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.

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

And even some outliers like The Daily Gazette, a daily news site at Swarthmore College that started as online-only and then added a print edition.

The most well-known of these sites is probably NYU Local, which has been covered by MediaShift and College Media Matters, the latter of which profiled founder Cody Brown. It’s even been linked to by The New York Times. Previously, CoPress spoke with Cody and Miles Skorpen, a CoPress team member then of The Daily Gazette, about online-only student news organizations last year.

We’ve also spoken with Jackie Hai and Richard Caesar of the Amherst Wire for a podcast (Jackie wrote a post about their economic stimulus coverage) and Whitney Rhodes, founding director of Connect2Mason, on a different podcast.

If you know of other good examples, drop us a link in the comments and let us know why they’re interesting — we’d probably like to talk with them. We’re particularly interested in student-created, student-run college news sites (i.e. not ones under the university or j-school).

Basically, we’re looking to write in more depth about startup, blog-style and other models of interest to college media — both at the college and professional levels. Also, we’d be open to submissions for posts, as always.

With these posts, we hope to offer lessons and advice that all college news organizations find useful and, perhaps, provide ideas to inspire others to start similar sites.

I’ve already started drafting a post about the Texas Tribune‘s model; until then, check out this interview with one of their developers. I also have ideas swirling in my head after attending the New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit last Monday. Stay tuned!

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.

To make short a 22-month long story, we ended up deciding after lots of debate and proposal reviews that we’d build our new site in-house — even with a generous Board of Directors ready to pay an outside firm. We’re glad we made that call because it was a completely unique learning experience for dozens of us, it ended up saving a ton of money at an important time and we made a Web site of which we and our readers can be proud. We released the site on Monday, Sept. 28, 2009.

Looking back at the last two years’ worth of work on this project, it’s becoming clearer to me what helped us along the way. I’m not going to go into why we made this design decision or use that video hosting service because I don’t think that will be as interesting or valuable as the following battle-tested strategies and tendencies. It’s these more general observations that will keep you on the right trajectory, in my opinion.

In short: if you’re just starting out, worry about planning now and pixel widths later. Here is some advice I hope you’ll take to heart:

Having a diverse advisory group is key

As I mentioned before, we had a task force composed of people from many areas of The Chronicle. Members included that year’s Editor and Sports Editor, the three core Online Department editors, a few more developers, an associate news editor, a photography editor and several adult members of our Board of Directors. Having all these people representing the interests and concerns of their respective departments meant that we didn’t overlook any major issues early in the planning stages. Also, because each department had a solid say in what we ended up building, it helped expedite the transition process from alpha to beta to official Web site with minimal pushback from staffers who liked the “old way” better.

In-person and long meetings are productive

Google Docs, email and weekly conference calls are great, but I’ve found that none is an effective substitute for a real-life meeting. We had three long meetings over the course of the development period: one to completely launch our blog network, one to create and decide on a general design for the Web site and one to discuss workflow. The meetings were hours long and were emotionally and mentally draining; things actually did get heated at times, which is healthy in a news hall. We left each time with an action plan and a bunch of confidence, and each meeting led to bursts of unparalleled productivity — which was especially important when we were in various corners of the country (and in some cases, the globe).

If the new one’s better, give it to the people

We could still label our site “beta” if we wanted. We released it with no newsletter feature, no RSS support, a few quirky archives problems, and a less-than-perfect photo uploading system on the back end. But our online readers have been unanimously supportive of the new site, even with those small annoyances, because on the whole, it’s much better than the old one. We solved three of those four problems in the first week and a half, and will release our newsletter feature very soon. Exactly zero of the many readers who gave us feedback chose to say something other than, “The new site is much better than the old one,” so even if you’re wary of releasing an unfinished product to the public, rest assured that as long as your site doesn’t crash and looks right in users’ browsers, you’ll be just fine. Your readers will thank you for giving them a much better experience even if it’s not perfect.

Combining technical and editorial wishes can be difficult

We’ve received hundreds of private emails in the past few years that basically say the same thing: your comment sections are offensive and unrepresentative of any sort of rational discussion. We wanted to do something to fix that with our new site. While our solution isn’t yet perfect (wherein all commenters must use a valid email address), it has decimated the number of offensive and inappropriate comments left on the site. Adding to its effectiveness was our realization that putting comments on a separate page (instead of right below the articles) would enable pages to load dozens of times faster and lower our hosting costs. You can marry the technical aspects and the editorial aspects of your project successfully, but sometimes it’s not so easy. For example, we custom-coded a module that allows readers to see date-specific front pages, which is a feature they enjoy but that caused us a lot of trouble at first. It can be difficult to ask someone to spend three weeks coding a feature when their services are needed elsewhere, but if your readers are going to expect something from you, try your hardest to deliver it.

Learn all you can about the power of Drupal

Dean Chen, the Lead Developer who coded our site, has some brief advice for those wishing to use Drupal. He encourages developers to learn the Drupal API and Drupal Coding Conventions from a book called Pro Drupal Development by VanDyk & Westgate. It’s a good idea to learn how to use and customize CCK, Panels and Views Modules, too. When it comes to browser testing, you can never test enough times. Check CSS and JS in all four major browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) to ensure that styles and behavior are consistent. Making sure there were no browser incompatibility issues was a major focus of ours as it directly affects the way our work is perceived and our users’ browsing experience. Optimizations such as memcache make a huge difference performance-wise and are a must. Lastly, test and back up the code base early and often, especially before and after performance optimizations are made.

Never rest when you’re in charge of a “living thing”

Not enough newspapers post corrections or updates to their stories online, and we were guilty of that, too. Now, though, we’ve worked out an easy protocol for going back to modify content. Making sure all multimedia content is as fresh as possible is also very important, but it can be hard to stay on top of. Having a new Web site to present to people is a wonderfully fulfilling feeling, but it’s certainly fleeting. We have many other things we want to do now that we have the site running well on a day-to-day basis. We want to explore text notifications and mobile news tips; we want to drive more traffic to our site with social media; we want to innovate with different types of advertisements.

My personal favorite potential project is a video hub where we’ll invite all members of the Duke Community (e.g. students, faculty, staff, alumns, local residents, etc.) to add their videos to our database. There are thousands of YouTube videos out there that are Duke-related, including recordings of improvisational comedy shows, live music and guest speakers. The official Duke News office produces many high-quality video features, as well. Students working on projects in their classes could add their videos to the database. A simple submission form would be available for people whose videos we didn’t find at first. We would become the go-to source for any video that had a Duke tie, and because we’d have all the meta-data that comes with a YouTube video, we’d have an excellent search function. Our designers would create a stunning interface that would make watching videos on our site more enjoyable. None of this has been specifically planned, but I believe it would be an excellent addition to our Web site and a useful resource for tons of people, from prospective students to aspiring Duke artists to alumns thirty years removed from Duke.

Alex Klein is a junior at Duke University where he serves as Online Editor of The Chronicle, an independent student-run newspaper. Follow Alex on Twitter at @alexklein or email him at alex.klein@duke.edu.

Chronology

After being a missing persons case for almost 5 days, Annie Le’s body was found and suddenly it became a homicide investigation. When we published the breaking news at 8:51 p.m., our server was immediately slammed by an unusually large swell in traffic; in the few hours remaining in that Sunday night, we had twice as many visitors as we typically get in an entire weekday. As the night wore on, I kept updating our editorial staff on the impressive numbers: 6,000; 8,000; 13,000 hits in 70 minutes. I eventually went to bed proud that we had survived the spike without any problems, but I was in for a surprise.

Out of curiosity before heading to breakfast on Monday morning, I decided to check on the server’s health. Server utilization was at 100%, and the server was really straining. I immediately went to the Drudge Report and found that they had placed a link to us at the top of their front page. Out of all the national coverage available, the editor(s) at the Drudge Report had decided linked to us, and the flood gates were opened.

For the first six hours after Drudge posting the link, we received over 70,000 pageviews per hour before traffic slowly declined to “only” 30,000 pageviews per hour by the end of the day. In the 48 hours following, we handled a total of 1.1 million pageviews; in the 10 day period starting when she went missing, we saw over 2 million pageviews. At peak traffic, we were serving 30Mbps in data from our server, which continued for several hours. Despite the 3000% increase in traffic, we had zero downtime and our site was fully operational the entire time.

Courant News’ Role

In the last week of August, the YDN Editor-in-Chief and I decided to make the switch to Courant News for our first issue instead of waiting a bit longer to refine it a bit more. One of the aspects of Courant that had not yet been properly tested was performance; Courant News was designed with the lessons learned from operating a high traffic site and surviving Drudges in the past, but no special effort had been made to optimize performance yet. Fortunately, the few steps that we had taken in the spring were sufficient, and the system performed like an absolute champ throughout the spikes.

Hourly traffic during Drudge Report coverage (blue); Typical weekday traffic (green)

One of the tricks that Courant employs is a full-page cache for anonymous (non-logged-in) users: when an anonymous user attempts to access a page, our load balancer (nginx) serves them a cached version directly from RAM using memcached. Nginx is amazing, and can handle enormous amounts of traffic with minimal server resource usage; however, Django (served by an Apache server instance), is more resource intensive, and would quickly be bogged down by too many simultaneous requests. Having nginx serve the full page caches to the swarms of anonymous Drudge Report referrals meant that very few requests were being passed through to Courant (mostly our EIC and MEs who were adding new content as the day went on).

Nginx log during Drudge Report spike (requests/second)

No downtime is great, but ultimately it’s all about the content, and our editors and reporters did an outstanding job covering the Annie Le case. Unlike many mainstream media outlets that published unsubstantiated rumors, the Yale Daily News supplied top notch coverage and provided unique angles that only Yale students can provide (such as photos from inside the basement before it was identified as the scene of the crime).

One of the new features that Courant News brought to the YDN site was the ability to post multiple media elements in a given article. We made judicious use of this capability, including upwards of three or four items on many articles. Our old system only allowed a single photo on each article, which would have crippled our ability to cover this story.

Another key capability was the ability to use multiple templates for articles and the homepage. We created a new “Big Photo” article template to highlight the top media item on many of our stories. We also created a number of new homepage templates to highlight our breaking news coverage. (Note: because we only archive one version of the homepage per day, I cannot show  some of the additional templates we used.)

To support the amount of content we were publishing, Courant News allowed us to give limited access of the administrative interface to our Photo Editors and some Production & Design staffers, who helped the EIC and MEs upload content and publish new information in a timely manner. This distribution of work is something that we would like to continue going forward, eliminating the excuse of publishing extra content online being too much work at the end of the night.

Finally, Courant News included new email and analytics tracking systems, which allowed us to push breaking news updates to our email subscribers and track engagement from emails and our Twitter updates. Such data nicely complements our Google Analytics reports regarding readership engagement and has provided insight into ways we can improve our coverage in the future.

Conclusion

Moving to a new CMS and publishing platform can be a risky endeavor, but Courant News has pulled its weight and played a critical supporting role in our ability to cover this story and survive the massive influx of traffic it brought us. With a promising future ahead of it, including the digital newsroom and other exciting new features, Courant News will help us at the Yale Daily News innovate and experiment with our website in the coming years. I see many interesting projects in our future this year, and I look forward to helping other news organizations take the next step and join us in developing the Courant News platform for the betterment of all college news organizations.

Max Cutler is a junior at Yale University where he is Online Devleopment Manager at the Yale Daily News. He can be contacted on Twitter, via email or through his Web site (from where this piece was cross-posted).

“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.

“Many people do not care that we are students and that we are not yet professionals, so many mature readers bash our writers for their opinions or uneducated writing,” wrote Chris Ullyott, Webmaster at The Daily Titan. “ Sometimes it can be pretty discouraging.”

At the Los Angeles Times, too, Blog Editor Tony Pierce reported that one to two users a week on average are banned from ever commenting again. This is especially prevalent in stories about politics, immigration and sports, where readers have a tendency to bicker at each other rather than commenting on the story itself.

“We want to get readers’ opinions up as quickly as possible to engage in discussion,” said Pierce. “It’s very valuable to hear their point of view.”

And while papers strive for diverse opinions, there’s a fine line between running an active-user site and becoming a user-run site.

“There are a lot of places on the Internet for people to express themselves so we don’t feel we are stopping them [by monitoring comments],” Pierce relayed. “ We want to make a quality discussion.”

At The Daily Titan, computers pre-screen comments, weeding out spam and advertisement links.

“We try to create an environment friendly to users of all ages,” said Ullyott. “We do not moderate comments but we do employ a strict blacklist of “no-no words.”

Apart from software, with the July launch of the E.W. Scripps’ Asphalt Design, the Knoxville News Sentinel changed the way they manage users, this time concentrating on abnormal user activity.

“We are reviewing comments of users who just signed up,” said Lail. “And those who may have been registered for some time, but suddenly started commenting.”

Some newspapers, however, still manually monitor comments. Even with three editors to divvy up the task, Pierce spends about an hour a day pre-screening each comment that users leave on every article on the Los Angeles Times and the LA Now blog sites.

But in the digital age of endless deadlines and dwindling resources, monitoring may fall last on the to-do list. Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Robert J. Lopez attests to this.

“Stuff just falls through the cracks,” said Lopez. “The reality is there isn’t much personnel to do all that, especially when news breaks.”

Which raises the questions: why do newspapers still include comments when resources are scarce and editors could be using their time doing more quality journalism? And is creating a quality discussion equivalent to quality journalism?

Similar questions were brought up at the APME Online Credibility Workshop last May, an effort Knoxville News Sentinel initiated to reach a consensus on when to remove commenters and ban users.

“A certain percentage of users feel the comments area are their area and not ours,” said Lail.  “And a certain other percentage of users hold us responsible, at least in part, for everything that is posted on the Website.”

Perhaps the answer to this dialectic problem lies in having readers participate in the monitoring process.

The OC Register implemented a policy that gives readers the ability to silence commenters through flagging, said Online Quality Checker Carol Priest. For users who find a comment objectionable, a “remove comment” button appears next to every post. OC Register revised its policy two years ago — it now takes only two readers for a post to come down.

Following policies like that of MinnPost — which holds their readers accountable by requiring that they register and use their full name to comment — may free up editors and actually encourage constructive dialogue.

On another hand, the inconsistency with commenting policies may stem from news organizations not fully accepting user-generated content. According to a recent article, Dr. Piet Bakker found in his study about Dutch newspapers and user-generated content that the news value of comments is nominal. News organizations tend to use comments not for their newsworthiness but as a way to drive traffic and keep users coming back. Perhaps before a news organization decides on its commenting policy, it should redefine its relationship with the audience and embrace participatory journalism.

Which of these cases is closest to how your news organization handles comments? Is it time to start rethinking and reframing this essential part of Web culture? Take this opportunity to sound off in — you guessed it — the comments.

Useful links:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=103&aid=123290

http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230

http://www.wiredjournalists.com/forum/topics/worth-talking-about-do-you

http://blogs.knoxnews.com/roll/2009/06/last-week-we-put-up.html

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).

• Multiple authors: While many publications note contributors within a story’s body copy, this one is a no-brainer for online presentation — especially because it can be achieved with nothing other than a plugin. Co-Authors Plus was modified from an existing plugin by Mo Jangda with the needs of college news organizations in mind.
• Author information/contact: With the social media revolution in full swing, news staff are no longer relegated to being a faceless name on newsprint. People maintain online personas on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, and you should highlight them to increase audience interaction. Listening to your users, after all, can only lead to improved content.
• AP date/time: An important but often overlooked feature of most (if not all) news Web sites is display of when content was updated. While there are PHP functions for displaying date and time in almost any format, theme designers have their own preferences. True to journalistic form, why not stick with the industry standard of displaying things in AP style? There’s even a plugin to assist you in doing so.
• Pull quotes: For designers users especially, the linear presentation of news content online is typically neither stimulating, attractive or extra informative. An easy way to help remedy this is to add a custom CSS style for pull quotes, allowing for emphasis through means other than those that can be added via pictures or standard HTML markup.
• Proper cutline/credit styling: Speaking of pictures, it’s an unfortunate reality that visual journalists often receive the short end of the stick when it comes to having their work integrated with a story. Whether their cutlines or credits are truncated or omitted, any loss of information degrades your coverage. Instead of allowing this to happen, make an effort to find a way to properly style cutlines and credits.
• Topical landing pages: We’ve discussed it before with regard to wikis, but topics on your site — whether based on a category, tag or otherwise — should have  landing pages that are logical to navigate and styled nicely. An unfortunate side effect of WordPress’ roots as a blogging engine make it so that many theme designers fail to account for anything but chronologically sorted excerpts of posts, but anyone who wants to get their feet wet with PHP should be able to overcome this.
• Identified link types: One Web trend that came about several years ago was the visual styling of links based on target or filetype. While the practice failed to endure, its use could be beneficial to your users if your content includes many links to sources (as it should). Best of all, the styling — while a simple procedure — can be achieved even more easily with some simple plugins.
• Print stylesheets: Some might consider it ironic in this day and age, but there are still times at which readers will want to print something from your Web site. To prepare for such a case, it’s a relatively easy exercise to create a stylesheet that will nicely present your content when output to a printer. Correcting for this eventuality will make sure your hard work is appreciated to the fullest extent regardless of what medium is used for transmission.

Perhaps the best thing about improvements like these is that they can be implemented one by one when your resources allow or when you are motivated to tinker a bit. The little things aren’t deal breakers for users if they don’t exist, but their presence will make visiting your organization’s site that much better.

Do you have additions to this list or have you taken the opportunity to enact some of these changes? If so, sound off in the comments or head to the forum!

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.

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.

MediaWiki

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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.

• Price: Free
• Open source
• Requires installation
• Requires database setup
• Anyone can login to edit
• Customizable skins using CSS
• Must learn MediaWiki markup

Download MediaWiki

WordPress Wiki

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If you want the wiki to match the brand of your site rather than the typical wiki look, you can use the WordPress wiki plugin (assuming, of course, that you’re running WordPress).

Editing is straight forward because you edit the pages just like posts, and simply mark the “wiki page” option to designate wiki status.

The catch, though, is that for users to edit a page, an administrator must create a “Wiki Editor” user who has access to the backend of your site. That user is only allowed to edit pages designated as editable by an administrator, but the notion of having many users access the admin end of your site may make you uncomfortable.

• Price: Free
• Upload and activate the plugin
• Does not require database set up
• Only designated users can edit pages
• Minimally customizable
• Updates are easy once a system is established
• May be hard to organize once you start accumulating many pages
• Users can’t create new pages, only edit existing pages

If you do decide to go with this software, it would probably be best to create one account called “WikiEditor” and post the username and password at the bottom of each editable page. Create a separate page or category under which all wiki posts can fall.

Download WP-Wiki plugin

WikiSpaces

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If this is all too complicated, there is a free service that does the hosting for you. WikiSpaces is a simple solution to your wiki woes. All you have to do is sign up for an account.

• Price: Free
• Doesn’t require installation
• Does not require database set up
• Anyone can make an account and edit pages
• Can change colors; must pay to change CSS
• Free version has advertisements

This is the ideal option if you have no idea how to set up a new database or if you want something that feels more intuitive for your users to update. WikiSpaces doesn’t require users to learn complicated formatting language; it uses a clean WYSIWYG editor. The downside is that if you want full control over the look and feel and ads, you have to pay for a pro version.

Sign up for WikiSpaces

Other options

These are by no means the only wiki software out there. These are just the systems with which I have experience. Wikipedia has a full list of wiki software too. If you have any suggestions or experiences, please share.

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.

Examples of online news brands

Having an online brand different from print isn’t uncommon. Generally, online brands are distinguished by their nameplates like these sans serif logos:

Steps to building an online brand

1. Develop a unique name if your print identity is a common one. For example, The San Diego Union-Tribune is “Sign On San Diego” online;  The Detroit Free-Press is “freep.com.”
2. Develop a logo. You can play off your print logo or create something completely unique and original. There should be a single, differentiating icon that can be used everywhere and recognized as representing your newspaper. (For example, CoPress’ icon is a puzzle piece)
3. In print, use that logo when referring or teasing to the site so your readers associate your print brand with your online brand. As shown in the Baltimore Sun example, the online brand is incorporated into the print masthead.
4. Use the logo everywhere online: your site, social networks, in the corner of your videos, etc. When people see your logo, they should associate it with your news site. 
5. Run a few house ads in print and online to let your readers know you’re changing your look
6. Keep it consistent. Once you develop a new online brand, don’t switch it up, or else you’ll risk your news organization’s credibility.

Brands in student media

The following logos were taken from student media Twitter pages. This is an example of where a single icon can come in handy, as opposed to using an entire nameplate.