CoPress

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

In the “Townsquare” session, led by Arvil Ward and Anthony Pesce, the Populous Project was demoed. The Populous Project is a Knight News Challenge funded project that is working to build a content management system for student news publications based on Django.

Among the technologies demoed were the Digital Newsroom, which is a system of tracking story assignments that is currently implemented by the UCLA Daily Bruin. As Arvil said, “this provides a communication tool with the ability to manage the newsroom online.” It has threaded commenting for story ideas and notifications for when an assignment changes. Interestingly, it is not yet integrated with the content management system and how closely it will be able to manage content is to be determined.

Also demoed was Campuswalk, UCLA’s project to create a unified, cohesive, and searchable campus gateway. The current system is not up to the task in the eyes of Arvil and they’re working hard at building something better. It will make professor reviews, housing reviews, and swapping books more social.

The final piece of the demo was Localresearch.com. Arvil described this as focused marketing to small local businesses that seeks to reinvent the decreasing value of print advertising. They provide a database of local business listings and for $45 a month they work with companies to create more full-featured listings that include links to social media, reviews, and more.