It’s no secret that newspapers lag far behind in the Internet revolution. Or, as online journalism pioneer Rob Curley said at SND Vegas 2008, “You can’t come to a gunfight with knives … We need guns and heavy artillery.”

Student newspapers, at colleges and universities, fare no better than the pros. In fact, they’re generally worse off. Few student publications have much technical talent at all on staff, and what they do have is spread very thin. Most are stuck with bad content management systems — either clunky commercial products or simple blogging tools — that take much hacking and “programming” to fit the complex needs of a modern news Web site. As a result, developers spend inordinate effort fighting their CMSes, leaving minimal time to innovate on top of the platforms or build engaging online material. To date, most publications have struggled individually to reinvent the wheel.

We’re hoping to change all of that.

With a team of students and online journalists from a number of different publications, we’ll collaboratively gather the means to overcome these technical barriers. We’ll reinvent the wheel just once or twice, then distribute the plans to any college paper, so that many more can easily obtain a robust, independent and profitable digital publication.

We believe it will take more than just a piece of software to achieve this lofty goal. It demands a full-fledged technical ecosystem for student newspapers. People working together for mutual aims.

At the moment, the CoPress project has three “branches”:

1. Connect student developers and online editors across the country, fostering a tech community to collaborate and provide support.
2. Build and share code that makes for an “out of the box” Web presence. It should require as little time and technical expertise to set up as possible, but allow for customization and future extensibility.
3. Write (and record) easy-to-understand documentation and report best practices, so that even mere mortals — not just coding gods — have a guide to running great sites.

We’re just getting started down this road. In the months ahead, we’ll blog about our research, the issues we face and the progress of the project as these branches grow.

But we’ll need your help to succeed; we view this as a collective undertaking. If you’re an online editor or developer, and want to get introduced right away, please use our contact form to get in touch. Otherwise, we highly encourage you use our signup form to be automatically put on the mailing list for announcements, etc. Shortly, we’ll be sending out a totally optional survey to get a better sense of the state of digital student newsrooms. Your contributions will be vital to making this endeavour a success.

So here’s to bringing out the big guns. Onward!