of creative effort. Other regular content will include the weather (especially long-range speculative), dream-energist and advice columns, scopes of horror, nostra-damn-it predictions, codger/codgerina fashion, entertainment, self-piss-taking curmudgeon bludgeons, and of course the classifieds (where codgers mostly meet).

 

So there is the dream in a nutshell.

 

To get going, CODGERAMA! needs a core team of journalists, designers and editors, legal and financial gurus. It also needs an outer circle of engaged reporters, columnists, news hounds, cartoonists, ranting pants and colourful opinionated characters to keep the show afloat.

 

Until it goes public, CODGERAMA will run as a contributors’ eyes only self-regulating site. The aim here will be to build up adequate content turnover to gear up for a launch so that the project can prove itself self-sustaining, to readers, contributors, sponsors and advertisers.