In “Defining What’s Good in Digital Journalism,” Mark Briggs led a panel discussion featuring Bryan Murley from the Center for Innovation in College Media, James Wickett from impactnews.com and Gary Chapman from the University of Texas at Austin.

The session began with the showing of a video produced by Lexington Herald-Leader photographer Charles Bertram about a one-legged Little League player. Despite simple production values, the piece garnered an unprecedented amount of page views after going viral. According to the panelists, the story is a prime example of what is good in digital journalism and its success was incumbent to that.

Murley summed up the general feeling of the session with a quote:

“Digital media is quantity or quality.… As long as you have the facts right and you have a good story to tell — that’s quality on the Internet”

Afterward, the panelists went on to touch on a few topics, among them:

• Weighing analytics metrics against what “your gut tells you is more valuable”
• Audience — not news organizations — defining credibility
• The more-than-basic skills necessary to land a job in this climate; five text clips aren’t going to cut it
• The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get

Briggs’ presentation is available here.

In the “Multimedia Storytelling” session, presented by photojournalist David Stephenson, the Canon 5D Mark II was showcased as a tool to solve the problems faced by today’s visual journalists. To that end, Stephenson began the session by highlighting his 5D Mark II tip sheet, later showcasing pieces produced by his team at kentucky.com. Included herein are some notable quotes and notes from the 50-minute presentation.

On tripods: if you purchase equipment that you are comfortable with and that you like, you will be much more likely to use it.<

On a multi-capable tool:

The fact that I don’t have to go to an assignment with a video camera on one side and a still camera on the other means a lot to mean and it means a lot to my back.”

On “serving two masters:”

“You can serve your Web publication and your print publication with one camera.”

On drawbacks to the 5D Mark II: audio and autofocus are not on-par with a dedicated video camera.

On making the most of your equipment’s shortfalls:

“Most journalists have a litle MacGuyver in them… They find a way to make things work.”

On music: it’s a hotly debated topic, but when deemed appropriate, royalty-free is the way to go. Specifically, Stephenson often uses Incompetech.

Finally, Stephenson on his shooting style with this camera:

“They were still images, but they just happened to move.”

It’s the little things…

You’ve invariably heard the phrase turned before, whether speaking about life’s pleasures or why a product is popular. Often, it applies to products on the Web; “It’s the little things that make Gmail so good,” or, “Why does WordPress dominate as self-hosted software? It’s the little things.”

And that it is. WordPress is quickly becoming the go-to solution for those who want ease of operation combined with a full feature set and nearly limitless extendability. The software’s popularity, however, is also part of its downfall: because of an enthusiastic community that pumps out new themes every day, oftentimes the product’s back end capabilities do not match up with what is seen by the audience.

Luckily, it’s generally easy to modify themes that were not necessarily well thought out or executed. Whether by enabling a plugin or hacking some PHP, college news organizations can greatly increase the presentation and functionality of their sites with a minimum of time and effort. Before doing so, however, one needs ideas.

Thus, I present to you a number of small improvements for your WordPress-based news site (in no particular order).

• Multiple authors: While many publications note contributors within a story’s body copy, this one is a no-brainer for online presentation — especially because it can be achieved with nothing other than a plugin. Co-Authors Plus was modified from an existing plugin by Mo Jangda with the needs of college news organizations in mind.
• Author information/contact: With the social media revolution in full swing, news staff are no longer relegated to being a faceless name on newsprint. People maintain online personas on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, and you should highlight them to increase audience interaction. Listening to your users, after all, can only lead to improved content.
• AP date/time: An important but often overlooked feature of most (if not all) news Web sites is display of when content was updated. While there are PHP functions for displaying date and time in almost any format, theme designers have their own preferences. True to journalistic form, why not stick with the industry standard of displaying things in AP style? There’s even a plugin to assist you in doing so.
• Pull quotes: For designers users especially, the linear presentation of news content online is typically neither stimulating, attractive or extra informative. An easy way to help remedy this is to add a custom CSS style for pull quotes, allowing for emphasis through means other than those that can be added via pictures or standard HTML markup.
• Proper cutline/credit styling: Speaking of pictures, it’s an unfortunate reality that visual journalists often receive the short end of the stick when it comes to having their work integrated with a story. Whether their cutlines or credits are truncated or omitted, any loss of information degrades your coverage. Instead of allowing this to happen, make an effort to find a way to properly style cutlines and credits.
• Topical landing pages: We’ve discussed it before with regard to wikis, but topics on your site — whether based on a category, tag or otherwise — should have  landing pages that are logical to navigate and styled nicely. An unfortunate side effect of WordPress’ roots as a blogging engine make it so that many theme designers fail to account for anything but chronologically sorted excerpts of posts, but anyone who wants to get their feet wet with PHP should be able to overcome this.
• Identified link types: One Web trend that came about several years ago was the visual styling of links based on target or filetype. While the practice failed to endure, its use could be beneficial to your users if your content includes many links to sources (as it should). Best of all, the styling — while a simple procedure — can be achieved even more easily with some simple plugins.
• Print stylesheets: Some might consider it ironic in this day and age, but there are still times at which readers will want to print something from your Web site. To prepare for such a case, it’s a relatively easy exercise to create a stylesheet that will nicely present your content when output to a printer. Correcting for this eventuality will make sure your hard work is appreciated to the fullest extent regardless of what medium is used for transmission.

Perhaps the best thing about improvements like these is that they can be implemented one by one when your resources allow or when you are motivated to tinker a bit. The little things aren’t deal breakers for users if they don’t exist, but their presence will make visiting your organization’s site that much better.

Do you have additions to this list or have you taken the opportunity to enact some of these changes? If so, sound off in the comments or head to the forum!

CM Life

Brian Manzullo, Editor in Chief

After a summer-long process of transitioning from College Publisher and building a new design, Central Michigan Life launched its new WordPress-powered site on Aug. 20. One aim for this site was to create a more simple, clutter-free look that was visually appealing but also straightforward enough that readers don’t have headaches trying to find what they’re looking for. Our photos and social networking elements are more prominent and the different story subtopics that people might want to follow exclusively are visible (e.g. football, money). Most of all, though, we wanted freedom with our Web site. We have control of all advertising and all of the different elements on our site, meaning we can try new things quite easily if we wish. My hope, however, is that we don’t stop with the makeover. The real goal is to keep readers engaged with our online presentation, whether it is through live chats, Twitter, Facebook or story comments. We feel that we can better connect them to issues that matter, and we will work hard to utilize our site in doing so.

Daily Titan

Chris Ullyott, Webmaster

We launched our new Web site, www.dailytitan.com, on Aug. 10. It was a task to learn WordPress from the very beginning but, in short order, we began to see how the theming system worked and were able to successfully make fundamental changes to the software. With the help of the nice people at CoPress, brilliant plugins, and some elbow grease, we were able to customize our WordPress theme to suit the specific needs of both our editorial and advertising staffs. Now we have a much more attractive, intuitive, and useful online presence.

The biggest advantage over our previous system is the amount control we now have over both the visual and technical aspects of our site. We now have complete control over:

• Roles and privileges of staff user accounts for a better workflow
• Sizes and placement of advertisements for more revenue opportunities
• Distribution of content with RSS feeds, accommodating for breaking news
• Integration of third-party services like Twitter and ISSUU
• Linkage throughout the site for a better user experience

We can see major opportunities for university media using open-source content management systems. The amount of control one can have takes a little getting used to! However, WordPress is fairly simple to learn, and any committed media student can quickly learn the HTML, CSS and PHP coding techniques needed to make improvements to a WordPress theme without re-inventing the wheel.

Currently on our site, we’re particularly proud of the “stay connected” widget bar we added, which lets users immediately connect with our social media presence and use other distribution channels like podcasts and email subscriptions. We also can’t get over how cool our new media kit is, courtesy of our talented design staff. The Issuu viewer makes the presentation sing.

The custom navigation bars proved a fruitful project for us as well. By rewriting the header navigation code with plain old HTML and CSS, we strictly separated editorial from advertising content and gave special pages more appropriate homes. Users clearly now have it easier in finding what they need. Since we launched, our bounce rate has dropped a whopping 30%.

We have already received very positive response both in online traffic and personal comments. We look forward to seeing what our experience will be like once the school semester starts this year. New additions we’re working on include section forums, dining and housing guides, creative online use of editorial columns, and integration of a gutsy “furlough edition”…

Thanks to CoPress for all of your help. Let’s show our campuses what news is really all about!

UA Traveler

Jon Schleuss, Web Developer

It’s better to teach someone a skill rather than do a task for them. Our move to WordPress allows for more control by the individual students rather than lumping the responsibilities onto one Web guru. Choosing the Gazette theme, we followed similar steps taken by the Mustang Daily and implemented a custom header logo different from our print edition to make a distinction between our products. This year’s staff includes students focused on the print edition and others focused on the Web. That’s not to say the content doesn’t intermingle, however. We’re now prioritizing content based on the delivery method. Moving forward, we’re strategizing an innovation of Web advertising and diversifying our Web delivery methods. Expect a mobile version of our new site and one that’s delivered in an e-mail sent each week.

Guests: Max Cutler and Robert Baskin

Summary: A question and answer session with Courant News, an open source Django CMS for student news organizations. The idea to build a Django CMS specifically for student newspapers came from discussion at an Ivy League news conference last April when people saw that no one had a CMS with the feature set they needed. Max and Robert, along with Paul O’Shannessy, decided they needed to fill the void. The conversation covers a bit of the history, and then goes into the specifics of the CMS. For more information, please check out or add to the wiki show notes.

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was light this week, with Greg posting the ever-relevant question(s):

If you could completely restructure your news organization to better to adapt to the new world of journalism, how would you do it?

• What would the process be?
• How would individual roles change?
• What would physically change in your newsroom?
• Would your CMS change?
• Would your business model change?

While there has been but one respondent thus far, it was the venerable Pat Thornton who argued that newsrooms need not be physical. Do you have thoughts? Drop by.

On the blog, we had three great posts with ten insightful comments (to date). The most recent content, a missive from Andrew Spittle about the Whitman Pioneer‘s efforts to push Twitter, prompted a detailed response from Joe Moore about his use last night of CoverItLive:

I think CoverItLive would also be good for breaking news that’s unexpected- it allows for multiple “producers” to post. This could be used in a lockdown-type of situation where journalists are located all over, and each have a different story to tell.

If you haven’t already, go check that out.

Finally, we’ve made some good progress this week on our still-fledgling wiki. Will Van Wazer, online editor at the Tulane Hillabaloo, added the story of their WordPress-powered site (with some very good plugin recommendations); Jackie Hai of Amherst Wire added a number of WordPress themes to the directory; and our own Joey Baker did some work to the WordPress plugins page.

As with any wiki, your contributions to ours would be very much appreciated and of use to the whole community. Share the love!

In the News

Last but not least, here are some links from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Web site wish list? Here’s a start – Mark Briggs outlined something very similar to what we’ve done previously. (If you’re feeling ambitious, start porting features to our space for it on the wiki.)
• The Bad, Good And Ugly Advice Given To Journalists On SEO – Rachelle Money’s look at the journalist-aimed cries of “SEO!”
• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable – A long but oh-so-worthwhile piece from Clay Shirky.
• Old Growth Media and the Future of News – Steven Johnson’s speech from SXWXi, which ended Tuesday.

Lastly, a quick one:

• Chicago Tribune masthead, Thursday, March 19

Have a great weekend!

Guests: Anthony Pesce, Miles Skorpen, Joseph Agreda, Max Cutler, Justin Myers, Rick Martinez, David Estes

Summary: Excerpts from a roundtable discussion among student developers from across the country regarding Django-based content management systems (and a Ruby On Rails system from FIUSM). The entire conversation is available as a MP3 download.

Links:

• Populous Project
• Ochs
• Nameless CMS
• The Maneater
• Gazjango

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Got feedback or ideas for an upcoming podcast? Let us know!

In the process of writing a blog post, Emily was hoping for someone with good knowledge of our project to explain to her the benefits of CoPress versus College Publisher. This post is my response.

Before I being outlining some of our organization’s tenets, however, I must address the potential danger of publicly replying to a query like this. I feel it is important to note that CoPress, despite being in a position to help sway some (or many) publications from using the services of College Publisher, is not explicitly aimed at doing so.

This is because our strategy and focus are fundamentally different. Above all, CoPress seeks to spread knowledge and easily accessible resources—whether or not we turn a profit. We feel it is safe to say that the same ideology is not held at College Publisher.

That aside, there are several reasons why CoPress will become an invaluable resource and, indeed, an eventual alternative to many systems currently being utilized by college media outlets. Not the least among these is the fact that our organization is, at this juncture, entirely student-driven.

In addition to offering the benefits of large-scale collaboration, this demonstrates and ensures that what we produce is done with passion and because of immediate need—with real-world scenarios in mind. We know what happens in college media because we are college media, and that is something that will continually strengthen as the network grows.

Similarly, a key component to the success of CoPress is the fact that everything we recommend, support and build is open source. Like students creating a network for college news organizations, open source software contributors make tools based on community need as well as personal passion.

They strive for continual growth as individuals and as part of a greater body, and in doing so they succeed in offering top-notch systems that rival and often overcome proprietary offerings. Open source software offers honesty and transparency, and we feel these are principles to live by as a progressive technological network.

Our belief in the open source ideology extends to the organization itself, thus we have made a concerted effort to create transparency within CoPress and its operations. This is possible because we lack a profit motivation, but moreover it encourages involvement at any and every level.

If someone is interested in involving themselves heavily with what we do, they are welcome; if one just wants to download a few plugins or find out how to get the most out of their College Publisher site, that’s OK too. CoPress wants to empower its constituents so that they can take control of their content, and organizational transparency goes a long way toward helping achieve this goal.

To briefly recap, the benefits of CoPress versus College Publisher are fourfold:

• No profit motivation
• Student-driven
• Open source
• Transparent

Simple as they may be, these few items will drive us to success. CoPress will prevail.

Do you want to get involved in a college media revolution? Get in touch via e-mail, our Google Group, Twitter, Facebook or any of our personal sites listed at right.