CoPress

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.

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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

Edit Flow was bumped up to v0.3 last week and saw a flurry of other updates as bugs cropped up that we managed to miss during the testing phase before release. The main focus of this release was to introduce usergroups, which will form the basis of future features and to enhance the notification functionality that was introduced in the previous version.

If you haven’t upgraded yet, download it from the Plugin Directory or directly from within WordPress.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the new features introduced in this release:

Usergroups

Version 0.3+ adds in what are called usergroups. On the outset, they’re similar to “Roles” built into WordPress, except that (at this stage) usergroups are simply ways to associate groups of users together. Edit Flow adds a number of sample usergroups for you to get started (as shown above) and get a sense of what sort of groupings you can create. However, the main power of usergroups comes with…

Notification Controls

Much of the feedback Edit Flow received since the email notification were introduced centered around having greater control over who receives notifications. Previously, post updates were emailed to authors, editorial commenters, and any roles that had been selected to receive notifications. Many people were drawn to the notification feature but were forced to keep it disabled since they didn’t want all their editors or administrators notified on every single post update.

With the new release, you can specify on a post level, what users and usergroups should receive notifications, so that only relevant individuals and groups of individuals receive updates.

Note: with the introduction of this feature the “Notify by Role” option was removed. In its place, a new feature was added “Always notify admin option” which includes the blog administrator in all notifications. To all overly protective, nosy admins that want to know everything: you’re welcome

This is just the beginning of notifications. Some interesting ideas that we’d like to integrate in future versions of Edit Flow include:

• Giving users the ability to subscribe to posts themselves
• Have specific users or usergroups automatically subscribed to posts based on categories or tags assinged to posts.
• Make the UI a bit more efficient. The UI for this new feature is something that was unfortunately rushed. My original vision didn’t quite make it in (due to various impracticalities, changes, and lack of time), but it’s very much a high priority on my list to make it easy to select users/usergroups (especially for installs with hundreds and thousands of users).

More Useful Notifications

On the topic of notifications, the new release introduces emails that are slightly more descriptive in terms of the action taken on the post. The subject line of the email will specify whether the post was created, published, unpublished, etc. Although a small change, it should hopefully help users manage incoming emails more effectively and not get inundated with a barrage of “Post Status was changed” emails. (Interestingly, I’ve found that this new change comes in handy even on my personal blog which is a simple on-user blog. I find these notifications fairly useful especially since I make aggresive use of WordPress’ future scheduling functionality.)

Additionally, the action links in comment notifications now take the user directly to the editorial comment form (e.g. clicking on “Add editorial comment” will open the post and take to directly to the Editorial Comment form). Again, not a major feature but something that should hopefully save you some time, scrolling and future dealings with Carpal Tunnel.

I’d like to extend this feature even further and allow users to reply to comments via email and not have to go into WordPress to do so. (As you can see, there’s a bit a time-saving trend going on here.)

New widget: Posts I’m Following

Still a little crude at this stage, this new widget gives you a list of the most recently updated posts that you’re following. However, this widget will likely form the basis of the activity stream, which will provide an audit trail of activity happening within the WordPress admin.

Knight News Challenge Round II

While not really a feature introduced in 0.3+, here’s a bit of news that may be interest: we’ve submitted our 2nd round application for the Knight News Challenge. Check out it, vote, and leave us some feedback.

What’s Next?

Apart from some of the ideas already mentioned, with the next couple of Edit Flow releases, you can expect to see some great features such as:

• Post task lists (a la Basecamp, namely a list of tasks that must be completed in order for a post to be published)
• Better Post Management (to help you track and manage your content better, such as snapshots of how far along existing content is)
• HTML emails (because emails should always be pretty — but always fallback to plain text for people still living in the ’90s)

Your Homework

As always, your feedback is much appreciated and vital to our development. Let us know what about Edit Flow works for you and what doesn’t and what else Edit Flow can do to improve your organization’s WordPress experience.

We’ve already had discussions with several online and print publishers and newsrooms interested in adopting Edit Flow and would love to include you in that conversation. Why not get in touch?

If you do a Google search for “How do college students read news?,” the resulting articles do little to answer the question.

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

The Yale Daily News hosted the “Conference for Newspaper Business at Yale”  Friday and Saturday, gathering the student leaders of the business sides of a bunch of college newspapers. Representatives from Yale, Brown, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Tufts, Duke, Georgetown, Boston College gathered, including myself representing CoPress and Penn.

Over the two days, we heard from speakers working in the media and marketing industries. But the most valuable part of the conference was the roundtable discussions and workshops discussing the common problems and solutions that college newspapers face. Far too little communication happens between different college newspapers, and that means that the practices and strategies that work well at one place aren’t passed on to other papers.

That’s why conferences that bring together people from different publications are so valuable, and that’s part of what CoPress is trying to do by connecting people from different schools to share their questions and solutions.

As it turns out, we all face a lot of similar problems.

Ideas and topics discussed at Yale

Chief among the topics of discussion was how to make more money and how to make more money online. In the sessions I went to we explored alternative sources of revenue, ways of improving local advertising and website projects.

Among the alternative sources of revenue, many schools explored raising funds from alumni donations and selling subscriptions to parents and alumni of students. This allows many of them to maintain an endowment which can provide steady funding even when the advertising market suffers. Several were exploring a store selling branded merchandise and prints of photos and the paper. Another popular feature is graduation announcements, where parents can buy something similar to a yearbook announcement in the final issue of the paper.

But of course, advertising is still the core source of funding for any newspaper. Roger Lee, a co-founder of PaperG, gave a presentation on how to engage local advertisers. One of the key points of his presentation was to bundle print and online ads together. Since print ads still command higher rates, this prevents online advertising from cannibalizing print revenue.

Online, papers are looking to expand in several ways. Many want to move beyond news and multimedia to providing more types of information to students. Among those ideas include:

• Creating guides to local restaurants and businesses
• Listings of campus events
• Professor ratings
• Selling prints and licenses of photos (with this though, it’s careful to avoid running afoul of NCAA rules for photos.)

What other ideas do you have to make your student publication more profitable and more successful? Or what do you want to know about how other student papers operate? Let us know in the comments!

Courier, my open source e-mail newsletter plugin for WordPress, is now an official product of CoPress. Although this change won’t mean much to the everyday user, for CoPress clients, it means guaranteed support for any technical issues related to the plugin.

The everyday user will notice improvements to the latest version of the plugin. A few weeks ago I pushed out Courier 0.3, and in the intervening few weeks have pushed out minor updates to add a few new functionalities and fix a few typos and errors.

Courier 0.3 includes major improvements to both stability and functionality. The biggest and most important improvement is queuing support. Instead of sending all e-mails at once when you click the send, the plugin instead queues the e-mails and sends them at a rate you determine. Not only does this protect you in the case the script hangs up when you’re sending e-mails (such as when you have thousands of subscribers), but it also makes sure the e-mail script doesn’t take down the entire server.

This new feature uses WP Cron to minimize setup time. You can schedule a test e-mail in the Courier dashboard to make sure WP Cron works. If it doesn’t you have a few options: you can disable queuing in the dashboard, which I don’t recommend if you have a number of subscribers, or you can set up Crontab to visit wp-cron.php every minute. I would recommend finding the root cause of why WP Cron doesn’t fire, though — otherwise you might have bigger problems than Courier not working correctly.

Courier 0.3 integrates with WordPress users, allowing you to manage subscriptions within the WordPress profile. It still supports users outside of WordPress, and I have no plans to phase out that support.

Courier 0.3.5 includes a sidebar widget, so you can now add the registration form to your sidebar.

I should note that if you upgrade Courier outside of WordPress (i.e. through FTP) you will need to deactivate and reactivate Courier before many of the new features will takeeffect.

If you’re testing Courier and run into any problems, please feel free to e-mail me (will@copress.org), and I will be glad to help. I am hoping to have a major (1.0) release out within two weeks, and if you encounter any errors or anomalies it’s important they be fixed before then.

Finally, Courier now has a new website, wpcourier.com, where you can stay attuned to all Courier news and updates. The site will include best practices for create e-mail editions and curating users. You can also follow Courier’s updates on Twitter @wpcourier.

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.

Read more →

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.

Updated: Dec. 16 7:18 p.m. We mistakenly referred to the Kodzk Zi6 as having an external microphone input jack. The Zi8, which costs $50 more, is the model we should have mentioned.

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.

Last Thursday a few of us gathered to talk about the development projects that will be seeing heavy work over the winter break. Max Cutler, Andrew Dunn, Will, Daniel, and Lauren joined me for a half hour conversation covering the various projects that we are all working on. The full audio is attached at the bottom of the post and here are some highlights of what we talked about.

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.

Hacking the Student Newsroom Session #3 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (879)