Forum:Weekly News team members

Recently, it has become clear that users in the weekly news team have become hard to contact. I am fully aware that these users are busy with other things, so this forum is being done purely as a courtesy. Instead of saying "X is inactive, let's remove him, agree?" I want to ask all the Weekly News team members if they 'feel' they are active enough to stay on the team at the moment. If a member does choose to step down for a while, they will be moved to "inactive" and will be allowed to regain their position should they ask. I would ask that the team members please be as honest as they can and not just go "yes, I'm still here, leave me there" and then vanish. Also, this is solely for weekly news, position on the News Team will not be effected. 14:50, September 11, 2013 (UTC)

Active users
Active - I can confirm I am active enough to work on weekly news. 14:50, September 11, 2013 (UTC)

Active - I'm still active and able to do weekly news. 16:11, September 11, 2013 (UTC)

Active - I'm around and willing to continue doing the news. 16:50, September 11, 2013 (UTC)

Not active enough - While I initially started the weekly news back in late 2011, due to University, various MMOs and other things, I'm no longer active enough to let alone remember when it's my turn to do the news. I leave it in your capable hands and will continue to write proper news articles when the opportunities arise. 17:00, September 11, 2013 (UTC)

'Active-but-looks-semi-active' I'd do the news but every week someone has already done it. We need better communication skills and a better schedule so we can produce the weekly new on time. Also n7 is inactive at this point in time. 18:08, September 11, 2013 (UTC)
 * Once we're aware on who is and isn't active we may be able to rework the news schedule. The original one we made broke down due to users not being around on the day they were needed and it sort of broke down. 18:12, September 11, 2013 (UTC)

Active - I'm active enough for making Weekly News. 22:10, September 11, 2013 (UTC)

Active/Semi-Active - I'm not sure what to deem "active" but I'm here whenever I'm not in school, and could do it whenever I am on, and I'm always on chat when I'm on, so it can mostly be determined from that. This is the situation with most, though, I believe. 00:59, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * At this point in time you're just news team, not weekly news team. 12:48, September 12, 2013 (UTC)

Active - I can definitely work the news just about anytime; except, while I'm in school, of course. 01:06, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * At this point in time you're just news team, not weekly news team. 12:48, September 12, 2013 (UTC)

Active/Semi-Active -  I'm available on most weekdays, a few days I'm required to go to my school for helping with volunteer work with my school band, for most of the day. Other than that I'm as free as a bird. 01:45, September 12, 2013 (UTC)

Inactive -  The past months have been very busy for me and I regret to say I am not in a situation where I can contribute to the wiki's news team (and really the wiki in any form) actively anymore. Maybe in the future I will be able to regain my activity and possibly rejoin the team, but that is not anytime soon. Until then I leave it to the rest of the awesome Administrator and News teams. 21:06, September 13, 2013 (UTC)

Further discussion
This section is just so we know where to take the weekly news once we're aware whom is active. 12:49, September 12, 2013 (UTC)

http://i.imgur.com/FaGK97y.png Idea - This is something I came up with a while ago. I've always thought that we should have a little more focus on the community goings-on here, so why not have a weekly or bi-weekly news blog specifically for community news? This may have been suggested before but I'm proposing something slightly different: On each blog, have headers for "articles" that could be 1 or 2 paragraphs long, each depicting something that happened on the wiki worth noting. Possible headlines include "User:X Gains Adminship!" or "Heated Debate in Forum:Y". Each particular event could be summed up so that those who don't want to read through a gigantic page can understand what is happening (useful for forum essays). Additionally, we could put a small section at the bottom that refers to specific users, something like "the xth was User:Z's birthday, and User:A attained 6000 edits".

We could have separate news team members for these blogs, and ideally several people working on the articles for one blog for those two weeks (avoids bias, gets broader coverage). We could include quotes of interviews with the users involved with whatever goes on to get their opinion, provide videos/images if needed, etc.

I think this could potentially be beneficial to us for two main reasons: It gives new users a chance to feel like they can get involved in the community happenings here, and it can draw attention to more neglected aspects of the wiki (e.g. Imrovement Drive, category project). If you guys like this or think something would work better another way, let me know. This is all theory. The question is: Do you think this would be worth doing? Would it get the views/comments that our other news blogs get? Joe Copp 00:54, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * As of now "community news" technically is only the Weekly News, which can only be done by everyone on the team except me and This username better work. But if we were able to record these small events and put them on a blog a say why not. 01:02, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a great idea, though would there be enough to put on a separate blog on a regular basis? 01:06, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * I think as long as we have like 3 or 4 stories for two weeks time, we could keep it going. We could also stipulate that the news members can agree to postpone it for a week due to lack of news. Joe Copp  01:09, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * Alright. If it is set up like that, then I think that would be a good idea. 01:17, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * Love the idea. It seems like it could be a lot of fun to have. -- 01:29, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * The main purpose of the weekly news as I originally created it to be was to help keep the community news tab moving and stop it going stale. As you can tell by looking at it, bar a couple of things recently, most of the articles in community news are indeed the weekly digest. Making it bi-weekly would most likely result in that section becoming updated maybe once every two weeks, which in my opinion is not sufficient enough. Maybe if you were to do something different every other week as well? 13:35, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * I think when Joe was explaining it to me, he wanted it to run at the same time as the Weekly News, since Weekly news only has links to things that have happened, like WR, but this would go into more detail about community news. 18:38, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * Yeah. They'd be released alongside eachother. Joe Copp  20:58, September 12, 2013 (UTC)
 * We would still run the usual CoD news in a weekly format, as that seems to carry a fair number of stories per week. Joe Copp  18:27, September 16, 2013 (UTC)

New scheduling
Now that it's been 1 week since this forum opened, and we now know whom is active and inactive we can make a new rota. We can bring in This username better work and Deathmanstratos to flesh out the inactive users slots, if this is fine with other members. So I'm thinking we can have the rota something like this: If anyone has anything they'd like to say about this, say so below so we can get this in place for the weekly news after this one. 03:12, September 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) Argorrath
 * 2) Damac1214
 * 3) Madnessfan34537
 * 4) Crazy sam10
 * 5) Callofduty4
 * 6) KATANAGOD
 * 7) This username better work
 * 8) Deathmanstratos

To fix the problem "I was busy so I could not make the news but I did not have a way to tell others" (like what could happen if someone's internet went down completely for a day or something, or they even just forgot to inform others), I was thinking something like this: it's UserA's turn to make the news, and it should be up at a fixed time (say, 5 PM), preferably earlier. If UserA hasn't made the news by then, then UserB (who is next up on the list) will do it. The next week it's UserC's turn. Just a thought. 09:05, September 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * Is it really worth it to have some sort of arbitrary system like that? I think it would be easier to just have somebody else take initiative and do it themselves, just to get the blog out, if the person who is supposed to do it isn't online. Joe Copp  18:34, September 19, 2013 (UTC)