In the coming days, we’ll be reorganizing the CoPress web site and moving servers. There may be some glitches or downtime as we work out the kinks. Please pardon any temporary mess.
Why the change? We’re gearing up to offer more news & information you can use as a college web editor/journalist/hacker. It all needs a place to go.
If you have any ideas or advice, let us know in the comments. What do you want to read? What do you need to learn?
Look for regular blogging to begin next week.
(Yes, the title is a Sam Cooke reference. Couldn’t resist.)
We submitted our application for the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge a few days ago. Check it out. Feel free to comment and rate us (suggestion: five stars).
There’s lots of competition this year, with nearly 2,000 ideas submitted for the $5 million in grants up for grabs. We’ll know by November 15 if we made the cut for the second round of the application process.
In the meantime, if you’re ridiculously wealthy and itching to give some of your money to a good cause, we’d be happy to oblige.
After a few weeks of drafting, CoPress now has a pretty stellar application together that really synthesizes where were at. Unfortunately, as I’ve just learned, there are character limits on each question we have to answer. I thought I might publish what we have already for the reader’s delight, and then get on to cutting large chunks out of it. Once we can actually fit it into an application, we would love your feedback in the form of comments and (preferably) 5 star ratings.
Description (1800 characters) - Verdict: We’re golden, answer is within limit.
CoPress is a holistic, non-profit, open-source, and community-driven initiative to provide student news organizations with the technical ecosystem they need to thrive during the evolution to digital information gathering and distribution.
Read more…
If you subscribe to this blog via RSS, be sure to check out our new theme/design (thanks to Drew Geraets!).
This week’s Skype call featured a few new faces (sorry for the flood of links here):
Each provided valuable feedback regarding our Knight application, which we will finalize before the Nov. 1 deadline.
(A quick shout out again to Anthony Pesce, who provided great feedback on last week’s call. Also, Anthony is now on Twitter @anthonyjpesce).
Check out what we currently have in the Knight Garage. Please add comments and let us know what you think.
We also discussed our organizational structure (see the draft [Google Doc]), which includes several lead positions from Web to operations to finance. In addition to the leads, we also plan to have associates, advisers and team members.
What’s to come:
- Finish our Knight application.
- Finish our audit of content management systems, the goal of which is to be able to act as a resource for student newspapers when they consider switching.
- Survey part deux: try to get more online editors and editors in chief to respond to our basic questions. Also, to have all new and past respondents answer questions about workflow.
Look out for more discussion of workflows, which is something Daniel Bachhuber (@danielbachhuber) and I (@greglinch) have chatted about a couple times.
Well, almost. Just two weeks ago, we closed our very first survey to new responses. Since then, we’ve been slowly compiling the results (I’m a student with brutal mid-terms, just like many others on the CoPress team). Over the weekend, I’ll continue working on the final report with the CoPress team. In the meantime, however, I thought I might share interesting findings I’ve come across about both our respondents and how they responded:
- Out of a total of 40 respondents, 10% identified as Publishers, 22.5% as Advisers, 27.5% as Online Editors/Webmasters, and 12.5% as Editor in Chiefs. With all of the other respondents included, it appears as though there is a wide spectrum of interest in the project.
- From that same batch of respondents, 27.5% are running College Publisher 4, 30% are running College Publisher 5, 10% are on Wordpress, and 5% are on Drupal and something Django-flavored. College Publisher 4 scored the longest average deploy at 46.5 months.
- College Publisher 4 wins props for an automatic email version, ad management, and free tech support. There are suggestions to include a WYSIWYG editor, more design flexibility, and better multimedia management.
- Wordpress received positive comments for its ease of use, plugin architecture, and comment management. It could use improvement in user management, backend customization, and an email edition (it currently requires a plugin).
Surprisingly, we received an entry stating that the paper used Dreamweaver to publish online. That, my friends, is dedication. My sympathy goes out to them. We’ll have a better solution for you soon enough.
Stay turned for stats such as the average number of developers, what languages they generally know, and CMS satisfaction. When the final report from the first survey is announced, so too will be our second, extended, even more amazing survey. We want to map out the technological workflow in your newsroom, as it will help us better understand what we’re working with (and feed you tips based on your current setup). Our second list of questions is comprehensive [Google Doc], but not yet complete. What do you think we’re missing? What do you want to learn about your community’s newsrooms? Please leave your feedback in the comments. Thanks for the support!
As has been suggested a few times in the recent past, this week’s conference call took a positive turn and fostered a fantastic discussion instead of focusing solely on action items. This was due in part to the small turnout, but also because we were joined by Anthony Pesce, a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner with Populous.
Since the KNC deadline is fast approaching and CoPress will be submitting an application come November 1, we talked about what we already have in the Garage and how our answers can be refined. Ryan Sholin already provided some great feedback there, so we used his responses/questions as a jumping off point.
Anthony did a wonderful job in offering advice and fielding questions from those on the call and he helped us firm up what CoPress needs to do to be successful as a Knight News Challenge applicant. We covered each requirement put forth by the Knight Foundation and tried to synthesize exactly what they are looking for.
If you are planning to take on the Knight News Challenge or if you’re interested in how to evaluate emerging ideas, do your best to set aside an hour and listen to this week’s call. It is likely to offer a good deal of insight while containing less esoteric discussion than usual.
19 October 2008 - Meeting notes - CoPress [Google Doc]
Another Sunday, another conference call, and plenty more progress here at CoPress. We’re making good headway and nearing some milestones that will push the organization into the limelight while firming up some questions that you may have.
First, though, some news: we have new members! CoPress is lucky to have attracted the talents of Matt Blalock and Megan Taylor, two individuals that are sure to help once things start getting technical. Matt is the proprietor of Vewd, a documentary photography Web site, and Megan is a recent graduate of the University of Florida. They’re both comfortable with scripting and their favorite pies are pecan and anything with whipped cream, respectively. Welcome.
Discussed were the results of our very first survey (which closed last Friday) and interesting things to be taken away from the data. We learned a lot about what sort of financial and personnel resources college newspapers have for their online ventures and, from that, determined how the next questionnaire will help shape the community. (If you contributed and/or you’re curious as to the outcome, stay tuned later this week when we will synthesize the results and announce our next poll.)
With regard to shaping the community and upcoming topics for discussion, during the call we tentatively assigned some attendees with the task of defending “their” CMS. The idea behind this is that, should CoPress as an organization decide to support a primary piece of software, we want it to be the most capable from the get-go based on what we have outlined to be the “ideal CMS.” Be sure to keep an eye out for those posts as they’re bound to be contentious.
Finally, the bunch of us talked about our options for hosting as this site grows and improves over the coming months. We grazed over updates from each specific branch of the initiative–technical, outreach, logistics, et cetera–and, an hour and a half later, that was that.
Until next week!
12 October 2008 - Meeting notes - CoPress [Google Doc]
Yesterday I took an hour or so to synthesis one thing I’ve been working on, the Organizational Development Roadmap [Google Doc], in to responses that better fit the questions on our Knight News Challenge application. Right off the bat, Ryan Sholin responded with questions I thought it would be easier to clarify in a blog post. First, he says:
1. OK, you need two years and more money.
The first year, you can roll out a prototype school or three in the fall, a few more in the spring, and by the time the next summer rolls around, you have a service you’ve taken a school year to develop and improve before you bring it out on a larger scale.
To this, I partially agree. Currently, we’re asking for $70,000 from the Knight News Challenge and have a time scale of one year. I am opposed, at the moment, to asking for more money than I think is necessary. We have little understanding of what our costs will be (plus I’m sure they will scale over time) and the other applications in the garage that have asked for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, seem outlandish. I don’t want CoPress to be taken as an outlandish project.
For me, the one year qualifies the amount of time it will take to build part of something cool. CoPress, by no means, would be “finished” at the end of the first year. A year, though, sounds good for project scope and two years sounds too long.
Second, Ryan asks:
2. Other than it feeling warm and fuzzy, being based on open-source software and thus extensible, what’s the advantage to a student news org to use this instead of College Publisher? It’s free, and hosted, and if you ever get enough traffic, there’s a rev share on the national ads, right? How is this different. (I’d emphasize that it will be built on a platform that students can learn and adapt to their own needs, right?)
Boy, do I ever agree with you. As I’ve written before and before, “hackability” is critical. Student news organizations need to be working on an open source platform (or, bowing to Kevin, Ken, and Expression Engine, at least one with a plugin architecture) so that they have the ability to innovate as fast as they can. If anyone tries to argue with me that student news organizations don’t need digital distribution platforms they can innovate with, I won’t listen to you. The software College Publisher uses is, from all of my experiences, clunky, janky, and proprietary. We’ll win people over when we show them we have an easy-t-deploy, maintainable, and open and innovate platform to use. Hell, we’re friendly too.
At the moment, we’re not working on a national ad network, although ability to deploy ads will be functionality we provide in some capacity. I’ve heard rumors that there is another group working on the ad coop, however.
3. If you’re going to offer hosting, that’s going to cost money to maintain after a News Challenge grant would run out. What’s the business plan moving forward? And if you’re not going to offer hosting, what super-easy-to-install platform are you going to build the service on?
(WordPress or Drupal? Maybe… An Ellington-like Django-based CMS would actually be difficult, unless the student news orgs in question all have access to and control of their servers.)
The business plan is being worked out. Currently, we’re looking at a few different potential revenue streams:
- Fee for service: core CoPress developers offer technical support (database porting, site theming, temporary support if you don’t have an online editor for a term, etc.) for affordable rates.
- Flat rate fee for basic hosting, management, and support
- Grants and donation drives; foundation support
- Using The Point for raising money for plugins/add’l functionality; money raised will fund development by a web developer from the CoPress community
And it’s funny you ask about what platform we’re going to use. We’re in the process of researching the best one for our needs through our surveys and CMS audit. We’ve developed a list of what we think is critical functionality [Google Doc], and are in the process of researching how well Drupal, WordPress, Django, and/or Ruby on Rails could be hacked to fit these needs.
The million dollar question:
4. One of the winners last year is building a CMS/community network tool (plus some front-end print scheduling?) for student media. How is this different (hosting? other services?) and why is it (also) necessary?
Ryan, I think what you’re referring to is the Populous Project. We actually were talking with them about a month and a half ago, but haven’t heard anything since. What we’re doing is similar in the CMS sense (although we preferably won’t be building an entire CMS from scratch) but different in approach: we’re focusing on the technical ecosystem first. The medium to long term survival of CoPress requires a vibrant ecosystem of student Online Editors, etc. because they’re going to be the ones hacking away, educating and supporting each other, and advancing innovation in student news.
We’re working together in an open, transparent, and collaborative fashion, and that’s how we’re different.
Update: Oddly enough, the CoPress Google Group received an email from one of the Populous Project grantees a couple of hours ago in regards to why we shouldn’t consider Ruby on Rails. Hopefully we’ll hear more about their development soon.
The Digital Journalist came out with it’s most recent ‘issue’ today. One of the articles is quite phenomenal and well worth a read.
A starting quote:
The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.
I’d be fascinated to hear a discussion on the topic of Newspapers as a platform. In my opinion, CoPress should be attempting to become the platform that all college newspapers are on. That means that collaboration is key. College Publisher attempts to do this, but fails:
- CP doesn’t really allow a way for you to pull in content of the ‘college newswire.’ We should build a system that can aggregate content and suggest to editors a selection of stories that they might cross-post.
- CoPress should get a small cut of the ad revenue of cross-posted stories. We can become a linking service. Do like politico, the content creator shares their content with whomever wants to cross-post, but gets a chunk of the ad revenue. Share content across papers, and we all thrive.
I’d really like to see a discussion in the comments below. This is a pretty radical plan that, while sounds logical, is gonna get a lot of bean-counters screaming. I know our business manger would hate this plan. In his mind, we’re first and foremost a newspaper. We should be in the newspaper business.
I refer you back to the trains. There is no newspaper business, there is only information media. If we, as an industry, can realize this, we stand a decent chance of avoiding the fate of railroads.
With our survey of college newsrooms wrapping up this week, Sunday’s conference call focused mainly on logistics. We’re getting ready to go from solely information-gathering to actually doing stuff.
If you still haven’t taken our survey, please go do it now. It will close on Friday Oct. 10, so don’t delay. We’ve received a lot of responses, but could use a lot more. The better we know your needs, the better we can help each other. So spread the word. We’ll compile the results and plan to share them next week.
The survey will be used as a guide in choosing projects - What to code, to write, to offer? What CMS(s) to support? Decisions should begin to be settled next week, then the real work can begin. After discussing a range of ideas, we’re prioritizing by crafting a list of specific CMS must-haves.
Other than that, there’s tidying up and organizing to be done all around. This Web site will get a face-lift soon, for a cleaner presentation. Look for more topical blogging, like the recent WordPress post, to come. If you want to hear minutia discussed, audio of most of the hour-plus conference is attached.
We also welcomed two new people on the call: Miles Skorpen of the online-only Daily Gazette at Swarthmore College and David Estes of the Django-powered The Daily at the University of Washington. Both bring experience from successful, custom-built sites, so it’s great to have them on board.
As always, we’re open to suggestions and contributions. Get in touch.
