CoPress » Daniel Bachhuber

Public debrief at a glance

Daniel Bachhuber — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:19:08 +0000

CoPress ended in the same way it started: a conference call. Wednesday evening, roughly 20 people joined us on a final debrief call as we explained our decision to terminate operations.

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.

CoPress is closing down operations

Daniel Bachhuber — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:32:38 +0000

After over a year of offering a unique approach to hosting and support for student news organizations, the CoPress team has decided to close down its operations. The decision to do so has been tremendously difficult, but we’ve come to realize that now is the best time for this to happen.

First, we’ve struggled with making our business financially viable while at the same time offering prices that reflect an understanding of the financial situation many student news organizations are in. This is even more apparent in that we’ve had to change our pricing structure twice in the past months.

Secondly, without the revenue to pay our team full-time, we’ve become dependent on the generosity of committed students to offer our 24/7 support. In addition, the nature of our hosting and support business is such that we encouraged publications to tinker as much as they want with their site. What this ultimately meant was a rapidly growing number of emails for us to answer. Needless to say, it’s become difficult to make this scale in any meaningful way. Our eventual goal was to build software for distributed support, but the resources required for hosting and support severely challenged our ability to make headway on the project.

By now, we’ve contacted all of our existing clients about this decision. Because of the way we’ve structured our Managed Hosting since August 2008, the transition for most will be as easy as changing the credit cards on their third-party hosting account. We intend to migrate the other sites from the servers we maintain to third-party hosting services like WebFaction and Slicehost.

Going forward, we also intend to reopen our list serv as a place for the community to ask and respond to more general support questions. We also hope to put together a list of WordPress consultants you can hire to help with more technical issues or extended projects. Lastly, we’re going to open source our database conversion script which makes it a lot easier to get archives of various form into WordPress. If you’re interested in being on this list of consultants, please contact us.

We think that story of CoPress highlights some of the most important needs for college media, and the news industry in general. Primarily, this is a willingness to experiment, iterate, and try new things. As such, we’d plan to post in the coming weeks as much as we can about what we learned along the way with the sincere hope of teaching what lessons we can to the next round of entrepreneurs.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments or contact us privately. We’ll be holding a public Skype conference call that anyone is welcome to join sometime early next week.

On behalf of everyone on the team, I’d like to thank everyone for the support of our efforts. We couldn’t have accomplished any of this without the tireless contributions of too many awesome people in the community to count.

Daniel Bachhuber
Executive Director, CoPress
daniel@copress.org

We’re making distributed collaboration the phrase for 2010

Daniel Bachhuber — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:02:31 +0000

First, a bit of history. CoPress started in August 2008 when I wrote a post calling for an open source alternative to the dominant proprietary content management system in the student media market. Greg Linch and I had our first conversation right before my flight down to San Francisco for WordCamp 08, and the discussion snowballed from there. Originally, my goal was to move the Oregon Daily Emerald to an open source, flexible content management system that I could hack at and experiment with. The role of CoPress was to provide a network of web developers at student news organizations that I could collaborate and share ideas with, as well as be a resource for whomever came after me.

This idea for a distributed network of support is still a very real dream for us but we soon realized, thanks to Bryan Murley, that there were intermediate steps we needed to cover first. Most importantly, this included supporting student news organizations with a turnkey hosting solution they could experiment with. We started our Managed Hosting program in January 2009 and launched our first site, The Whit, shortly after that.

Since then, we’ve migrated and launched more than 35 WordPress-powered websites, including The Red and Black, the UWM Post, and the QU Chronicle in the past week. It’s a learning experience for us as much as it is for the news organizations with which we work. For instance, as the largest site we’ve worked with thus far, The Red and Black has offered unique performance challenges that I had the fortune to work on during my wifi-enabled flight back from our team meetup in Philly this weekend.

As a part of our goal to increase the number of opportunities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing in 2009, we also held regular workshops throughout the summer and fall, published reports from the field on our blog, started development on the Edit Flow Project, and connected with the network at conferences including BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly and ACP/CMA in Austin.

We’re committed to executing our vision for the future of journalism. Our original philosophy for hosting and support, though, involved a one-size-fits-all solution that we’ve come to realize isn’t the best long-term approach to scaling our efforts. As such, we’ve relaunched our hosting and support plan again (we did it once in August too) with four tiers of service: basic, standard, full, and premium. Based on our experiences of the last year, we think the offerings better reflect the needs of different types and sizes of publications; for some, it’s fine if theme changes are made on the production site whereas others should have a development sandbox and deployment process. The new prices will be applicable to all of our new sign-ups, and existing publications will be guaranteed their current prices through the end of their invoice plus three months.

For the spring and into the summer, our goal is to ramp up the collaboration opportunities. That’s the true value of having a well-connected network of student webmasters and developers.

Let’s do it.

Mark Johnson: Failing faster

Daniel Bachhuber — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:45:17 +0000

For today and Friday, I’m hanging out at the 2nd annual ICONN conference in Knoxville. ICONN is a “set of individuals, academic programs and professional organizations dedicated connecting student web journalists and campus news websites and to advancing education in web and online journalism” and, from what I know, has a very similar set of goals as CoPress. The first talk at ICONN this year was Mark Johnson on failing faster.

“We have to accept the fact that what we have done as journalists and journalism educators for the last fifty years doesn’t work anymore.” Mark is currently working on completely rebuilding his program from the ground up. During his career, he’s failed at certain things including college (twice), 1st job (fired 3 weeks in), freelancing, the last job before coming to academia, and changing college curriculum.

For college, his dream out of high school was to go to Northwestern University. He did everything he thought he needed to do to get in. When he was rejected, he ended up going to Syracuse instead. There he realized that, instead of writing for a career, he wanted to be a photojournalist.

At the university, Mark teaches three courses a semester and his boss gives him the freedom to do whatever he wants. He failed at getting the entire curriculum changed, but that failure led to this opportunity and inspired some of his colleagues to do radically new things in their courses as well. “If you’re doing the same thing as you did last year, you’re doing it wrong. You need to try something new.”

Embrace failure, Mark says. The standard career ladder for a journalist is completely broken. The New York Times is a billion dollars in debt. Innovation, however, is “how new ideas address issues.” What this means for reporting is to look at the essence of the story, and figure out the best way to tell the story. That’s what’s more important right now. Sometimes you need articles in column inches, but other times you may need maps or infographics.

Norm Larson was a chemist in the 1950′s. The air force needed a chemical to repel water on pipes in their rockets. He failed 39 times before he got it right. On the 40th try, he had a working product that eventually became WD-40.

There’s a difference between innovating and creating. Innovating is trying new things. Instead of covering the council meeting and writing about it, bring an audio recorder, a couple of microphones, and try to tell the whole story without using your own voice. That’s innovating. Creating, however, is about developing a routine that makes you prepared to produce.

Technique isn’t creativity. The people who know all of the ins and outs of Photoshop, but can only produce within the scope of the assignment aren’t creative enough.

Google Living Stories, Google Analytics and BCNI Philly

Daniel Bachhuber — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:18:16 +0000

It’s been a couple of weeks since our last link roundup, but that doesn’t mean there’s been any shortage of news.

Among all of the announcements made by Google this week, Living Stories struck me as by far the most interesting. This has serious implications the near future of news. Why? Because it’s experimenting with a few important concepts: the topic as the base element of journalism, time as a perspective on a topic, filtering to learn more about specific elements of a story, and personalization to tailor the learning experience. Currently there’s no functionality for users to participate in the production of the page, a key component of the news wiki idea I’ve written about before, but what they have is a very cool start. Paul Bradshaw has more. (tks Brian Manzullo!)
BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly, aka the second annual mecca for innovation in journalism, will be at Temple University on April 24th, 2010.
On PBS MediaShift, Roland Legrand covers the biggest reasons why young journalists are the most risk-averse in the newsroom. The most astute observation: the younger journalists in a newsroom could have higher opportunity costs in regards to exploration and experimentation because the traditional method of getting ahead in a career is to “acquire the skills and emulate the behaviors displayed by the older leaders within that environment.”
Google Analytics recently added 8 new features. Analytics intelligence and custom alerts look mighty interesting.
Andrew Spittle built another at-a-glance visualization for the Whitman Pioneer: Grid View.
On College Media Matters, Dan Reimold has an exclusive interview with the founders of the College News Network. They’re bootstrapping a content-sharing network to fill the void of UWIRE and hope to eventually partner with a publication in every state.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

Courier updates coming, and Harvard Crimson launch

Daniel Bachhuber — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:46:28 +0000