Full audio of the hour-long call can be heard below.

During the debrief, each team member wrapped up a significant takeaway that they’ve gained from being involved with CoPress:

Andrew Spittle, Hosting Director:

“I think the biggest takeaway I’ve found both from working with CoPress and also starting out as the web staff at the Whitman Pioneer is that a lot of things seem sort of intimidating at first … the best thing to do for yourself as an individual and the news organization you work for is to just jump in.”

Lauren Rabaino, former Creative Director:

“The power of collaboration… Aside from the annual conferences we go to, newspaper editors we meet once, we brainstorm and then never see each other again. CoPress provided the platform for us to actually continue that interaction beyond the face-to-face meeting. The community we built was something that didn’t exist before and I think it will continue to exist after CoPress the organization has gone away.”

Albert Sun, Hosting Associate:

“This stuff, it’s not that hard. The best way to go and try something … We didn’t come in just knowing a huge ton about what we’re doing now. It was just a learning process through the same thing, the same sort of process anyone can go through. Don’t be afraid.”

Will Davis, Hosting Associate:

“What I’m really proud of is just really being able to delv into projects and set my sights on finer problems … and really take time to delv into that problem and solve it. For example, Courier was the answer to a problem we had on our website and it was something that CoPress allowed me to do.”

Daniel Bachhuber, Executive Director:

“What I most wanted to see come out of CoPress and what I’m most happy to see happening now is people taking initiative, but then having this community discussion/place/area where people can convene and share knowledge … I’m happy to see that starting to happen finally. That’s what it was all about in the beginning.”

Why is CoPress shutting down?

The question that we received on Twitter and that was echoed in the call boiled down to the cut and dry: Why is CoPress shutting down now?

As Daniel noted, the honest truth of why we’re closing down operations is because the money-making side of our business wasn’t covering the effort we were putting into it and the business wasn’t scaling.

We encourage innovation. We encourage experimentation. We believe that the best way to learn how to code is to build something and break it — and CoPress would have your back to save it. While it’s a great philosophy, it’s not a business model.

“As it turned out, we were answering a lot of stuff for free, meaning we weren’t billing people for it,” Daniel said. “The way we structured our turnkey hosting is that you get full access to the server, you get full access to the software, install whatever plugins you want, and break the site as much as possible and we’ll answer your questions and help you bring the site back up. Our pricing strcuture didn’t reflect that offering in a logical way.”

What services will fill the void?

We’ve learned that the biggest challenge in moving to open source software is how to transition site data and archives from proprietary software. After that process is complete, organizations have the ability to be largely independent.

One option is to open source our transition process and allow other entrepreneurs to sell those services as independent contractors to set up newspapers on third-party hosting.

Even with CoPress’ operations terminated, we’d like to see the network that formed around CoPress continue to rally for innovation. Whether that looks like a Google Group, weekly conference call, forum, etc. is yet to be determined.

It’s time for the community to take ownership.

Nando

First up Max gave us an update on where development on Nando stands. As Lauren mentioned last week, Nando is the administrative side of the Courant News CMS. Max and Rob Baskin will be developing the templates for the interface and I’ll be working with them on designing the user interface and experience. The project is in the early stages right now but wireframes for the interface will be released soon so stay tuned to the Google Group for updates.

Edit Flow

Daniel also recapped what will be happening with Edit Flow over break. Work will be ramping up on version 0.3 of the plugin which will include more granular control over email notifications and user groups. Other features include some bug fixes as well as visualizing posts through a calendar-like interface.

Courier

Will Davis also filled us in on some of the work that will be done on Courier, his plugin for better email notifications. Courier already has support for custom templates and will be gaining further subscription options. The plugin update should be released before the end of break so stay tuned for updates.

Tar Heel iPhone app

Finally, Andrew Dunn talked a bit about The Daily Tar Heel’s iPhone app that he announced on Thursday. The app includes their Housing Guide as well as all the news, classifieds, and radio that you’d expect. It also has a feature that Andrew talked about on the call: a drink specials mini-app.

To hear more about all of the above projects listen to the full audio below.

We want to extend a very special congratulations to the College Heights Herald, winner of the best Publication Website among large schools.

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.

He said that while a few years ago Google was the main traffic source for his site it has now become Twitter and Facebook. He says that “you need to speak to people where they already are” and that the top “neighborhoods” for online activity are now those sites.

Next up was Twitter and a quick introduction to how it works and how to use it. Andy mentioned that you need a solid vision of what you’ll be using Twitter for before you just start posting tweets. There needs to be a purpose in order for it to be effective for your news organization.

Quote URL was mentioned and looks like an interesting tool for aggregating conversations or reactions to a specific topic. You’re able to enter in links to various tweets and then Quote URL aggregates them into a central list.

Toward the end the subject moved to general site comments. Andy said that if you don’t yet have comments “it’s worth having a conversation about whether you want and/or need comments.” He cited the concerns over turning the comments list into a string of irrelevant posts. The takeaway: make sure that people will be using the comments and that you have a clear purpose for wanting them.

Much of the general conversation centered around how to make all of these tools as frictionless as possible. For both Facebook and Twitter tools that turned your stream into an automatic RSS list dump were brought up as great and efficient solutions.

After the demo some asked how much standard English conventions matter on Twitter. Andy’s response was that it really depends on your audience and purpose. If they won’t be bothered then it won’t be as large of a concern. However, there need to be some parameters and guidelines set beforehand so that everyone is clear going into the tool.

This past Thursday we ran the first of what will become a bi-weekly series. We’re calling it “Hacking the Student Newsroom.” Each session will lead you through a specific skill related to WordPress and college news that you can implement immediately. We’ll also do our best to record the workshops for those who can’t make the scheduled date. This week’s session was on setting up a sandbox in WordPress.

A sandbox provides a great test environment where you can experiment with both ideas and code without having to worry about breaking things. Your Web staff and any others that are interested in learning about WordPress can also use a sandbox to teach themselves some great new skills.

We covered everything from creating a subdomain for a sandbox to the proper way to configure your development version of WordPress. For those who want a test site to test edits that will be made to the production site, we went over how to transfer your theme and plugin files so that everything is as similar as possible.

On the wiki, we started a cheat sheet of how to set up your own sandbox. We’ll be adding to it, and you’re more than welcome to contribute as well.

Why a sandbox?

The advantage to having a sandbox is that these sites can be a great way to test out those ideas that you’re not sure quite how to implement or design. They provide a great test environment where you can experiment with ideas and code without having to worry about breaking things. Your Web staff and any others that are interested in learning about WordPress can use it to teach themselves some great new skills.

Thursday’s session is open to everyone, and we’ll be leading you through from start to finish on how to set up a demo instance of WordPress. We’ll show you how to create a subdomain on which to install WordPress plus lead you through each step of configuring the software. From creating the database to installing themes and plugins or getting some dummy content in there, we’ll cover it all.

If there’s time left over, we’ll also be open to discussing any and all questions you may have.

This is a great opportunity if you’ve ever wanted someone to show you how to start hacking a WordPress theme. CoPress team members will be there to answer your questions in real time — no more clogging up your inbox!

Sound interesting? Head on over to the Facebook event to RSVP and we’ll get the details out to you. Let’s start hacking!

First, an overview

We’ve used Edit Flow’s ability to define custom status to create a 5 step online workflow that, for us, works quite well. Stories go from reporter drafts to pending the review of an editor. From there the editor can send it back to the reporter if the story needs further review or they can send it along to the copy editors. Our two copy editors then each take a look at the article and the article goes from “Copy Edited Once” to “Ready for Web.”

As soon as things are marked as ready for publication, our Web editor uploads any graphics for the piece and makes sure that the article is categorized and tagged properly. Once this is done, things are published online on a rolling basis.

The editorial team is sent an email at each point in this workflow so that everyone is in the loop regarding what is going on.

Making Edit Flow better

The recent update to the plugin has made it exponentially more useful for our student newsroom. While it now encompasses the core functions that the Pioneer needs for an online workflow, there are still some things that would be nice to have:

• User Groups - It would be great to have the ability to categorize reporters and editors into section-specific user groups. This would largely be a way to replicate the existing staff structure but would go along well with…
• Fine-Tuned Email Controls - Right now, every editorial staff member receives the emails for all articles. This can be a bit overwhelming when 20 or 30 articles are going through the editorial process. What would be great would be to define who receives emails for each user group. In other words we could create a “Sports” user group where only members of that group received emails about articles in that section.
• An “At-A-Glance” View - While the standard list of posts in WordPress is great for most needs, it would be wonderful to have a page within the dashboard where one could see more detailed information on where things stand for the week.
• Photography and Illustration Assignments - The one thing that we have not transferred to online with this workflow is story assignments. This is largely because right now we don’t have a great way to track photo and illustration assignments within WordPress. If this were to be incorporated into Edit Flow then we could have a really killer online workflow.

Ultimately, the first 5 weeks with Edit Flow have been a wonderful boon to our online workflow. Whereas last year we were spending anywhere from 3 to 6 hours uploading content every week, we are now spending less than an hour to put together all the photos and illustrations and publish everything online. Quite simply, it has allowed us to direct focus elsewhere. Because of the time saved with Edit Flow we now have some much larger projects in the works that will be coming soon.

If you’re not familiar with Jackie and the work of the Amherst Wire then it’s definitely worth checking out the work they have done for special features.

Several of the points that came out of the session that are worth repeating:

• Plan in advance: From creating wireframes to deciding what you’re going to include it’s important to start from a solid base to prevent headaches down the road.
• Keep the design fresh: If your news organization is going to go through the effort of producing special content then make the online presentation reflective of how much work went into the section. Don’t just recycle a traditional story template; create something that highlights the content and topic of the feature. Think of feature sections as a way for your online staff to showcase what they can do.
• Showcase what’s important: If you’re producing multimedia content along with print stories for your feature make sure you emphasize these in an attractive way. Simply providing links to videos, photo galleries, interviews, etc. is not enough. Frequently multimedia aspects are the most eye-catching aspects of a story so it doesn’t serve your news organization very well to hide them away behind simple text links.
• Bring in extras: If you’re working at a small news organization and covering a much larger story don’t feel like you have to cover every aspect of it in your feature. As the saying goes: do what you do best and link to the rest. This will allow your staff to focus their time and energy on producing and designing stellar content for what you can cover.

There’s much more in the session which is embedded above with all the audio as well so check that out.

The session concluded this summer’s Web Design Camp but there will most likely be a session toward the end of the summer that covers what people accomplished with their summer projects. While the sessions are over we are still here to answer any and all design-related questions that come up during your work. If you’re stuck and need help head over to the forum or shoot an email to us.