CoPress

Post edited 11:40 pm – September 23, 2009 by CMLife
Post edited 11:41 pm – September 23, 2009 by CMLife
Post edited 11:41 pm – September 23, 2009 by CMLife
Post edited 11:42 pm – September 23, 2009 by CMLife
Post edited 11:43 pm – September 23, 2009 by CMLife

Hey guys,

Hope all is well. I thought I'd give you an update of ways we're advancing our Web presentation at Central Michigan Life as the fall semester rolls on. We just launched a new feature on our Web site called hot topics, landing pages that give our online readers a one-click stop for all content on a particular issue. We modeled the idea after the Mustang Daily and the Spokesman Review, in particular.

We had the perfect opportunity to take advantage of this idea when, over the last week, CMU's new tailgating policy exploded in controversy and caused the school's student tailgating crowd to shrink to 300 from about 5,000. We were getting thousands of hits to our stories on Monday and are still continuing to get a lot of people. So I created this today- cm-life.com/tailgate.

We use this page to compile all our links relating to the tailgating policy since it was first reported (July 2009), including all our multimedia, and threw in an overview at the beginning with a list of the new procedures. We have a section for our latest coverage, the rest, plus a comments section at the end I'm trying to promote.

It's a work in progress. I'm still a little iffy on where its placement is on the home page, but I wanted to put it somewhere prominent and didn't want to interrupt the rest of the header. I may just change the text styling, especially once we get going on more landing pages. For more details on what I'm hoping to do this fall as CM Life editor, read this blog post.

Let me know what you guys think, and if you are doing anything similar at your newspaper!

-Brian Manzullo, editor in chief

Looks great, Brian. I'm also really curious how you made the page. I'd imagine it's just another blog post because of the comments at the bottom, but that makes me wonder about the permalink.

Nice job!

I am coming late to the party, and I don't want to be a scrooge for the first post, but I do agree that the hot topics is too small. As well, the red still seems to slide off the eye into the background.

I feel the issue is more with the amount of adspace the site is giving in relation to the content.

This screen capture is revealing in the sense that almost half the space is non-news/advertising, and I have to scroll down to see the story excerpt. A lot of the themes have this, but I think the banner ad above is a little too large. If this was shortened, I think the scheme could be better and the hot topics can breathe a little.

As for Daniel's wiki comment, a school wiki would be an amazing resource to put up. It would take less time to find information, and references can lead back to your paper's source. If a story ever breaks out, your wiki can become legitimate in terms of specifying a history. This would def add more traffic to your site, since people who will read will be more comfortable in using the wiki in case they are like "wtf does this mean?".

Not to use the last phrase so openly, but especially in big schools and essentially all colleges, there are different people coming and out every year. Information, even as mundane as a local band show in 2002, could become priceless when these people come up in the news again.

Umass has an open wiki ( you can Google it ). Although it isn't as good as it should be, it is somewhat valuable.