CoPress

Recommended links for the weekend:

• It’s the season of new sites. On Wednesday, we helped Brian Manzullo take the new CM Life live. He has since written a thoughtful post to the community, as well as a more detailed post about the new features of the site. Late last night, a new, more Drupally Daily Tar Heel went online. Andrew Dunn, Sara Gregory, and other staffers give a short introduction and talk about their plans for the upcoming year.
• Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better When It Comes To Online Ad Formats – “The study, which was based on 2,390 online display campaigns running over the past three years, found that so-called “half banners” (those measuring 234 x 60) and rectangles (180 x 150) were more effective than ads that frame the page such as high profile leaderboards and skyscrapers.” (tks Joey Baker)
• Will Davis deserves significant props for the amount of work he’s been doing to improve the wiki. The focus of what he’s doing is configuring Semantic MediaWiki to make all of the semi-structured data on a newspaper profile available in aggregate form. We now have over 120 newspapers listed in the directory; if you see that yours is missing detailed information, please add to it!
• Max Cutler would like to see a “feature matrix with links for college news sites.” I’d like to see that, as well as a page on the wiki dedicated to just brainstorming and listing out new ideas. For instance, in the forum, Brian asked about a “breaking news” box that could occasionally appear on the home page, as well as ideas for sweet author pages. It would be great if we could capture these on the wiki in such a fashion that, if I wanted to get some inspiration for author pages regardless of CMS, I could go to that page to see what other people have done.

Help us out with the curation process by joining the CoPress Newsgroup.

The best links of the last two weeks (I’ll do this on a weekly basis beginning next week, I swear) via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup that you’re more than welcome to join:

• Rob Curley at the Las Vegas is looking for fall interns that know the latest and greatest of the web and can “write their backsides off.” At Serra Media, Mark Briggs wants “fresh perspectives and top-notch talent” to join his team for 9 to 12 weeks.
• Andy Dickinson released a WordPress plugin on Tuesday that allows the author to comment on individual paragraphs in the post. It’s wonderful to see some of the greatest things about the News Mixer project being ported over the WordPress. Now we wait for the plugin that allows you to do 140 character comments natively. (Tks Greg Linch for the link)
• If better self-branding is a goal for the fall, then Mindy McAdams has an excellent list of ten tips for you. Notable priorities: making sure someone can find you by googling your first and last name, posting your resume online in HTML and not as a PDF (although having it available as a PDF download can also be useful), and being a part of the conversation online. (Tks Brian Manzullo for the link)
• In the past week, Twitter as all about Facebook, FriendFeed, and tr.im. Jeffery Zeldman, a notable designer, has taken the approach of not using any third-party URL shorteners and instead runs all of his posts off his own domain with a WordPress plugin called, you guessed it, “Short URL plugin.” If your domain is short enough that this makes sense, it would probably be a worthwhile approach that would help avoid link rot. On a related note, Max Cutler and David Estes came down to Portland last weekend. One of the projects that actually came to life was a URL shortener app for Courant News.

There are at least a few active conversations going on in the forum that you should check out. Chris Ullyott is putting together a staff page for the Daily Titan and is figuring out a way to automatically pull in profile images to the page. I started a thread for a Featured Posts widget I’d like to build when I have the chance.

Kevin Koehler and Megan Taylor have been working hard on new content for the wiki that we hope to start introducing over the weekend. In the meantime, Kevin is compiling a list of blogs related to specific topics that wants your input.

The best links of the past two weeks (yes, I missed last week) that you probably should read over the weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup which you can join and contribute to if you’d like):

• Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media – An idea for a better way of compensating the “citizen journalists” who do on-the-spot reporting when an event happens. Sounds like a good business idea to me.
• For those following the Associated Press DRM conversation, there are two important articles which pretty well sum the entire thing up: “AP Launches Open Source Ascribenation Project,” by Doc Searls, and “Microformats, hNews, the AP and the Animals,” by Steve Yelvington. DRM aside, it will be really sweet if the hNews format is codified into something that’s adopted. There’s a lot of semantic data produced by newspapers that’s lost to the machines, and the markup for hNews is relatively simple to incorporate into your website if you can modify the template (open source for the win, by the way).
• Brian Manzullo of Central Michigan Life has started redesigning their website in preparation for an August 20 launch (disclosure: we’re giving a bit of help). It’s worth paying attention, however, because I think he’s going to learn a number of sharable lessons along the way. Check out discussions in the forum about navigational menus and revamping CM Life’s website logo.
• What an AP alternative could look like – A source of material for people to mix, match, and create news packages. An iStockPhoto for news content. This could be useful on the collegiate level as well.
• If you aren’t subscribed already, Rebooting the News is a highly recommended listen. In the most recent podcast, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer cover personalized suggested user lists for Twitter and the expand upon the idea of a virtual assignment desk. If we can meet our delivery timeline (knock on wood), I’m optimistic that the Edit Flow Project will provide a solid foundation for crowdsourcing story assignments.

On the wiki, we now have a really decent editorial strategy thanks to Megan Taylor. We’ll be building our content there over the next month as well as (hopefully) skinning the wiki in alignment with our website relaunch. The goal for the wiki is to have the community take ownership over editorial quality; we’re looking for page editors for each of the topic tubs. If you think you might fit the bill, let us know!

In a search for projects to work on this summer, Will Davis, incoming EIC of The Maine Campus which migrated this summer to WordPress MU, has decided to build a better email newsletters plugin for WordPress. A free option available right now is MailPress but the feature set offers a lot of room for improvement. From a thread we had last week brainstorming ideas, Will put together a feature list for the first iteration he hopes to produce by the fall:

• Ability to ignore certain categories/posts
• Text and E-mail editions
• At least a per-issue and breaking news e-mail option. Best case scenario, customizable newsletter categories
• A basic, customizable template that supports advertising spots
• Ability to send e-mail to all users without an article
• First version will use PHP mail() function

There’s a new thread for those who want to help him refine the feature set for this first version. I’m looking forward to seeing this develop; it’s something that would even be useful in our publishing workflow.

There are oh so many wondrous things for you to click on this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism? – Crowdfunding may or may not be the future of journalism, but crowdlinking is one way of determining which stories are hot. Everyone who’s anyone linked to this story on Twitter. The story covers some of the successes and challenges of projects such as Spot.us and Chi-town Daily News. It will be interesting to see who in the college market follows suit.
• DjangoCon is coming to town. My town, at least. DjangoCon will be in Portland this September 8th through 12th. The first three days will be conference days, and the last two will be code sprint days. If you can make it to Portland, student tickets are only $135.00 for all five days. We might even be able to put together a small, college-media specific component.
• Announcing the Publish2 WordPress plugin: Do more with your links – Full disclosure: this was my baby that we finally released officially into the wild. With a feature called Link Assist, It makes it much simpler to access your Publish2 links while writing a story. The plugin also makes it simple to add your links to your sidebar or create a “What We’re Reading” page for your readers. /shameless self-promotion
• How Useful (and Usable) is Your Site? – A simple set of exercises to tell whether your newspaper website is actually worth using or not. See if yours passes the test; if not, you probably have work to do.

On the note of WordPress, you should upgrade your Google Analyticator plugin. Among a new set of features released with version 5.0, the plugin now offers one-click authentication with Google and makes it super easy to access your analytics on the WordPress dashboard.

This morning, I started a thread on commenting policy best practices based on a question we received. The success stories I’ve heard in the past year have been coming from the Daily Gazette at Swarthmore and NYU Local. Both have actively engaged communities. The Daily Gazette keeps things civil by recording the location of the commenter (whether they’re on campus or off), encouraging them to sign up for an account, and allowing fellow commenters to vote on the quality of comments. NYU Local requires all commenters to use both first and last names. Depending on the amount of participation on the thread, I might roll the results into a blog post.

On the wiki, The College Voice has started maintaining a list of their current projects which include “designing a new icon and masthead to go along with its new website, all launching in September 2009 as part of its online development project” and also “developing a pdf archive of its issues, from the 1990s, and hopefully scanning its editions from its premiere in 1977.” For anyone else interested, if you include this section on your organization’s profile then it’s an easy way for us to keep up to date on what you’re working on.

At The Maine Campus, Will Davis is finishing up a classifieds system he built in PHP from scratch. One advantage? If you want to add a feature, you just build it. There’s a new feature on Will’s project every time I look at it (most recently, an RSS feed of all items posted). I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it this fall.

Here are the top links you should check out over the weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• AP, Media Standards Trust Propose News Microformat – Just announced yesterday, the microformat means a markup specifically for the type of metadata in news articles. They want to make the content even more machine-readable such that more data is exposed in search results. Check out the draft for the spec and a conversation that’s already started in the Google Group. Very interesting.
• Perform Better With AdSense: The Ultimate Round-Up – Joey says this is a solid roundup.
• If you were starting a news organization, where would you put your initial efforts? – Not surprisingly, existing news organizations should be following this advice too. Martin starts out with practical suggestions, and many people weigh in with their input in the comments
• Vote for 2.9 Media Features – WordPress wants your input on what should be in version 2.9.

All of the activity really happened on the wiki this week. Will Davis deserves mad props for doing most of the work getting Semantic MediaWiki working. Check out “Newspapers by age” for an example of how it works. Basically, what it will allow us to do is aggregate all of the semi-structured data in the infoboxes. At the moment, it just lets us then create charts of the data but I’m hoping that we’ll be able to incorporate it into search and navigation as well.

Claire Gould from The College Voice also added a bunch of information about their publication to the wiki, and Rick Martinez has launched a shell of a community wiki for FIU.

Yes, we missed last week. Here are the top links for the last two weeks that you should check out over the holiday weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Two Knight News Challenge projects have been open-sourced: EveryBlock and ReportingOn. With the right developers and the right ideas, both of these code bases could be the foundation for something really cool at a student newspaper. Andrew Dunn is already thinking about a “Ask the Reporter”-style website.
• Gazette Communications is looking for an Online News Editor with a keen eye for innovation. My prediction: they are going to have a number of applications from highly-qualified recent graduates. This is one of those companies you’d want to start a 21st century career with.
• We’ve all heard a number of theses on why industries fail but most put fault with the leadership. Michael Nielsen’s essay on scientific publishing posits another hypothesis: the leading companies are too good at what they do in their industry, are highly geared towards being too good, and are nearly impossible to reorient when the industry evolves or no longer matters.
• Mark Briggs covers all of the metrics you might want to consider as benchmarks for your newsroom. Watch his blog for a series of posts from his upcoming textbook, to be published this fall.

I’m considering changing the format of this weekly post to be a more informal synthesis of the things that have happened in the past week. If you have an opinion on the matter, let me know.

Around the network, Sean Sullivan is looking for opinions on the best wiki for putting together a history of a school budget crisis (I assume he’s looking for both the best software and approach). If the project is big enough to merit the investment, I’d say MediaWiki would be the tool of choice. It’s themeable and has a plugin architecture that lets you extend it. Will Davis and I are going to be playing with the Semantic MediaWiki extension so that you can indicate some information as structured data and do cool things with the aggregate of it (related: check out the information Will added to the profile of The Maine Campus; this is going to be really cool when we have this type of information on a number of newspapers).

Rick Martinez had the first meeting for FIUSM developers earlier today. I’ll see if I can get him to give us some clues on what they’ll be working on this year. Developers plural must mean that FIUSM is going to be doing more than basic website maintenance this coming year.

Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Rebooting The News #13 – Excellent discussion about how news coverage is already rebooting itself in the context of Iran, and the “newsroom as a cafe” concept gets discussed (and recommended).
• Gary Kebbel on the Knight News Challenge: Repetitive ideas, tougher judges hurt some applicants – Josh Benton asks questions related to the current round of News Challenge grantees.
• WooThemes GPL’ed - All of themes released by Woo from June 2009 onward will be licensed under the GPL.
• Co-Authors Plus Upgraded to v1.2 – Mo Jangda updated the Co-Authors plugin to be compatible for WordPress 2.8 and a couple other bug fixes.

Around the Network:

In the forum this week, conversation was focused on the design camp, with Andrew Spittle discussing article pages. He suggested:

I thought I’d get it going by including a list of some of the sites that I think do a good job with articles. Among others I like the design of:

• The Atlantic – Great job of creating a consistent design between the site in general and article pages specifically. Bold typography and borders keep it flowing.
• The New York Times (sometimes) – I know a lot of people love to hate on the New York Times, but I think that their article pages are superb a lot of the time. The line length and fonts work well for me. Also, I think the way in which they incorporate links to other related content (slideshows, video, other articles, etc.) is great.
• Instapaper – Yeah, it’s not technically a news site, but I think that Marco is on to something with the design. Instapaper provides not only the ability to save articles to read later, but also allows for you to view the article as text only. This removes ads and some of the more distracting elements of some sites. Sometimes simplicity is great.

On the wiki this week, John Mrystad added a number of free, high-quality WordPress themes including Hybrid News and Joey edited the ethics page.

Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets – Daniel: New version of WordPress! Includes improvements to themes, adds multiple widgets, and offers more flexibility with taxonomies.
• Rise of the Data Scientist – Joey: The responsibilites of a data-journo.
• Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture – Joey: Journalism shouldn’t strive for perfection before publication, but perfection through publication.
• The Future of Local Newspapers: Product vs Platform – Daniel: A new voice in the discussion with a few interesting ideas, such as having the community could buy into the ability of determining editorial voice and what gets covered.

Around the network

Daniel offered suggestions for redesigning a homepage in preparation for this week’s Design Camp session. Joey added his opinion,

• There’s tons of student groups that want attention and market that on facebook through events and groups – why can’t you take that info and post it on your site? Facebook is constantly updating and it’s just what you’re friends are doing. If 5% of the info from the whole school is good for general consumption, you’ve got a lot of info to present.
• A hefty chunk of groups want alumni support (monetary) give them an ad package that includes updating you with any event they do. You don’t have to write an article, but that data can be presented well.
• There are always events happening on campus. Everyday nearly. You just need to know about them. At a minimum, I bet you can add one new, “event on campus” to your homepage everyday.
• Do what you do best, link to the rest: pull in content from your local newspapers, publish2, ESPN for sports news, relevant articles about college in general (use Publish2!)

On the wiki, Lauren added updates to the Summer 2009 Projects page.

Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Facebook news application source code open to college news sites – NewsCloud has open sourced a Facebook application specifically for student news organizations. The application reportedly incentivizes activity around the news org’s content through a point system and rewards.
• TWiT 197: Steal This Diploma – Jeff Jarvis joins Leo Leporte for a discussion on newspaper collusion, Google Wave, and education.
• How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing – Detailed, enlightening essay on how the web has changed writing formats.
• The Daily Tar Heel’s new social media policy – Sara Gregory, incoming Managing Editor for Online, lays out the DTH’s remarkably open and earnest social media policies for the coming year.

Around the network

Conversation on the forum was light this week with Daniel asking about different styles of navigation. Joey quickly replied with:

My point: think about nav bars from the user’s perspective. I’d propose http://newser.com as a good example of a newsorg nav bar.

• It’s dynamic: content changes based on what the top stories are.
• It links off to topic pages. Only the most timely and relevant topic pages are easily accessible.
• You can still get to the traditional sections if you really want to navigate that way.

Max Cutler also offered his opinion,

In my experience/opinion, the reality is that that most college news orgs publish about the same limited set of topics repeatedly, and that’s why the section model can make some sense. That’s not to say that tags shouldn’t be used; they definitely should, and virtually all college news sites could do a better job of integrating tags into their navigation and exploration flow.

On the wiki this week, Daniel edited the Edit Flow Page with the latest info on the project.