We want to find an answer.

For those of us in the college media industry, understanding how students find, share and consume news is an important part of reaching that audience.

There are general assumptions, of course. We all say that print is dying among generation y and that students get their news online. But how is it being replaced?

Even among the CoPress team there’s huge diversity in the way news is consumed, from Daniel Bachhuber, who reads 250 RSS feeds a day, to Will Davis who reads three broadsheet newspapers a day. We want to find out what goes on beyond our circle so that you — the college editors, reporters and developers — can better structure your news for that audience.

So we’re asking for your help. We’ve compiled a survey of questions about the way college students consume news, and we need you to spread the word. Pass this link along to your classmates, retweet it, blog about it. It won’t be a scientific survey, but it will tell us more about our community and the students associated with our community.

Our goal is to get 200 responses in two weeks and we can’t do it alone. Have at it and keep an eye on the blog over the next few weeks where we will publish the findings.

…or click here to fill out the survey

Yesterday Nielsen reported that video streaming online is up 17 percent for November, but of the top online brands for video, not one was a news site. While this statistic is not necessarily surprising, it’s just another reminder that news has room for improvement for online video — and student news orgs are no exception.

Video kit on less than $200

The basics for high-quality video production don’t have to leave you broke. Fairly high quality video can be produced with inexpensive products. A basic video kit can be put together for less than $200.

1. $99 – Kodak Zi6HD $150 – Kodak Zi8: We recommend this camera over the FlipCam because it has an external mic input and it shoots in HD. For those on a larger budget, a Sony Handycam is a good, inexpensive camcorder.
2. $26 – Lapel microphone: Audio is one of the most important elements of the overall video production and built-in mics hardly ever do the trick. Lapel mics can be used almost universally in a pinch — you can even tape them to podiums. At all costs you want to avoid the echos and ambient noise that any camera’s built-in mic will produce. You might also want to consider buying an XLR adapter, which allows you to plug in to the audio system at most public events.
3. $15 – Tripod: Nothing says amateur like shaky video. For crisp, clean shots, a basic tripod is a must.

Both Windows and Mac operating systems come with free video software — Windows Movie Maker and iMovie, respectively. Both are more than capable of producing single-camera news stories and adding features like lower thirds. Without spending any money on software, they are probably your best bet. A free option for PC users is Pinnacle’s Video Spin software.Something that might be an option in the future is a product called Stroome, which is still currently in beta. It is a Web-based video editing tool that seeks to make video production a collaborative process. The interface needs work right now, but the platform will surely become more stable as more versions are released. USC’s Annenburg School of Journalism has already signed a license with the program to start using the software in its classrooms.

Building effective archives

Being able to shoot and edit video is only half the battle. Presenting it in a manner easy for your users to find and navigate through is one area where college news orgs can improve. Lessons can be learned from YouTube, where on average, users spend upwards of an hour a month streaming video. Perhaps one of the most effective techniques utilized by YouTube is the “related videos” box in the sidebar that keeps readers perpetually engaged. A few takebacks from YouTube’s interace that news sites can use:

• Ability to search for videos by keyword
• One-click access to play videos (without having to navigate back and forth between a landing page and posts)
• Permalinks for individual videos
• Ability to share individual videos via social media

Building archive functionality into WordPress takes a little extra handy work. One of the easier solutions is a video sharing service called blip.tv. Blip.tv offers several advantages to other video sharing Web sites:

• Full integration: You can customize blip.tv’s player to match your own branding — no third-party logos on your video.
• Tools for dissemination: Using blip.tv you can post video on YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr, notify your Facebook and Twitter followers, and you can even have it add a new post in WordPress.
• Revenue Sharing: You can choose whether or not your videos have advertisements, and what kind of advertisements to show (preroll, overlay and postroll). If you choose to allow ads, you will receive 50 percent of revenue from them — a good deal if you consider that major news sites are relying on video more than ever for revenue.

You can create a custom video player with the sidebar turned on in order to provide one-stop access to all your videos, or you can use the RSS feed to create a list of clickable thumbnails.

If you want to keep everything in-house an option is the JW Player. JW Player is more customizable than blip.tv’s player — for example, it allows the playlist to appear at the bottom — but you can’t add advertisements unless you’re willing to pay for the product. One option is to use the RSS feed from blip.tv in the JW Player, which would allow for ease of use and maximum customization. If you decide to use the JW Player exclusively, the Flash Video Player plugin makes embedding videos much easier.

Examples of effective video landing pages

The New York Times’ video landing page is very YouTube-like in nature, displaying popular video clips in the right sidebar and a description below the player. The NYTimes dedicates an entire subsection of its main site to multimedia and video. Sharing videos is easy with quick links below the player.

The Daily Pennsylvanian uses a slick overlay system that plays videos with the one-click ease. The Pennsylvanian uses the aforementioned JW Player to play the videos. There are also permalinks to each video, which is where users can comment.

The Daily Kansan, a publication running the Django-based Ellington CMS, has a nice page layout, but clicking on one of the thumbnails takes you to an article page, which does not include any links to related video.

Investigative multimedia site from McKenna Ewen

McKenna Ewen, a multimedia journalist at the University of Minnesota, is doing an investigative piece about a journalist’s mysterious death in Minneapolis in 1945. This winter break, he’s putting together a custom site and documentary about the story. Ewen says:

[Investigative reporter James Shiffer] approached me in August about helping build the project into a website and making a short documentary of it. I agreed and made it part of my senior thesis, which is about increasing video views on the web. We’re going to launch project independently and see how much traffic we can pull in without an advertising budget (it should be interesting).

The anticipated publish date is early in January (we’ll link you to it when it launches). Update: This post originally stated the project was part of a collaboration with the Star Tribune. It is not.

Development continues on Nando from Max Cutler, Rob Baskin, and Andrew Spittle

Yale student Max Cutler has been working on a workflow tool for the administrative side of the Courant News CMS, code named “Nando.” A few features for the tool include a pitch system, a workflow based around statuses and user roles, and a heavily customizable dashboard for all of this activity. He’s recruited CoPress’ Andrew Spittle to continue development on the project over winter break. You can hear more about what they’ll be working on specifically at today’s Hacking The News workshop.

SR2 Blog from Josh Halliday

Josh Halliday, a journalism student at the University of Sunderland, is starting a project for community-based blogging as part of his final project. From the blog’s about page:

SR2 Blog is the new community-run neighbourhood news website, dedicated to the SR2 area of Sunderland.

We’re recruiting community reporters who either want to keep their neighbours on top of what’s going on down their street or vent on an issue that’s not being dealt with. If you live, work or know SR2 why not get involved?

SR2Blog features news broken down by neighborhood, video, liveblogs, and social media. The project is an interesting experiment in -hyperlocal, community-generated news and we’ll be interested to watch its progression.

EditFlow updates from Mo Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Scott Bressler and Will Davis

Edit Flow is a WordPress plugin being developed by Mo Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Scott Bressler and Will Davis to help tailor the CMS’s workflow for an editorial environment. Although the first few phases of the project have already been released, the plugin is still actively in development. Here’s what they’ll will be working on this winter as part of the next phase (via the CoPress wiki):

• More granular email notifications, including the ability to have a notification go to a predefined group of people
• User groups with functionality to define specific groups of users within WordPress.
• Visualization of the editorial workflow data within WordPress, let it be through a calendar view, an activity stream, or other.
• The ability to define newsroom-specific metadata for each post.
• Functionality to allow custom definition of a required set of actions for each piece. These could be “copy-edit,” “fact-check,” etc.

SB Statesman redesign and restructuring from Bradley Donaldson

The SB Statesman — the student newsorg at Stony Brook University in New York – has a winter goal that every student publication can and should be pursuing this break: redesigning and resturcturing their site. From editor-in-chief, Bradley Donaldson, here are a few goals they have:

• Create a website that has a greater focus on multimedia.
• Make the site much more user-friendly and student-centered
• Harness social media to both spread the word about the newspaper and have a presence in student communities

What I really like about this redesign project is that it’s not a feat accomplished by a few web editors, but the staff as a whole. Donaldson said they’re finally taking a step they’ve neglected in the past:

Fortunately we have a good number of staffers who are interested in helping out with this, and the entire newsroom on a whole is excited about the changes being made. We’ve neglected our online presence too much or been very inconsistent with it in the past, even though we had the manpower and know-how to really improve it.

Full disclosure: The Statesman plans to launch its new redesign on CoPress’ Managed Hosting plan.

If you want to hear about what’s going on specifically with Edit Flow, Nando and Courant News, or just want some feedback on what you’re working on now’s the chance: join today’s Hacking the Student Newsroom session. The session will be run through TalkShoe so just call (724) 444-7444 at 4 p.m. PST and enter the Call ID when asked (it’s 67693).

Then a body was found. And like clockwork, the traffic spiked.

Was the Mustang Daily prepared? Strategically, yes. They had five editors on the scene of the incident. Technically? Perhaps not. Their site went down for a few minutes (and was quickly fixed when CoPress received the notification). Here are a few steps the editors could have taken to prepare. (Full disclosure: one of the authors of this post, Lauren Rabaino, is a former editor of the Mustang Daily.)

1. Keep your site delivering the story

When you’re about to break major news, you will need to prepare your Web site for the upcoming onslaught of traffic. If you’re using WordPress, that will mean making your site as static as possible. WP Super Cache contains a feature known as Lock Down that allows you to make your site completely static — in other words, posts will be saved as flat HTML files, dramatically decreasing server load and dramatically increasing the chance that when someone visits your Web site, they’ll be served something other than an error. There are two drawbacks to using Lock Down that you should know about up front:

• Comments will not show up until the page is refreshed, either manually or by turning off Lock Down.
• Updates to stories will not be pushed without dumping the cache manually.

These, however, are small prices to pay for making sure visitors can read the article at all.

If you don’t have WP Super Cache installed already, you should — it smoothes over spikes in traffic and reduces server load even when it isn’t in Lock Down mode.

To enable Lock Down mode, go to Settings -> WP Super Cache.

Near the bottom of the page, you will see a button to enable Lock Down mode.

At the top of the page, you will see an option to Delete Expired and Delete Cache. If you update one of your articles or want newer comments to show on the page, you will have to hit Delete Cache.

If you are a CoPress client and you expect a huge spike in traffic, let us know ahead of time and we’ll be around to actively monitor your site and keep it delivering pageviews.

2. Make sure your article gets read

Google News is a great way to gain traffic, especially when big news breaks. If your site isn’t already on Google News, or if your site is incompatible with Google News, fixing any problems and submitting your site for review should be the first step of optimizing your Web site.

When updating the story, the decision about whether to do a write-thru or post a new story goes a long way toward driving traffic to your site. Google News will not re-index a news story after it has been published, even if you use a sitemap generator like Google XML Sitemaps. Therefore, if there is any sort of a major development in the story, and certainly if there is one big enough to warrant a change of headline, it is imperative the article is put into a new post for SEO.

Targeting your regular readership is also important. Plugins like SMS Text Message and Courier allow you to quickly and easily notify your readers when news breaks or when there are updates.   Be sure to use keywords in your tweets so anyone going to search.twitter.com can find your updates. For developing news, create a new #hashtag related to the topic for readers to follow throughout your coverage for example (#missingstudent or #polydeath).

Twitter can be an easy way to notify readers, but by far the best social networking site for you to focus on is Facebook. If there is a Facebook page or group concerning the news, post a link to your Web site. Have your reporters post links on their walls and Twitter accounts. Together, these two mediums can drive hundreds or thousands of visitors to your Web site. For example, the day news broke about the student suicide at Cal Poly, more than half of the Mustang Daily’s pageviews for the day were referred from Facebook (56.6 percent, to be exact).

All these strategies should be deployed within minutes of the article’s post. If you are one of the first media organizations to report on the news, you need to hook as many readers as possible and convince them that your newspaper is the ultimate source on this subject. This is only possible if they learn about it first from you.

When you update the article — which you should do, frequently — or when a big update comes in that warrants a new article — which should happen, though with less frequency — be sure to let your readers know. Don’t spam your readers, but find a point right before they start feeling harassed when they’ll be grateful for keeping you informed.

Finally, if you are expecting you might create a new story when a big enough update comes in, link your homepage on Facebook and in e-mails instead of the story itself, so when readers visit the site they see the newest news first. Also, when you create a new story, it is a good idea to link to it at the top of the old one.

3. Develop an editorial strategy

The best way to break news is to have a game plan in place so you’re not scrounging for reporters and photographers at the last minute. Here are a few steps you might want to try:

• Designate a breaking news “leader.” This person can be in charge of delegating responsibilities to reporters and photographers when news breaks and posting Twitter and Facebook updates throughout the day.
• Have a breaking news emergency kit. The worst thing that can happen when news breaks is that the video camera is checked out or the batteries are dead. If you have the resources to do so, keep a spare camera, tripod and batteries in the newsroom solely for breaking news purposes
• Know the workflow. You don’t have to have a multi-sourced, 500-word article before posting updates to your site and Twitter. Break news as it happens and get your staff into the mindset of posting breaking news nuggets as it happens. Updates can always come later.
• Listen to your readers. Breaking news is perhaps one of the best opportunities to use reader feedback while reporting. Let your readers submit their questions and tips via social media so you can integrate it into the reporting process. If the breaking news event is a scene (fire, protest, etc.), seek user-submitted photos and video.

This week’s guests:

Mindy McAdams (@macloo) is the Knight Chair for Journalism Technologies and the Democratic Process at the University of Florida and the author of Flash Journalism. Mindy is known for online journalism, by way of her blog (Teaching Online Journalism) and her open-source teaching style.

Rich Beckman (@richbeckman) is the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile. Rich is known for multimedia projects and for training students with high-end skills.

A few of the topics from this week’s podcast are:

• How college media organizations can innovate and improve their Web sites
• Comments on college media
• What each professor would do if they were the editor of a college news organization today
• Increasing online and in-person engagement
• Pros and cons of high staff turnover
• Changing and sustaining newsroom cultures

Rich and Mindy on ‘the state of college media’ online

Mindy said the biggest problem facing college media is that students mirror the professional industry with their “abysmal” handling of revenue:

“They don’t understand Web advertising. They don’t understand placement of advertising. They don’t understand how to communicate about that advertising with the people who buy it, their advertisers.”

Rich looked more at content than business in his analysis of the state of college media. He said to look for strong examples of multimedia at big news orgs like MSNBC and The New York Times:

“[Students] scoff at that and say, ‘Well we don’t have those kind of budgets and we don’t have those kinds of skills.’ And my answer was simply, ‘Well, they (The New York Times and MSNBC) don’t have the kind of time that you have. And they don’t have the ability to work in teams like you have and they don’t have the ability to get feedback like you have from your professors.”

Listen to the full podcast here:

There’s a lot student media can learn from the web-centric setup of the Texas Tribune newsroom, from its use of open source software, to its strong development team, to its depth and excess of useful content.

Yesterday I spoke with Brandon Taylor, the lead developer for the Texas Tribune. He said the Texas Tribune development team built the entire site in four weeks, during which time Brandon pulled a few all-nighters in the newsroom and even broke a keyboard because he was typing incessantly — in other words, it was an intense turnaround.

Here’s what Brandon had to say about their development logistics (the audio of the interview is posted below):

Texas Tribune in numbers:

25: Percentage of the staff that are web developers

4: Number of weeks it took to build the entire front-end of the site

80: Percentage of desired features that were complete by the launch date

400: Hours of work Brandon put into the site in a single month

On the development workflow

Brandon Taylor

Because the site launched a week ago, there haven’t been too many new projects to plan. Brandon referred to the current state of development as the “bug-squashing” phase. But in general, specific steps of the workflow process are assigned based on skillset and priority. Brandon said the general categories are “get it done now,” “like to haves,” and “maybe someday” projects.

On hiring a development team

Brandon’s advice for hiring web staff is to choose the person best fit for the job, even if that means choosing someone outside of the journalism department. Taylor’s personal background is in graphic design, meaning a lot of his work was done in ad agencies. But switching to news has been equally as high-pressured and fast-paced.

“The most important thing to keep in mind when you’re hiring  is, ‘Do I have the personnel that has the skills to pull off this project?’” he said.

On the editorial/development relationship

Brandon said projects dealing with site functionality are primarily lead by the development team. But because he’s new the news world, editors lend a guiding hand on editorial features that should be built into the site, and he figures out a way to make it happen.

What College Media can learn from it

Brandon encourages the use of open source software. He’s a strong advocate of Django, which the Texas Tribune is built on:

“Because it’s open source, it’s free basically, it’s extremely cheap to host — you can host a Django site for $10/month — it’s fast, it’s flexible. . . it’s got a very low barrier to entry,” he said.

For students thinking about learning Django, he recommends a few key steps:

• DjangoProject.com
• Learn about semantic HTML
• Read Practical Django Projects
• And read Pro Django

As an easier but less flexible starting point, Brandon recommends students should get started with WordPress (which CoPress is a huge advocate of) because it’ll give you a fully functional “blog on steroids” that is themeable and will get you started on the basics of a CMS.

“There’s really nothing stopping somebody from learning this stuff,” he said. “Frankly, if it wasn’t easy, I couldn’t do it.”

If anyone has specific technical or workflow questions about the Texas Tribune, feel free to e-mail Brandon at btaylor@texastribune.org.

August E. Grant speaking in the Austin Convention Center.

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.

August E. Grant from the University of South Carolina shared lessons learned from Newsplex, a project that started in 2002. From the site, the Newsplex’s mission statement:

Newsplex was built to help news organizations adapt to a future in which people acquire news and information in different formats and across platforms. It is a laboratory where new techniques and technologies are evaluated.

A few notes from Grant’s talk:

On retaining traffic

If you aren’t in the habit of posting in a 24-hour news cycle, you aren’t going to retain readers at regular intervals. By planning your updates, you will get more traffic. If you know a different demographic comes to your site at night, change the site content to reflect that change in audience.

Keeping content timely, always

In the online world, content is out there forever in the form of newspaper and Internet archives. It’s not like old media where a broadcast is gone at the end of the hour. Because online content is always there, you need to change the way to present it. The interest will persist beyond constraints of time because the content is always searchable and accessible.

Digital signage

Paper signs as a means of marketing are going away.

“There are going to be more jobs created in the next five years because of digital signage than there were in the 1980s for the Internet,” Grant said.

The concept of putting stickers or posters on the walls of restaurants and stores, Grant predicts those messages will be replaced with LCD screens in the windows that are animated and interactive. Journalists can step into this role because the same concepts of telling a story interactively apply. (But only make the switch if you want to be rich, he noted).

Challenges on the web

• User generated content: If anyone can be a journalist, does journalism matter? Referencing Steve Outing, Grant said to give every reporter a way to interact with the audience and a way to solicit user generated content so it can be moderated and edited.
• Mobile media: It’s instant. There are more contributors. People are reading information in smaller chunks and thinking they know everything they need to know.
• Tools: We sometimes get caught up in the tools instead of the content. Grant says you need to know the tools and the tech, but the content is still the most important.

Kristin Millis (University of Washington) and Jason Manning (Arizona State) shared ways to market your newspaper both online and offline.

A few things they’re doing to market themselves and make money:

• Build a full multimedia company and sell campaigns. Example: University of Washington charges to do “chalk on the ground” campaigns for $30/chalk
• UW Gave away 10k condoms when releasing their sex edition a week before Valentine’s Day
• Live tweeting, live video updates from sports events
• House ads in print product to promote their social media products
• Univ. of Washington charges thousands to do viral marketing videos (see example below)

Social media

Undoubtedly, social media is one of the strongest and easiest forms of marketing a college newsorg can do. A few tips:

• Don’t need official “Twitter staff,” but when posting to social media it’s important to be organized about it in breaking news situations
• Be personal about it. For example, if your newsroom holds a “pie week,” tweet, “What’s your favorite pie?” to loop your readers into newsroom happenings
• Do Facebook advertisements. They can be as cheap as $25 and give you the opportunity to bring more people in (plus, you can target it specifically at people from your university)
• Be on their minds all day, no shotgun effect
• Congratulate staff members who have won awards
• Don’t just put it on your newsorg newsfeed, but double post to your own newsfeed
• Ethical standards that apply to jour apply to social media realm

In college media, the tendency is to regard the Web as a mere afterthought in terms of revenue. For those of us at college news organizations, however, the time to start perfecting our online revenue system is now, not in five years — when it’s too late and you’re bankrupt.

Capturing value on the Web can be overwhelming because the audience and approach is different from what we’re used to with print. Chances are that your Web site users are parents and alumni, meaning that you can’t translate ads directly from print to the Web. Advertising online means leveraging resources like Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate links and tailoring ads to match your user demographics, which you can track using an analytics service.

Making money online doesn’t only come in the form of advertisements — podcasts, minisites, events calendars and other features can be monetized through sponsors. Giving out promotional code coupons on certain days of the week is a way to both generate traffic and engage users with ads.

To dispel a myth about online advertising, we must realize that ads online are not all about generating clicks and traffic to advertisers’ sites. The point of having advertisements on a site is to build brand among readers. A study shows that when exposed to branded ads, the impact may not be direct or immediate, but “users engage better and transact more with brands once they’ve been exposed to them. ” Even if they don’t click the ad, they’re still building brand recognition and creating value in those online ads.

But the key to good money will always coincide with good journalism. The better the site content, the more eyes will come to our news sites. More eyes means more advertising potential, which ties into everything we’ve discussed before; investing in your staff, creating a web-native newsroom, and constantly innovating from within.

What is your approach to online advertising or how do you regard it? What steps can you take to improve your organization’s utilization of the medium? Sound off in the comments.

Experimentation in the newsroom is one of the best ways to learn new skills and discover full potential of your team. Now that you understand why it’s time to innovate, how to create a web-centric newsroom and how to invest in your staff, it’s time to start experimenting.

To get you thinking, this video presents a few ideas as a starting point for your next staff meeting.

If you still need a little more ammunition, CoPress’ summer design camp has a great series of discussions about news wikis, landing pages and article layouts, among other ideas to get you started.  Our blog and wiki also have resources  about setting up a Facebook fan page, e-mail newsletter, web-first workflow and open-source software.

These are just a few of the project ideas we’ve discussed at CoPress. Do you have a better one? If so, head on over to our forums or leave a comment on this post and let the community help you brainstorm.