CoPress

One trend I've noticed is that most responses are from people internally involved with CoPress. Do we want to reach out beyond our circle to promote these posts? Perhaps this will be part of the new community manager's job. 

The most responses we've ever had to a discussion topic was 15 for a topic about advertising rates and another about the summer design camp. The reason the numbers are slightly higher on those posts is because the same people were holding conversations within the post. So, while the number of posts is higher, the number of participants doesn't necessarily fluccuate much. 

Maybe we should refocus the use of this forum. Generally, forums aren't a place for open-ended questions, but a place for people with specific problems seeking specific solutions (WordPress forums are a good example). We should promote it as a support/brainstorming resource and encourage others to post the questions, instead of the CoPress team posting the questions. 

I know all you fancy new-media junkies publish on the CoPress blog, the twitter, the wiki and here, but how about an old-school way of keeping all of these fantastic outlets alive and kicking: email. I would love a weekly email summary with the best tweets, blog posts, and forum discussion. I tend to come and go simple because I'm busy… I have a lot of things going on, and I'm just a lonely web person on a small college paper- and my major has nothing to do either journalism nor techology. I would love a weekly email, and I'm sure other newspaper folks that peruse the services of CoPress would, too.

Likewise, I think this is a great way for college papers to grow, especially over the summer. The key, though, is love. You can't just use Feedburner or something to collect up everything and send it out. There needs to be some loving time spent putting it all together, editing it, etc. People don't go down their bookmarks each week to see what's new on their favorite websites… but if they get an email letting them know, and inviting them to join in the conversation, I believe only good can come of it.

I hope this is the right place to ask this question… How does everyone run their editorial staff on WordPress? Are all the writers "contributors," and their stories are approved by the editors?

One thing our editorial staff want to do is to be able to totally handle creating and posting stories themselves. Is there a way to be signed into WordPress as an Editor, but post a story as being written by another user? Is there a plugin you would recommend?