CoPress

After over a year of offering a unique approach to hosting and support for student news organizations, the CoPress team has decided to close down its operations. The decision to do so has been tremendously difficult, but we’ve come to realize that now is the best time for this to happen.

First, we’ve struggled with making our business financially viable while at the same time offering prices that reflect an understanding of the financial situation many student news organizations are in. This is even more apparent in that we’ve had to change our pricing structure twice in the past months.

Secondly, without the revenue to pay our team full-time, we’ve become dependent on the generosity of committed students to offer our 24/7 support. In addition, the nature of our hosting and support business is such that we encouraged publications to tinker as much as they want with their site. What this ultimately meant was a rapidly growing number of emails for us to answer. Needless to say, it’s become difficult to make this scale in any meaningful way. Our eventual goal was to build software for distributed support, but the resources required for hosting and support severely challenged our ability to make headway on the project.

By now, we’ve contacted all of our existing clients about this decision. Because of the way we’ve structured our Managed Hosting since August 2008, the transition for most will be as easy as changing the credit cards on their third-party hosting account. We intend to migrate the other sites from the servers we maintain to third-party hosting services like WebFaction and Slicehost.

Going forward, we also intend to reopen our list serv as a place for the community to ask and respond to more general support questions. We also hope to put together a list of WordPress consultants you can hire to help with more technical issues or extended projects. Lastly, we’re going to open source our database conversion script which makes it a lot easier to get archives of various form into WordPress. If you’re interested in being on this list of consultants, please contact us.

We think that story of CoPress highlights some of the most important needs for college media, and the news industry in general. Primarily, this is a willingness to experiment, iterate, and try new things. As such, we’d plan to post in the coming weeks as much as we can about what we learned along the way with the sincere hope of teaching what lessons we can to the next round of entrepreneurs.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments or contact us privately. We’ll be holding a public Skype conference call that anyone is welcome to join sometime early next week.

On behalf of everyone on the team, I’d like to thank everyone for the support of our efforts. We couldn’t have accomplished any of this without the tireless contributions of too many awesome people in the community to count.

Daniel Bachhuber
Executive Director, CoPress
daniel@copress.org

If you’ve been keeping watch in the forum lately you may have seen some talk about a College Web Design Camp for student newspapers. I posted some preliminary information on the wiki a couple days ago and this is a more formal introduction to the idea.

The main goals

Our goal is to create an environment within which college news organizations, web developers, and editors can come together to collaborate and exchange ideas about their summer website design projects.

An inherent problem that college news organizations have to deal with is the high rates of staff turnover every four years. This means that some years the tech/web staff is robust and at others it is scarce. By providing virtual space in which everyone can exchange code, ideas, and projects we are hoping that everyone will gain web development skills that can be passed on down to future staff members.

Finally, in the spirit of transparency and collaboration, all training sessions and demos will be recorded and posted online. This will provide examples of all the code used in the sessions so that anyone can download and implement the ideas presented.

The first collaboration session

The first session will be held on May 28th at 5:00 p.m. PT. It will serve as an introduction for everyone to the project and to each other’s sites. We’ll seek to answer some of the questions below:

• What does your site look like now and what are the main goals that you hope to achieve during the summer?
• What skills does everyone have? Are you ridiculously good at creating gorgeous drop-down menus in WordPress? If so, then perhaps you’d be interested in leading a session for everyone.
• What have you found to be some of the biggest obstacles to successful college web development to be? What would have helped you along the way?

Read more →

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.