CoPress

We announced the first iteration of our turnkey hosting solution last December, and launched our first client by the end of January 2009. Now we’re announcing round two.

We call it Managed Hosting.

The first version of our strategic development roadmap [PDF], a fancy name for a document with big ideas for the future of CoPress, had hosting and support as an “optional” project if we absolutely needed to do it. Bryan Murley convinced us of the need in college media for a turnkey hosting solution. This “optional” project is now the current flagship of CoPress’ product line.

Since the beginning, demand for our services has skyrocketed past our initial estimates. By the end of this month, we’ll have helped move more than 25 student newspapers to WordPress – a highly-flexible, and open-source CMS. To meet the almost-overwhelming demand – we actually needed a waitlist for part of the summer – we have a new approach that will allow us to scale while providing the same high level of support.

Until now, CoPress’ hosting and service model was run on servers we operated. Although a good approach, it had a few weaknesses.

First, it wasn’t a cloud service. This meant that we needed to make sure every server had extra capacity in case any of the sites end up a massive surge in traffic. This extra capacity is generally wasted on a day-to-day basis.

Second, because each server works for five or six newsorgs, our launch schedule was highly restricted; once we filled one server, we had a difficult time launching another until we had at least five more clients ready to go.

Finally, our dedicated hosting services provided the same resources for all of our clients, big or small. This effectively means that our smaller clients were subsidizing the hosting of our larger clients, clearly not an equitable situation.

Managed Hosting means we can focus on our real strength: support. We’re working with one of the world’s top hosts, WebFaction, which lets us offer different levels of cloud hosting to fit each school. As a part of our transition package, we’ll move you to WordPress from virtually any other content management system and provide ample support to get your website up and running.

Once you’ve launched your new website, you have the opportunity to become a member of our Priority Support System. In a nutshell, the system is a safety net. We want you to innovate without fear. We’ll be there to help you with your website when you need it the most, as well as help you with all the bigger projects you want to do (classifieds, housing guide, etc.) at an affordable rate.

More specifically, partnering with CoPress means that you’ll get fast access to all of our support offerings. We’ll be monitoring your site’s status and sending out warning messages in case of downtime. We’ll store your username and password for your hosting and WordPress installation so that our team can respond immediately to serious issues. We’ll also backup your entire site every day to two different data centers to make sure that your information is always safe — even if you accidentally break your theme.

Sound intriguing? Contact us for more information or get started today.

Oh, by the way. We’ve redesigned our website too. If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, you should come check it out. It’s a bit more bold, dashing, and integrated, and we’ll be launching new features and content bit by bit. If you’re looking for a bit of design inspiration, we’ve chronicled most of the process on our team blog. Also, we’ll be making tweaks and changes throughout the week so pardon our dust.

That’s right, Greg Linch has gotten hella hired and is upgrading to business class. (He’s sticking around CoPress as an advisor though.) Which means we’re now looking for an energetic, forward-thinking, and helpful individual to take his place as CoPress’ Community Ninja.

This talented, network-focused, person will focus their efforts on increasing the quantity and quality of interactions between student news organizations. It’ll be your goal to know of all of the different projects going on, who is working on what, and finding ways for them to work together.

We’ve got lots of tools for you to do this with too, including our social network accounts, forum, etc., and it would be wonderful if you can analytically track how well these engagement efforts are working.

Like the rest of the core team at CoPress, the position is not paid at the moment. The flip side, however, is that you’ll get to work with really smart people on a rapidly expanding project. We’re looking for a student who can commit between 15 and 20 hours/week.

Sound interesting? Send an email to apply@copress.org and we’ll hook you up with the job description and application. The position is open until filled.

Clarification: Courant News is being developed as a side project of Max Cutler, Robert Baskin and Paul O’Shannessy — independent of the Yale Daily News. It will eventually become the Yale Daily News’ CMS.

Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern (Tuesday, May 5th) Emily and I will record a new episode of This Week in CoPress with Max Cutler and Robert Baskin, discussing their Courant News CMS project. Courant is an open-source Django CMS that Max has blogged about extensively on his site. We’ll talk about main features, the installation process, theme capabilities, and what their vision for the future is.

We’ll be hosting the call on Skype. If you wish to call in, please contact me with your Skype name or phone number at greg [at] copress [dot] org. You will be added to the call and be able to ask questions.

We’re trying this as a higher quality alternative to BlogTalkRadio. Let us know what you think. We’re also still looking at ways to stream it live, so please leave ideas in the comments. Thanks!

As always, the full podcast will be available here on the blog on Wednesday.

CoPress will be getting some professional help this afternoon. No! Not that kind! (Although that wouldn’t hurt!) We’ll be speaking with professional journalists about what they would do with the web if they were college media leaders in today’s world.

We’ll be talking to New York Times reporter and former TVNewser blogger and Towerlight Editor in Chief Brian Stelter about what college newspapers can do to become more innovative online, in the newsroom and with readers.

Howard Owens, former Director of Digital Publishing at Gatehouse Media and now Publisher of The Batavian, is also planning on joining the conversation.

Want to get tips from these pros about how to take your paper’s website to the next level in the upcoming school year? Tune in or participate by joining our chat or call-in.

The conversation will take place at 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern. If you miss it, we’ll publish the recorded version on Wednesday.

We might also have some other professionals stop by, so be sure to tune in and get a fresh perspective on what you need to do both for your publication and yourself to improve.

Today — four months after first learning about CoPress through Twitter —  the Mustang Daily launched its new WordPress site, hosted and supported by CoPress. The Mustang Daily, a 2008 Online Pacemaker Winner and 2009 Pacemaker Finalist, had been with College Publisher since 2006.

Website Design

We went with the Gazette Edition from WooThemes because it gave us all the basic capabilities we were looking for:

• Prominent ads
• Wigetized sidebar
• Slick, rotating slideshow
• Auto-generated thumbnails

Advertising

During a time when revenue is falling, having full control over priority ad space is a must. We have a top banner (468 x 60 pixels), a sidebar ad (300 x 250 pixels) and up to four square ads on the lower sidebar (125 x 125 pixels).

We installed a WordPress plugin that allows for a “page peel” style advertisement in the top corner of the site. Although probably annoying to some, people like playing with it.

Read more →

This Week in CoPress is getting a lot more interactive! Tonight (April 6th) at 6 p.m. Greg Linch and Emily Kostic will be taking calls and chatting online with listeners on BlogTalkRadio.

Tonight’s topic of discussion? Your web plans for next year. We’ll be talking to future EICs (and those running for that position) about how they plan to make their publications more Web savvy, bring in more money online, reorganizing a staff for the Web, or whatever else they come up with. We want to start a conversation and hear your ideas on how you plan on helping your college publication become more tech-focused.

If you can’t tune in at 6 p.m. ET, check back here on Wednesday to see a recorded version of the show.

This Week in CoPress: Monday at 6 p.m. ET on Blogtalkradio. Same great guests, only now you get to be a part of the conversation.

We love bringing you This Week in CoPress every week, and are working with how to make it more interactive. Next week’s solution? We’ll do it live! Same great guests, only now you get to be a part of the conversation. Here’s a bit of what we’re thinking:

Launch date: Week of April 5th

Length of Show: 30 minutes. This could change after the first week if we decide we need more time, but we think it’s better to run out of time the first week than to scramble to come up with things to say.

Number of Hosts: 2 . We’re going to try to make this more conversational, so it will be best to have two people who are familiar with one another that can also bounce off each other.

Number  of Guests: Ideally just 1. Having too many guests could easily get out of hand, especially since we’ll also be dealing with people calling in and people in the chat room.

When to Record: Dun-Dun-Dun! The controversial question. What do you think?

We have a new core team member: Emily Kostic!

Emily, whose title will be editorial associate, will work on the CoPress blog and This Week in CoPress podcast.

One of her ideas is to the make the podcast more participatory, possibly by using BlogTalkRadio, recording live shows and allowing listeners to “call in” with questions and comments. This idea goes along nicely with Daniel’s goal of making the podcasts more like a discussion than an interview.

Some background on Emily:

Emily is a junior studying journalism at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. She currently serves as the managing editor and Web editor for The Whit. In her role, Emily led the staff in incorporating more multimedia tools after The Whit transitioned to WordPress as CoPress’s first client. Outside of journalism, Emily enjoys traveling and listening to music.

From her experience at The Whit to her awesome blog, we’ve known for awhile that Emily would make a great addition to the team and we’re thrilled to have her on board.

And, just to leave a teaser, we’re looking to add another new team member in the next couple months. Stay tuned…

E-mail Emily at emily [at] copress [dot] org or follow her on Twitter: @emilykostic.

Ok, I can’t get much hokier than that. Now is the time to get involved with CoPress! If you’d like to, we’ve started outlining a few golden paths to do so:

Contribute to the Blog

Redesign your website recently? Have an idea for the next killer student news application? Join the growing list of contributors to the CoPress Blog by pitching your idea to blog@copress.org. 

Connect in the Forum

When we relaunched the website a few weeks back, we installed a super powerful WordPress plugin called Simple:Press Forum. Our goal is to provide ways for our community, you guys, to connect on a regular basis about all things tech, student media, and journalism. At the moment, you can leave questions about WordPress, Django, and Drupal, and also participate in the weekly discussion group. This week Greg asks, “what ways are you generating revenue right now, how would you would evaluate your success and what would you like to do in the future?” We’d certainly enjoy having you weigh in. Read more →

Starting a business, even as a non-profit, can cost some money—or so we’ve learned here at CoPress.

Our hosting project is aimed at giving schools fast, reliable service on a well-supported open source platform. We’re doing this because we see a distinct need in college media to move online in a meaningful fashion and we believe that many current solutions are poor.

It’s our thinking that a centralized place to share resources among many newsrooms can benefit everyone, and apparently we were right. There is a very widespread need for services just like these, and we’ve been growing a lot faster than we had anticipated. While this makes us ecstatic, it also means that we don’t currently have the money to support the growth on our own.

CoPress is a non-profit initiative that has thus far been funded entirely out of our own pockets. We’ve come to realize that our small group of college students alone isn’t capable of raising the money necessary to do all that we want to do, however, so we’re asking for your help.

We’d like to offer you this challenge: the next time you go to buy a soft drink, a bag of pretzels or think about super-sizing that burger, pocket the cash and pledge it to helping us. We could really use the extra dollar.