CoPress

We’re a day late on this because of everyone’s travel, but the show must go on!

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The discussion of advertising rates continued this week. Brad Arendt approaches the issue of click-throughs and identifies two issues: finding the proper tool to accurately count click-throughs and take down the ad when the limit had been reached, as well as educating your local business owner on the concept so that it doesn’t discount the “value in brand awareness.” In fact, Bryan Murley argues that costs per clicks are a “horrible idea for college media sites, akin to allowing advertisers to only pay for print ads per the number of coupons that are brought in from an ad.” He’s more interested in looking into selling against user engagement with the site, based on such metrics as the amount of time spent on the site.

Also, Mo Jangda reported in the forum that he’s published a better version of the Co-Authors WordPress Plugin.
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This week, eyes have been on Twitter, as the race to 1,000,000 followers reached fever pitch with Ashton Kutcher reaching 1,000,000 followers on Twitter around 2:30 a.m. ET. On Wednesday, CNN acquired CNNbrk twitter account to further its lead over Ashton Kutcher to further the race between the media and man.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was light this week, with Joey Baker starting a discussion for Web Development ideas, saying:

This is intended to be a place for all you developers and designers to share crazy ideas that you have about newsorg website design. Anything that comes to you, treat this as your open notebook. Chances are good that you’ll find someone around who just might like your idea and try to implement it.

Also on the form, wvanwazer asked asked for advice on advertising rates.

How much does everyone charge for advertising rates? Right now, we (the Tulane Hullabaloo) charge 5 dollars per 1000 impressions. Is this high? Low? We’re in the process of setting our advertising rate for the next year, and I have no idea what a good price is.

On the wiki, Daniel and Miles started the Recruiting Technical Staff page, while Joey updated the Switching from College Publisher page.

In the News

Last but not least, here are some links from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Why top-down syndication is broken – Jackie Hai looks into how the fact that we are all now content producers has changed the top-down syndication model to one which is distributed and bottom-up.
• New York Times Landing Pages: All the Irrelevance That Fits the Pixels – Fascinating analysis by Jonathan Mendez on how the NYTimes’ landing pages present content. Do newspapers just take what is in the print edition and put it online?
• Recruitment -  Max Cutler analyzes solutions to recruiting technical staff for college newspapers.
• MediaShift . College Media Miss Opportunities Covering the Economic Crisis | PBS – A missed opportunity indeed. A look at how college media should be covering the economic crisis.