CoPress

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.

Update (Nov. 18, 2009 at 2 p.m.): I’ve added Connect2Mason, another site we’ve previously covered, to the list of examples and included a link to a podcast with their founder.

From linking out and social media to video and liveblogging, student journalists often hear advice about steps their individual news organizations should take to succeed today. But we often neglect to take a step back and consider different models from which college media can draw inspiration.

So, we’d like to examine those with some depth in a new series, offering a different twist on the usual coverage. Specifically, focusing on news sites that began online. There’s a ton of great work being done online by print publications across the country, which we often cover, and this series is intended to help everyone.

Why this approach? Because good things can come when your news organization thinks like a startup. Also, these sites are unencumbered by legacy costs or structures related to a long-standing print publication.

We already know of a few good examples within college media:

• NYU Local — an independent site at New York University
• Amherst Wire — a magazine-style site at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• Connect2Mason — a convergence site that partners with existing college media on campus
• The Bwog — a blog run by the undergraduate magazine staff at Columbia University
• Onward State — a blog covering the Penn State community
• Daily Colonial — online daily news site for George Washington University and the surrounding areas

Read more →

For years, both The Chronicle’s staff and our readers knew we had a pretty nasty Web site. But like most college newspapers back in 2007, we didn’t have a robust online department and we treated our site with a level of respect even Rodney Dangerfield would have been surprised to witness.

That all changed when we had a few important things happen at around the same time in early 2008. First, our then-editor, David Graham, recognized the need for a new Web presence. Midway through his editorship, I cold-emailed David to tell him that I really wanted to help The Chronicle make a new website. The next year’s editor, Chelsea Allison, immediately went to bat for us financially and logistically, and a task force of sorts was hatched — including a few top editors, some nerdy staff members and several developers we had managed to recruit. Read more →

On September 2nd, the Yale Daily News published its first issue of the fall 2009 semester. Although appearing to the casual observer to be just another issue, there was one huge difference: it was running on the new Courant News online publishing platform. Just one week later, Yale graduate student Annie Le went missing. The following ten days resulted in enormous national and international coverage of the case and a record surge in traffic to our Web site. Courant News played a huge role in our outstanding coverage and lack of downtime during the traffic spikes. Read more →

In the age of interactive media, there’s an infinite opportunity for open discussion and idea sharing through comments. Turning these comments into a real conversation, however, is a challenge that news organizations confront on a daily basis.

“We want to position ourselves as the center of community while at the same time driving out hateful, hurtful and trollish commenters,” said Jack Lail, Director of News Innovation at the Knoxville News Sentinel, in an email. “It has proven difficult to say the least.”

One of the great things about the Web is that it allows anyone to comment what they think — but perhaps the biggest downfall to that is many of these comments are crude, malicious, self-promotional or plainly irrelevant. Read more →

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). Read more →

It’s fairly common knowledge that our daily activities online (and off) are tracked, analyzed, and sold — to an extent that would make most of us blush if we really knew all the details.

But as Wired.com reported last week, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have found a particular nasty practice by Flash cookies, a piece of technology becoming widespread in ads, videos and widgets around the Web.

First of all, Flash cookies — unlike the more ubiquitous and better-known HTML variety — cannot be regulated or deleted through Web browsers’ privacy settings. They can only be controlled by the end user through an obscure, downright confusing page on Adobe’s web site. (And Flash cookies can hold up to 100Kb of data, dwarfing HTML cookies which are usually limited by browsers to 4Kb.)

More dubiously, Flash can “re-spawn” traditional cookies that the user has already deleted, creating a new cookie using the original’s unique ID and filling it in with other data captured by Flash. That’s right, it brings them back from the dead. Thus: ZOMBIE cookies!

Third-party advertisers are the worst offenders found by UC Berkley researchers. Also named is Clearspring, makers of the popular AddThis widget. The AddThis button (pictured) makes it easy for publishers to add many social bookmarking links to any page or post. Apparently it also was found to resintate deleted cookies from AOL.com, Answers.com, and Mapquest.com.

Clearspring did not deny the practice when contacted by Wired, saying it speeds up surfing and is disclosed in their privacy policy. It’s still a shady move, however; Web editors who use AddThis should strongly consider discontinuing it.

Furthermore, all publishers should be reminded that many great copy & paste third party widgets like AddThis — from video and feed embeds to bookmarking and analytics — may be free, but that does not mean they do not come without a cost. In exchange for expedience, you’re allowing outside companies to run code through your site and on the computers of your visitors. While their intentions may not be nefarious, you should at least know what they’re doing. Are you comfortable with all that happens? If your readers knew, would they be comfortable too?

The same suspicions apply especially to outside advertising.

Few college news sites have their own formal, written privacy policy. That’s understandable; they’re a very small cog in the very big machine of behavior tracking. We all implicitly accept a little loss of privacy for the conveniences of the modern Web, and your college rag is hardly a big reason why Google knows you better than your mother.

However, journalists must be worthy of their readers’ trust, not only in reporting but in the technology that they use to deliver it. Thinking through how you treat your readers’ privacy is essential.

You can read the full UC Berkley report here. (It’s only 4 pages long). Their methodology is simple enough that you could repeat the tests on your site to find out what all those little Flash buggers are really up to.

With more and more student journalists thinking about graduate school, there are many factors to consider in making the choice. In a rapidly changing industry, the options can seem a little daunting. In fact, this list was originally intended to be the “Top 10 Online Journalism Graduate Programs,” but further examination found that, well, a lot of online journalism programs look alike. Most require a similar laundry list of courses. They go a little something like this: take a class on video, one on audio. Then, take a class on the changing face of news, followed by one on ethics, etc. All these classes are followed by the introductory one which teaches the basics of reporting.

Luckily for you, however, there are a few programs that are head and shoulders above the rest.

5. Columbia University — New York, NY

While I tried not to include this classic in journalism education on the list, it was difficult to ignore them. Their faculty and the access you will gain to distinguished alumni still make Columbia a great institution no matter what area of journalism it is. Having professors like Sreenath Sreenivasan brings credibility and a forward-thinking attitude to the school.

What makes Columbia stand out: The faculty – some of the best of the best in the industry.

4. Stanford Graduate School of Journalism — Stanford, CA

While the program offers no specific program for online journalism, it’s location near the Silicon Valley brings to it some very tech-y faculty and some interesting courses, such as “Media Enterpenuership.” They’ve even recently launched a online publication for new media news for their students, entitled iStanford.

What makes Stanford stand out: Location, Location, Location.

3. Missouri Graduate School of Journalism — Columbia, MO

Any school that requires iPhones for its incoming journalism students is either crazy or insanely advanced. I vote the latter. Other than its famous new requirement, Missouri is known for one thing: options. Their long list of masters options really makes it possible for you to make a “create-your-own” masters program (after your complete the core curriculum, of course) to ensure that you’re learning exactly what it is that you want.

What makes Mizzou stand out: iPhone requirement and varied masters program

2. Medill at Northwestern University — Evanston, IL

It’s graduate program is broken down into two sections: training in technical skills and training in reporting skills. Does it get any more straightforward than that? Most recently journalism students joined with computer science majors to create new journalism tools, including:

• A program that creates computer-generated sports stories from box scores and play-by-play
• A Microsoft Word plug-in that allows reporters to speedily research and fact-check stories as they write them without having to switch to the internet
• An iPhone web application that provides the daily news in five- 10- and 20-minute chunks for news-hungry readers with limited time
• Two Twitter-based applications.

What makes Medill stand out: Rich history and detailed, modern curriculum.

1. CUNY Graduate School of Journalism — New York, NY

This new school has an advantage over the others – it’s brand new. Created in 2007, the school was able to create the nearly perfect online journalism program for what the industry faces today. Where else can you take a class in enterpenurial journalism and then have your idea be given the chance to receive start-up funds? Not to mention the fact that CUNY is currently leading the pack in not having separate tracks for the various mediums of journalism. With the mantra, “One media is all media,” no one really compares.

What makes CUNY stand out: Faculty (Including Jeff Jarvis and Eric Alterman), and a unique, top of the line approach to curriculum.

Wikis for news organizations have been a buzzing topic recently as both a means of spreading news and passing down information to future editors. If creating a wiki is your summer plans, you’ll need to use software that meets your needs. 

MediaWiki

Rating:

This is perhaps the most well-known wiki software, especially because of its use by Wikipedia. It’s the open source software that is used on the CoPress wiki.

For your readers, this might be the functionality they’re most familiar with on the front end, but the complexity of the back end could intimidate and deter people from contributing.

If you put a helpful guide showing users how to edit the wiki and use the system’s formatting, they might be more likely to contribute. You have to be able to set up a MySQL database for your wiki, but it’s easily done. Setup is straight forward process that only takes a few minutes.
Read more →

In print, your circulation is limited to the surrounding geographic area, meaning your brand has little competition. But online, you have to differentiate your publication from the thousands of other brands out there. And that might mean ditching your print masthead for a more modern nameplate.

Take these three brands, for example. Although on a local level these brands may be established, on the Web, they’re nearly identical and, frankly, unoriginal.

While it’s understandable that these newspapers would want to use their already-established brand on the web, a Web site presents the unique — and rare — opportunity for a newspaper to rebuild its identity.
Read more →