You present an interesting question, one that our prospective customers often ask.

Here are the assumptions that I am working with in answering your question:

1. You want at least the functionality in your publishing system that will allow for publishing articles that will have a beginning and ending date and will automatically archive on the ending date. This is a fundamental requirement for online newspapers.

2. In addition to this news article functionality you will want all of the functionality of a full-featured news site, such as event calendars, polls (with ads, of course), display/banner ads (including in-story ads), automated classifieds, dedicated real estate functionality, video, shopping cart, yellow pages, blogs, etc.

3. Finally I am assuming that the launch would be effected by one or more true entrepreneurs whose intent is to get the job done and who will find a way to do what needs to be done without spending much money. You would not be hiring any office staff to start with, period.

That said, using our system you can start an online business newspaper for less than $1000. Here's the breakdown:

Installation and initial setup fee - $300 (We used to waive this but we don't do that any more - it's too much work not to get paid for it).

First quarter payment - $300 to $450 ($100 per month for hosting and the full publishing system; $125 a month if you add multiple polling functionality; $150 a month with all that plus unmonitored server space and bandwidth, which you surely wouldn't need to start with. However, I would highly recommend the multiple polling. You can put ads in the poll and in the poll reports, and this can be a real revenue center).

Camera - $200 (You can get a Flip Ultra HD pocket video camera from which you can also pull stills from Amazon for about $150, although the list price is $200 I believe. I have bought and used this camera and it's incredible).

Although you will have to have some sort of telephone communication, I am not adding anything for that because most people have at least a cell phone that they could use initially without incurring any additional expense. And I'm not adding anything for office space because we are talking about entrepreneurs. You could easily do this from a dorm room or a home office. In fact that is what several of our successful customers have done. I also haven't included anything for a computer and Internet access. Just about everybody already has that. If not, they can go to any public library and publish from there. If you are on a university campus you probably have campus-wide free wifi.

You might want to throw in $50 for business cards, but you certainly wouldn't need to print up stationary. In addition to owning this company I have a very active, vibrant law practice and I haven't used pre-printed stationary for years as a lawyer. I simply use a word processing template that takes care of that.

Domain name registration - $10 (You can even get it for less, around $8.95; this would of course be a yearly expense).

There you have it. I am aware that a business plan project in a university class might require much more detail in projected expenses, but this is a real world projection based on entrepreneurs flying by the seat of their pants and getting out there and working hard, long hours to build a profitable business that would become an area institution.

Just so you'll know it, I'll probably publish this response on one of my websites. I think it will be helpful to other readers who are thinking about starting an online newspaper. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

All the best,

Joseph Edwards, JD, LLM

ReadMore Systems, Incorporated

On May 27, 2010, at 11:08 AM, Jeff xxxxxxx wrote: