A New Design for the Whitman Pioneer
Although the Whitman Pioneer has had a web presence since 2007 when it launched a self-hosted version of WordPress by Daniel Bachhuber and Andrew Witherspoon, we wanted to launch this semester with a redesign from the ground up. The result of this process launched last week with our first print issue of the semester.
The Design Process
When thinking about how to redesign the site, we wanted to create something that could be used as the homepage for Whitman students. Essentially, we wanted a site that would incorporate information about a lot more of what happens on campus. By getting a fresh WordPress design we were able to do this by creating a place for photo galleries, a campus calendar, student forums, featured videos, and the potential for student and/or athlete blogs. Some of these features went live with the launch of the site, and others will be rolled out in the coming months.
One of the other main goals with this redesign was creating a site that encouraged student, community, and general participation. To this end we changed how the website displays comments as well as creating the potential for the occasional online forum. In the past comments were just listed one after the other in the sidebar of the article and there was no real way to promote a discussion. Now comments appear at the bottom of the article and people are able to reply to each other. With this, as well as maybe adding forums in the future, we’re hoping that the site serves as a place for students to read about and discuss events and issues on campus. Whitman is a campus that is full of too much email and occasionally there are some pretty heated debates that occur on list servs. With this new site part of what we’re hoping to do is give the campus a more central place to come together to calmly discuss these issues as they come up.
Our Workflow
We print the Pioneer for distribution every Thursday afternoon. In the past, the website has been updated at some point after this, but this semester we’re working on getting the online content to go live once the papers hit campus. Once we finish the article for print on Wednesday night (or in the wee hours of Thursday morning if it takes that long) the process of uploading then begins. I basically copy and paste the content from the InDesign files that the Production Assistants make and upload the corresponding images. (This is probably not a very efficient way of doing things, and we’re certainly open to hearing how the CoPress Network works through their content).
There is some special formatting that goes into the Featured section articles. These articles span the center pages of the print edition and are generally much more design heavy than the rest of the print layout. Since so much work goes into the layout of these articles, I’ve implemented a way to give the layout people some recognition for their work. If you read one of our featured articles the thumbnails at the top of the article expand to show you how the page looked in print. For now this is the best method that I have been able to come up with, but it’s probably something that will undergo some changes in the future.
The Future
The Pioneer’s site is definitely something that is still a work in progress and probably will be one for a few months. Within the next week we’ll be launching newly designed category pages as well as some design changes that will hopefully help to make the site seem even more professional and fitting for a newspaper. In addition, the Pioneer is currently supported through funds from the Associated Students of Whitman College and we’re hoping that through advertising in the print addition as well as online we’ll be able to become a little more self-sufficient.
Also, with the spread of Twitter I’m personally hoping to move the newsroom through at least a little bit of the stages of Twitter adoption. By doing this I’m hoping that the Pioneer becomes somewhat of a hybrid between a daily paper (which Whitman is just too small of a campus to support) and a weekly paper (which doesn’t do a great job of covering events that pop up). We already have a Twitter account and will be posting updates there as our site advances and as anything significant happens on campus that doesn’t make it into the paper.
Part of what excites me about working with online journalism is the potential for people to come together and really perfect what works and what just doesn’t. With that in mind I’d love to hear about the workflows that you out there go through and what you’ve found has worked. Also, it’d be great to hear from anybody at a paper that has successfully created ad revenue through their site and how they did that.
Regarding the workflow… you’re not alone. There _has_ to be a better way! We use Quark here at Millersville and I can’t find a way around copying and pasting.
Does CollegePublisher have any cool tools? Or what do other newspapers (like real papers) use?
This is something that has dumbfounded me from the beginning, but I’m always too busy uploading new content. At least I have a day- our paper is finished late Tuesday night, is delivered to our newsroom Wednesday afternoon/evening, then distributed by someone for Thursday. What I do is upload the articles, pictures, etc. on Wednesday during the day (luckily this semester I have another person helping me), and then have WordPress auto-publish them, with the top articles set to publish at 22:00 (10pm), the next-important articles at 21:55, etc. I do this so the top stories in the paper are the top stories online.
I haven’t used College Publisher, but I somehow doubt that they would have any tools available that would exceed that of WordPress. I also would love to know what papers like the NY Times or Washington Post use, because I’m sure with the content they have to manage they’ve figured something out.
I enjoyed the post–for a newspaper dork, it’s always fascinating to see how other college outlets work.
All that copy and pasting sounds like a ton of work. This isn’t the ideal programmed solution, but at my paper we have each section editor paste their articles in, instead of one person at the end of the chain. It’s still copy-pasting, but at least the work is divided between people.
[...] a blog post about the design process, workflow, etc. It got posted today and can be found at the CoPress blog. I’d love to hear what you think and if anyone has ideas as to how to make our workflow at [...]
First off, my apologies to Andrew for publishing this under my name at the beginning. I did all of the editing last night and saved it as “Pending Review” for Adam or Joey to publish this morning, but mistakenly forgot to change the name of the author.
Second, reading this post made me think of an idea: it would be really sweet if we took time regularly, say once a month or once a quarter, to critique each other’s websites. For instance, I think it would be really sweet to have Subscribe to Comments and the Seesmic plugin installed on the Whitman Pioneer site. We could discuss design considerations, etc. as well.
I really like the idea of collaborating on each other’s websites. It’s also important to be fostering this exchange of opinion at a time when a lot of papers don’t have their sites set in stone. I think a lot (at least from my view) are still trying to figure out what the best way of formatting their online content is.
The Seesmic plugin looks great, but out of all the sites they list as using it I couldn’t find one that actually had a video comment that worked. None of the videos loaded. (Do you have any working examples of it Daniel?). Off to go pitch the plugin to the Editors…
I would love for site-to-site critiquing. I honestly have little idea of what I’m doing… I just love WordPress and journalism, and I put the two together at my University.
FYI, I just installed a Facebook connect plugin and I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever thought of- the plugin (1) lets Facebook users comment using their accounts and then (2) it comes up in their newsfeed, bringing more traffic to the site from the ideal viewer- fellow students. I highly recommend this to other WP-powered sites.