Weekly Roundup
The Weekly Roundup is an ongoing project for the McNair Center. Weekly Roundup posts are published Friday afternoons and cover news relating to entrepreneurship from the week (and sometimes the previous weekend). The Weekly Roundup began in the Fall 2016 term and originally focused on both Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Currently, the McNair Center is only publishing a Weekly Roundup on Entrepreneurship.
| Weekly Roundup | |
|---|---|
| Project Information | |
| Project Title | Entrepreneurship Weekly Roundup |
| Owner | Meghana Gaur |
| Start Date | Fall 2016 |
| Deadline | |
| Keywords | Entrepreneurship, Start-ups, Small Business |
| Primary Billing | |
| Notes | |
| Has project status | Active |
| Copyright © 2016 edegan.com. All Rights Reserved. | |
Current Project Write-Up
RSS Feed Sources (current RSS feed uses a Google Chrome plug-in)
Refer to RSS feeds for content selection. Current RSS feeds in use utilize the Google Chrome plug-in RSS reader and cover the below sources:
- New York Times, Venture Capital
- TechCrunch Startups
- Entrepreneur: Latest Venture Capital News
- Forbes - Entrepreneurs
- The Guardian - Entrepreneurs
- VentureBeat
- Entrepreneur: Latest Articles
Additional Web Sources
Refer to additional online sources, including:
To-do/Recommendations for Improvement
In future terms, the content search process for articles could be made more efficient through further automation. Increased automation could be achieved by expanding the RSS feed base, as well as implementing a web crawler, especially for sources such as PitchBook and CrunchBase. Currently the primary issue with using RSS feeds is that there isn't a standard plug-in or RSS reader for all of the relevant RSS feeds.
Additionally, to make the process more clear, research assistants who are publishing a post should share their post with the research assistant in charge of the weekly roundup.
Second Semester Notes
For additional sources that have not been automated (not available via RSS feed), subscribe to electronic newsletters. Newsletters currently subscribed to include:
- Silicon Prairie News (Subscribe to daily newsletter for free)
- Crunchbase, Daily (Subscribe to daily newsletter for free)
- PitchBook, Daily Pitch (subscribe to daily newsletter for free)
- Venture Beat Daily Roundup (subscribe to daily newsletter for free)
- TechCrunch, The Daily Crunch (subscribe to daily newsletter for free)
- PE Hub Wire (subscribe to daily newsletter for free)
- Mattermark - can be useful for editorials/blogs
The above newsletters are free and can be rerouted directly to a weekly roundup mailbox. For future weekly roundup creators, McNair Center should consider setting up an e-mail account that can be utilized solely for the purpose of gathering weekly roundup content from VC and entrepreneurship newsletters.
For internet sources, such as PitchBook (News & Analysis), Harvard Business Review, Mattermark and Venture Beat, recommended search words include but are not limited to:
- small business
- entrepreneurship, startups
- venture capital
Standardized format for blog posts
Weekly Roundup posts begin with coverage on blog posts/reports that will be published by McNair Center faculty during the same week.
The weekly roundup post is split up into two segments:
- Latest news in entrepreneurship
- This segment follows reports, op-eds, and blogs from the various aforementioned sources that cover a broad variety of topics in entrepreneurship (diversity, policy, demographic trends, etc.).
- Startup news
- This segment mainly focuses on updates in VC funding rounds for successful startups (often stories are found from CrunchBase).
Weekly roundup posts should include:
- around 7-10 stories
- 1-2 paragraphs per story
If applicable, news stories should be linked to previous and relevant posts by McNair faculty. Share links to news stories with the social media admin (weekly roundup stories make for informative/interesting tweets). Always include links to the original source when referencing studies, reports, and surveys and including statistics/data in a write-up for a specific story. When drafting weekly roundup posts, adhere to the McNair Center's general writing guidelines and create a blog form on the wiki page with a shareable link to the google doc that contains the roundup draft. Get another McNair Center staff member who is familiar with the blog-writing procedures at McNair to peer-edit the post before entering it into Wordpress for final review by Anne and publishing.
