CoPress

In terms of scale and scope, Election Day is consistently one of the biggest stories of the year. Generally presidential election years receive the most attention, and most newspapers depend on wire services to provide the results.

This year, Maine’s ballot contained a referendum to overturn a law allowing same-sex marriage. The turnout was immense (60 percent, more than double the usual turnout in an off year) and we wanted to make sure we had our own, unique coverage. The Maine Campus had been following the run-up to the election closely, and we were committed to providing up-to-the-moment coverage. We were able to avoid wire reports using easily acquired tools larger news orgs haven’t adopted yet.

We used a plugin for WordPress called Live Blogging to quickly and easily add updates to a single page. The plugin allowed two reporters to collaborate at different locations without worrying about overwriting posts and gave readers a single page to come back to to receive updates. It also tweeted (and re-tweeted) our updates so our Twitter readers could follow along.

Our updates went out faster and more frequently than larger news organizations updated their Web sites. One news organization even used our reporting to decide whether or not to call the close election.

When WordPress really showed its true colors, though, was when one of the organizations decided to declare victory. Within minutes we had written and posted a brief to the Web site. It was only a matter of seconds to reconfigure the front page and send out a breaking news e-mail. Other proprietary content management systems would not have allowed us to report with the ease and speed at which we did.

Larger news organizations have advantages of money and larger staffs, but The Maine Campus had an advantage that allowed us to scoop them on one of the biggest stories of the year: WordPress.

Max Cutler, Web developer at the Yale Daily News and Courant News, recently started a forum topic about presenting multimedia on a student news site that we’ve been meaning to start a conversation around. The YDN recently launched a new landing page for their multimedia that offers a much more graphic view. What’s your reaction to how the page presents different type of media? Is it better to have content organized by topic or content type? What’s your ideal multimedia browsing experience? Weigh in on the thread!

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

In “Defining What’s Good in Digital Journalism,” Mark Briggs led a panel discussion featuring Bryan Murley from the Center for Innovation in College Media, James Wickett from impactnews.com and Gary Chapman from the University of Texas at Austin.

The session began with the showing of a video produced by Lexington Herald-Leader photographer Charles Bertram about a one-legged Little League player. Despite simple production values, the piece garnered an unprecedented amount of page views after going viral. According to the panelists, the story is a prime example of what is good in digital journalism and its success was incumbent to that. Read more →

August E. Grant speaking in the Austin Convention Center.

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

August E. Grant from the University of South Carolina shared lessons learned from Newsplex, a project that started in 2002. From the site, the Newsplex’s mission statement:

Newsplex was built to help news organizations adapt to a future in which people acquire news and information in different formats and across platforms. It is a laboratory where new techniques and technologies are evaluated.

A few notes from Grant’s talk:

On retaining traffic

If you aren’t in the habit of posting in a 24-hour news cycle, you aren’t going to retain readers at regular intervals. By planning your updates, you will get more traffic. If you know a different demographic comes to your site at night, change the site content to reflect that change in audience.

Keeping content timely, always

In the online world, content is out there forever in the form of newspaper and Internet archives. It’s not like old media where a broadcast is gone at the end of the hour. Because online content is always there, you need to change the way to present it. The interest will persist beyond constraints of time because the content is always searchable and accessible.

Digital signage

Paper signs as a means of marketing are going away.

“There are going to be more jobs created in the next five years because of digital signage than there were in the 1980s for the Internet,” Grant said.

The concept of putting stickers or posters on the walls of restaurants and stores, Grant predicts those messages will be replaced with LCD screens in the windows that are animated and interactive. Journalists can step into this role because the same concepts of telling a story interactively apply. (But only make the switch if you want to be rich, he noted).

Challenges on the web

• User generated content: If anyone can be a journalist, does journalism matter? Referencing Steve Outing, Grant said to give every reporter a way to interact with the audience and a way to solicit user generated content so it can be moderated and edited.
• Mobile media: It’s instant. There are more contributors. People are reading information in smaller chunks and thinking they know everything they need to know.
• Tools: We sometimes get caught up in the tools instead of the content. Grant says you need to know the tools and the tech, but the content is still the most important.

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

In the “Townsquare” session, led by Arvil Ward and Anthony Pesce, the Populous Project was demoed. The Populous Project is a Knight News Challenge funded project that is working to build a content management system for student news publications based on Django.

Among the technologies demoed were the Digital Newsroom, which is a system of tracking story assignments that is currently implemented by the UCLA Daily Bruin. As Arvil said, “this provides a communication tool with the ability to manage the newsroom online.” It has threaded commenting for story ideas and notifications for when an assignment changes. Interestingly, it is not yet integrated with the content management system and how closely it will be able to manage content is to be determined.

Also demoed was Campuswalk, UCLA’s project to create a unified, cohesive, and searchable campus gateway. The current system is not up to the task in the eyes of Arvil and they’re working hard at building something better. It will make professor reviews, housing reviews, and swapping books more social.

The final piece of the demo was Localresearch.com. Arvil described this as focused marketing to small local businesses that seeks to reinvent the decreasing value of print advertising. They provide a database of local business listings and for $45 a month they work with companies to create more full-featured listings that include links to social media, reviews, and more.

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

Kristin Millis (University of Washington) and Jason Manning (Arizona State) shared ways to market your newspaper both online and offline.

A few things they’re doing to market themselves and make money:

• Build a full multimedia company and sell campaigns. Example: University of Washington charges to do “chalk on the ground” campaigns for $30/chalk
• UW Gave away 10k condoms when releasing their sex edition a week before Valentine’s Day
• Live tweeting, live video updates from sports events
• House ads in print product to promote their social media products
• Univ. of Washington charges thousands to do viral marketing videos (see example below)

Social media

Undoubtedly, social media is one of the strongest and easiest forms of marketing a college newsorg can do. A few tips:

• Don’t need official “Twitter staff,” but when posting to social media it’s important to be organized about it in breaking news situations
• Be personal about it. For example, if your newsroom holds a “pie week,” tweet, “What’s your favorite pie?” to loop your readers into newsroom happenings
• Do Facebook advertisements. They can be as cheap as $25 and give you the opportunity to bring more people in (plus, you can target it specifically at people from your university)
• Be on their minds all day, no shotgun effect
• Congratulate staff members who have won awards
• Don’t just put it on your newsorg newsfeed, but double post to your own newsfeed
• Ethical standards that apply to jour apply to social media realm

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

In the “Multimedia Storytelling” session, presented by photojournalist David Stephenson, the Canon 5D Mark II was showcased as a tool to solve the problems faced by today’s visual journalists. To that end, Stephenson began the session by highlighting his 5D Mark II tip sheet, later showcasing pieces produced by his team at kentucky.com. Included herein are some notable quotes and notes from the 50-minute presentation. Read more →

Andy Dehnart from Reality Blurred demoed Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, and Google Voice among other things at the ACP/CMA 2009 conference. He started with a recap of how Facebook fan pages can benefit your news organization. Among other things the insights that Facebook offers could prove useful to figuring out how effective campaigns are.

He said that while a few years ago Google was the main traffic source for his site it has now become Twitter and Facebook. He says that “you need to speak to people where they already are” and that the top “neighborhoods” for online activity are now those sites.

Next up was Twitter and a quick introduction to how it works and how to use it. Andy mentioned that you need a solid vision of what you’ll be using Twitter for before you just start posting tweets. There needs to be a purpose in order for it to be effective for your news organization.

Quote URL was mentioned and looks like an interesting tool for aggregating conversations or reactions to a specific topic. You’re able to enter in links to various tweets and then Quote URL aggregates them into a central list.

Toward the end the subject moved to general site comments. Andy said that if you don’t yet have comments “it’s worth having a conversation about whether you want and/or need comments.” He cited the concerns over turning the comments list into a string of irrelevant posts. The takeaway: make sure that people will be using the comments and that you have a clear purpose for wanting them.

Much of the general conversation centered around how to make all of these tools as frictionless as possible. For both Facebook and Twitter tools that turned your stream into an automatic RSS list dump were brought up as great and efficient solutions.

After the demo some asked how much standard English conventions matter on Twitter. Andy’s response was that it really depends on your audience and purpose. If they won’t be bothered then it won’t be as large of a concern. However, there need to be some parameters and guidelines set beforehand so that everyone is clear going into the tool.

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 →