College literary journal

The college that I am enrolled at does not have a literary journal. Most, though certainly not all, colleges have a publication of this kind, and I think it is a great opportunity for students to express themselves, especially since this area is not strongly represented in our school's extracurricular activities. We have sports, we have theater, we have community service, sign language, art, etc. but nothing related to writing.

I am looking to start something up. I was wondering if anyone here who was ever involved in some kind of school publication would have any tips for me? How did you get interest? How many people did it take to run it? What did your publication include? What was the submission process? Did you accept all submissions (within reason)? Did people purchase it or was it distributed for free? What was the design? What program did you use to create it?
Or anything else relevant that comes to mind.

Thanks!

I was in a small-medium company, and all it really need was a boss, a chief editor, an intern and an accountant to publish a magazine. All you need is a system and a good network of journalists, contributors, photographers, designers and what not, unless you plan to integrate all those roles into your staff.

I worked on my college's lit journal for a little bit, and while I think it'd be difficult to start one up from scratch, everything moves very smoothly once you got everyone working together. However, funding is always a big issue.

Fortunately, the college I went to provided all student clubs with a certain amount of money according to their needs and what was reasonable, topping out at $1,000. If your college does something similar, then the biggest issue - funding - will be largely taken care of. Alternatively, try to attract some advertisers and slip some ads into the final pages of the finished journal.

The lit journal at my college was distributed for free, but that was probably because they already had funding taken care of. It was created just using a template on Microsoft Word, and it was printed using a local publisher. Nowadays, you could probably do printing through Lulu far cheaper.

If possible, talk to your English department as well. They'll have some ideas, and probably be willing to help out. More than likely, there's probably been a lit journal at your college in the past, and some of the professors might be able to tell you how it worked and why it failed.

Last but not least, it's difficult to get these kind of things started, but it's very difficult to set it up such that it'll last for many years after you leave. One of my friends started his own journal in college for engineering papers, and from what he told me, the hardest thing was not setting it up, but ensuring it'd last.