CoPress

We’re changing things up! Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared – Joey Baker: Video sharing sites treat your copyright differently. Summary: the best sites are the most restrictive.
• 4 productive summer projects for j-students – Daniel Bachhuber: Proactive summer J project ideas from @laurenmichell. It would be sweet to see experimentation with the news wiki.
• 10 Ideas I Want to Try at the Newspaper Where I Work – Daniel Bachhuber: I dig the ideas Will has for community relationship management, as well as using data and APIs well.
• Steve Ballmer, Microsoft – The Future of Microsoft, The Future of Technology – Daniel Bachhuber: Steve Balmer makes a case for entrepreneurship in the economic downturn.

The most notable news of the week, however, is that Greg taught me the stylistic considerations of headlines and subheads.

Activity around the network

In the forum this week, Joey asked the crowd about their editorial workflows within WordPress. Lauren Rabaino left the lengthiest answer, explaining in detail how the Mustang Daily is currently operating their web-first workflow. Writers upload their documents into WordPress, and then the editing happens within the CMS. The information about these interactions is managed in a Google Spreadsheet.

The wiki is where the real party was happening this week. Related to the Mustang Daily’s workflow, a few of us have been sketching out a spec to build functionality into WordPress to enhance editorial workflows, and enable newspapers like the Mustang Daily to conduct their entire operation within the CMS instead of having to add a Google Spreadsheet on top. These ideas have materialized in the form of the Edit Flow Project. Look for a more detail post on the project’s goals next week.

Also on the wiki, Lauren Rabaino has been doing a stellar job adding more student news organizations to the Network directory. Late last night I had an “aha!” moment when I figured out you could apply meta data of a sort to these directory pages. The result? Sorting by CMS, location, or type of publication. As we add more information to the system, hopefully with your help, this will become an increasingly useful database of what student news organizations across the nation are doing with their web technology. If your organization is missing, please feel free to add it by following the criteria at the top of the Network page.