CoPress

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?

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!

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.

Leading into this week’s Hacking the Student Newsroom session, here’s a quick preview of online projects individual student journalists and newsorgs will be conducting over the upcoming winter break:

Investigative multimedia site from McKenna Ewen

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

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

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

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

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

SR2 Blog from Josh Halliday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SB Statesman redesign and restructuring from Bradley Donaldson

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

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

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

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

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

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

When news that a Cal Poly student had gone missing hit the Mustang Daily newsroom, editors knew they had a big story on their hands. The next morning when the student’s bike was found at the base of a local mountain, the implications for the story were larger. The editors were on the cusp of a breaking news story and a potentially huge influx of traffic.

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

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

1. Keep your site delivering the story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Make sure your article gets read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Develop an editorial strategy

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

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

Many newspapers are now transitioning to a Web-first workflow; among other things, this means that weekly papers can break stories online long before they’re printed in the newspaper. At The Maine Campus, we’ve faced problems deciding how to handle new developments in such stories — whether older versions of the story get a write-through or we create a new post for the development, and whether we should write a separate version of the story for our print edition.

An example of a situation when The Maine Campus had to adapt to appeal to both Web and print audiences.

One factor is whether you view your paper as a daily news organization with a print newspaper once or twice a week, or as a weekly newspaper with a Web-first workflow. At The Campus, we’re fairly new to Web-first reporting, so we’ve made a decision to continue to tailor our print edition to our print readers. Sometimes this means taking the latest story we’ve posted to the Web and adding additional context grafs from earlier stories so readers who haven’t been following the story online aren’t lost. As we get more used to writing for the Web first, I expect we’ll get used to treating every day like a new issue of the paper, even if we don’t have a print edition coming out that day, and we’ll expect readers to check our Web site every day for new stories and updates.

Other papers have already embraced the latter. The Washington Square News, the student newspaper at New York University, bills itself as a daily even though it only publishes four days a week in print. On Fridays it publishes online and expects readers to stay tuned to the Web site one day a week, at least.

The WSN doesn’t publish any of Friday’s stories in Monday’s paper unless new information breaks, making it one of the most Web-reliant college papers out there. Only once in the year or so since WSN moved to Web-only on Friday has the paper put out a special issue — when members of a radical student group called Take Back NYU barricaded themselves inside one of the student centers for more than 24 hours.

Here are a few basic things to consider when deciding how to handle articles that are published on the Web long before print:

1. If there is any change in the news — any sort of breaking detail — it should probably get its own post. Not only will Google News not re-index the article after it’s been initially published but this also enables readers to easily identify when there have been major developments.
2. Be sure you know your audience. Use Google Analytics to find out who’s visiting your site, when and what they read.
3. If you go Web-first, be sure to stress to both your Web and print readers that you post articles online every day. Truly Web-first newspapers should have a steady stream of readers on their Web sites, not a giant spike of traffic the day the newspaper comes out. Convince your readers the Web site is more than just a carbon copy of your paper edition.

If you can build up your online readership by building up expectations of what will be offered, as WSN has done by cutting out a day of the print edition, papers can effectively use their Web sites as extensions of their print editions. Smaller papers will have to build a bridge between their print and online audience before readers will come to expect multiple updates online.

The most important thing is to make sure you don’t leave your readers confused. A final idea is to refer to your Web site in print with something like, “For more information on such and such, visit mainecampus.com.”

This guest post is both an update on our previous coverage of Connect2Mason and the first in our new series about innovative models of interest to college media sites.

George Mason University has an interesting community; with many of the students living off-campus or attending classes at one of the four satellite campuses, finding a way to reach out to and work with them can be difficult. We are always looking at what’s going on online to figure out which tools can help us best.

With that in mind, we’ve launched two websites, Mason Votes and onMason, in the past year and a half. We’re also in the midst of a second redesign of Connect2Mason, our convergence website which pulls content from all of our other student media outlets. We’ve also been pretty serious about expanding our social media presence to cover the needs of our diverse community.

onMason

At the beginning of this semester we launched a new site called onMason. During the last two years, we’ve noticed that a lot of students are out there, blogging, sending pictures from their phones to the web and creating websites. We felt that we were missing a serious opportunity to bring student-created media to the forefront because, even though we run searches, there’s always going to be a huge amount of stuff we’re going to miss.

Read more →

Google News, Google’s news indexing engine, has received a lot of criticism and praise alike largely because it’s a powerful way of driving traffic to news websites.

Rupert Murdoch recently accused Google of stealing content from the News Corp. news outlets and even went as far as threatening to pull all News Corp.’s content from all Google indexes. Although protecting their revenue stream is important for big corporations like News Corp., it is a big mistake to think that the free availability of news content is damaging. Internet news directories like Google News offer student news publications an opportunity to tap new markets and reach new audiences.

I believe that exposure is very valuable for any news organization, and that as a news organization you have to be wherever your audience is. As college newspapers, we are usually serving a relatively small geographic area with our news organizations. But does this mean that only people in this particular area would be interested in what we report? Of course not! Now that almost any college newspaper has an online presence, it is time to start reaching out beyond these geographically confined areas and reach new audiences that we otherwise could access.

Read more →

WordCamp NYC 2009 — a two-day, community-organized conference held at Baruch College of the City University of New York — offered a lot of inspiring sessions on how people and organizations are using WordPress, WordPressMU, BuddyPress and BBPress to manage content and build communities.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, here is a sampling of what you missed:

Case Study: WNET.org

WNET.org worked with Tierra Innovation to build 50 sites in 10 months using WordPress MU.
Related:

• WordPress CMS Toolkit and Best Plugins.
• Sleepless in Social Media: WordCamp NYC 2009 WNET.org case study
• WordPress Publisher Blog: Fifty Sites. Ten Months. One CMS.
• Case Study: How a Non-Profit Media Company Profits from Building Open Source Online Publishing Platform (PDF)

BuddyPress Group API Extension

Andy Peatling, lead developer on BuddyPress, talked about the new Group API Extension and showed how it could be used to pull Twitter feeds into BuddyPress groups.

The Texas Tribune, an innovative news start-up located in Austin, is a non-profit that seeks to cover news in the entire state using features like extensive databases, blogs, calendar, an elected officials directory (and an iPhone app for it), a state newswire,  a slick mobile site and much more.

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

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

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