CoPress

As the school year winds down to an end, many news organizations are searching for the next online editor. If you already have your next online editor, then the summer is a perfect time for him or her to brush up on necessary skills that will make your news website flourish.

Finding the balance

Ideally, an online editor will have both the tech-smarts and the journalism abilities to present news content in web-friendly way. You can teach someone how to embed a video from YouTube or add a new article to a CMS, but teaching someone how to write a lead can’t be done through an hour-long training session. 

Splitting the job

Increasingly, the responsiblity of maintaining the website is more than a one-man show.

As Andrew Spittle suggested in the CoPress forum, the best way to balance the job is to split the web position into a web developer and web editorial position.  Editing articles in addition to training the staff for multimedia year-round leaves little time to focus on developing new features. 

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College media is a funny beast. It seems to lag about a year to three years behind the mainstream media. This applies web-first thinking, blogging, web site design, and monetization. So, this weekend, when the CoPress forum became an active discussion of CPM vs CPC vs CPD ad models, I couldn’t help but grin twice.

First, because this is a conversation that the rest of the media had a few years ago (and has never resolved), and second, because this struck on a particular passion of mine – monetizing online media. (Go figure, the Business Director is interested in monetization)

The following post is an expansion of my forum comments, and still worth a read if you’ve already been through the forum.

The Current System

There are really three ways for advertisers: by impression, by click, and by time period (usually day). Of course, there are hybrids of all three models, which the top ad networks utilize (Facebook, Google). The issue, is that all of these models have some inherent flaw. CPM doesn’t reward for the effectiveness of an ad, CPC necessarily reward high traffic, and CPD, while it guarantees a nice minimum about you can make, has both of the same issues.
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Assuming that your college newspaper is on Facebook as a professional page, there is a good chance it isn’t updated often or doesn’t have many “fans.” Why not?

The best way to get traffic to your site is from links, and if your Facebook page is used correctly it can bring a great amount of traffic to your site.

Here are my top 10 ways to make sure that your Facebook Page doesn’t get overlooked:

1. Use RSS Feeds. It will be a great load off your shoulders to know that every time a new article is put up on your site, it will appear automatically on your Facebook Page. You can bring RSS feeds to your page by do adding Applications in the edit area of your page. The one I recommend is Simply RSS. It’s quite reliable and does the job well.

2. Use the Status Feature. Since the redesign, Facebook now has given Pages the opportunity to update their Fans without having to flood them (the old Facebook page’s version of statuses that went into their own separate inbox which often became overwhelming). Since the newest version of Pages include statuses, you can update your fans that will appear in their News Feed, which will make your publication’s Facebook page that much more visible than before.

3. Update Your Fans. The feature from the old version of Facebook pages can still be effective, so don’t overlook it. Some Facebook users have a tendency to ignore updates when they are sent to them but not all. Updates also allow you longer form communication with your Fans.

4. Use multimedia to make your Facebook a mini website. Consider putting the main slideshows and videos you put on your Web site onto your Facebook Page too. This content can then enter your Fans’ News Feeds. The NY Times’ Facebook Page is a good examples of this.

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The background

College news organizations need to move beyond advertising. Now.

Hold that thought.

Some background: The topic of generating revenue to sustain news organizations has begun to consume my thoughts about journalism. There are a number of reasons why, but this mostly came after a little meetup last Saturday in DC called RevenueTwoPointZero (Rev2oh on Twitter).

This isn’t the first time our humble CoPress crew is talking about the business side of journalism. Namely, check out Joey Baker‘s post from December, “But we make all our money from newsprint!”.

But why? Aren’t we just about technology and college news sites?

No. That’s a main theme, but we would be remiss if we left revenue off the table. It’s hard to run a news site without money, unless you’re an exception.

Actually, one of our three main goals directly relates to making money: We want student news organizations to generate more online revenue by having full control over their sites.

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Words of warning. The following post is hotly contested internally among us CoPress folk. Very likely this is controversial to the greater community as well. But at the risk of having people with pitchforks or angry twitterers show up at my door, I’ll go ahead and share my opinion.

I’d like to propose a simple rule:

Tags should never contain a proper noun.

This is a maxim is intended to avoid frustration from both users and content creators by implementing tags in a useful way.

Tags are the darling child of the social networking, web 2.0 community. The concept is simple really: words or short phrases that, as metadata, can be attached to anything on the web to enable easier searching, better SEO, and greater user ease of use. But, when misused they become overwhelming, hard to use and irrelevant.

Here’s the logic behind the rule to never put a proper noun in a tag: the term you’re entering is likely already in the article and therefore searchable. If it’s already there, then putting it into the tags is not only a repeated, wasted effort, but it is going to confuse the reader by culttering up the tag cloud.

• Wasted effort. If you’ve already put the proper noun in the article than the information is already there. Likewise for photos, the information should already be in the caption. Why would you spend the extra time trying to get the information in two places?
• You’re giving the reader too much info to sort through. A ton of information is good for computers, but if you want tags to be user-friendly (often the argument for putting proper nouns into the tag cloud), you need to limit what you choose to use.
• The whole post is already searchable. If you’ve got the person’s name or the place in the article, caption, description, whatever it is you’re writing, the data is searchable. Tags are there to add additional information that you couldn’t writing directly into the post.
• There’s no way you’re going to be able to remember every single proper noun that could possibly be affected. Let the semantic web (when it finally comes about) take care of that for you.

What should be tagged

Tags are meant to be used for conceptual information that you would never write in the post, but you’d like to attach to your data. Read more →

This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform; and while the Web can do that, the idea of re-purposing news content had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild. It permitted the press to delay the date of migration.

– Migration Point for the Press Tribe, Jay Rosen

Newspapers got it all wrong when the went online—simply shoveling their content from the print product into a template Web site and saying, “There, we’re online.”

They’ve never really been ‘first class citizens’ of the Web, however. Newspapers are still not doing simple things like linking or tagging or using social media. They’re online in that they have a Web site, but they’re still using a print mentality to maintain it. Read more →

News wikis haven’t make it big yet but, in my opinion, their day is soon.

In a conversation I was having with Joey Baker the other day, we were talking about micropayments, monetization, and how news differs from music, movies, and other forums of content. His argument is that news is “read once, and then file away” while the other forms have “repeat use” value which makes them easier to charge for. This got me thinking. Journalism shouldn’t just be about broadcasting the most recent event of the day, but also providing accurate, vetted, and independent information to educate the community. In fact, news websites are pretty bad with this other side of journalism. If I want to understand the context for an issue’s current situation beyond what’s presented in the article, I’ve got to use an atrocious site search tool to find previous articles on the issue. There has to be a better way to get me to the information I need to know.

Enter: the wiki. Read more →

Bloggers are the anti-journalist.

Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among “true” journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of… blogging: consistently producing good content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.

The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.

Now, some strategies for getting readers engaged. Read more →

As I’m sure everyone is aware, there’s been a lot of talk in the media as a whole about the fate of print news as more people (supposedly) turn to the Internet as their favored information source.

This got me thinking quite a bit about exactly why that is. Many who write about the murder of newspapers at the hands of digital media make it seem as if it is inevitable. As if to say, it must be so, because the Internet is much more shinier and newer than newsprint, and therefore must obviously be newsprint’s destroyer.

I find fault in this attribution of Darwinian evolution to our forms of media.

For the most part, our industry has looked at the Internet as either an opposing force or a distasteful side-dish that has to be served in order to appease the people. Again, I don’t believe that either has to be the case. There are ways of harnessing digital content and making it work in partnership with your print content, meshing the two together. Read more →

The CoPress hosting plan is doomed to failure according to Dean Chen, lead developer at The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper.

In an e-mail forwarded to the CoPress Googe Group, Dean wrote: (emphasis added)

I don’t like the idea of sharing a server with other papers, the primary reason being that if another site receives record traffic the response time of our site will suffer as an result. The specifications for the server hosting all the virtual servers is actually lower than what I was planning for our site only. To put it in perspective, the desktop in my dorm is much better configured than that server.

Their hosting plan also seems to be geared towards wordpress, which i much less demanding resource wise than drupal.

After receiving so much good press lately, it sure is refreshing to have someone take us to task on a technical issue — something that we’re supposed to be teaching other people about.

Dean makes some good points and got the CoPress team talking on New Year’s Eve. We’ve realized that there are several things that our organization, which strives for transparency, hasn’t made entirely clear. Read more →