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.
