CoPress

This week held big news for conference go-ers who wondered how they would be able to attend two big conferences taking place later this month. Luckily for all, the SPJ regional conference will be attending BarCamp NewsInnovation in the Annenberg building in Center City Philadelphia along with the rest of us. Meanwhile on the technology front, the big news seemed to be that Skype would now be coming to the iPhone, quite possibly bringing the ease of use associated with doing interviews with Skype to mobile.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was light this week, with Greg posting the question on everyone’s minds:

How will student media (in general or on your campus) change in the coming academic year?

While Jared Silifes and Daniel Bachhuber discussed the most productive ways to implement QR Codes, Ben Leis said he wanted to see different college media outlets “all come together into one well orchestrated online narrative.” He said he wanted to see more community involvement, stating:

I think that while investigative journalism is surely something to be valued and featured in the media, different groups on campus should be approached to provide content in short form. I think that this approach will get more people across campus introduced to new ideas and new perspectives and it will bring new audiences to interact both online and off. The short form will allow for content providers to easily make deadlines and not have the sense of feeling overwhelmed with the obligation.

On the blog, Greg’s post on Revenue Two Point Zero generated a lot of buzz. Among them were several inspired college journalists who hope to bring this sort of unique innovation to their own campus publications.

As far as the wiki goes, Miles Skorpen and Joey Baker updated the WordPress Guide and Themes pages.

Remember: your contributions are always valued! Share some love (or at least some knowledge)!

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):

• Aim the gun the right way – Joey Baker gets quoted by Jeff Jarvis: “The kool-aid of the bass-akwards mind fuck that the ‘old media’ folks try to sell you.” Well said, brotha.
• Courant News: A history and status update – Max explains the thinking behind his delay in relaunching the Yale Daily News website, and what he hopes will come of the CMS, Courant News. I personally am really excited to see whether this will be adopted by the community.
• django + facebook connect – Ryan Marks has a Django app for a better Facebook Connect.
• How Do You Feel About the Economy? – This interactive feature at NYTimes.com is yet another example of how they’re leading the pack in multimedia.
• Newspapers Not Harnessing Readers’ Social Power – Among the key findings were, “When asked what they do when they find interesting content online, 52% of respondents say they usually read it immediately. Only 9% said they bookmark it to read later.”
• Old Journalism Standards that Should Remain -  A great list of skills every journalist should know, no matter what direction we move in.
• How Many Homegrown News Stories Are in Your Daily Paper? – On MediaShift, Jay Rosen asks for your help in his research on how much original reporting there is in local newspapers. Help him out!

A relatively quiet week, in my opinion.

I think it begs a mention, however, that there are not one, not two, but three BarCamp NewsInnovation jam sessions going down this weekend: Portland (9 to 5 Pacific) and Chicago on Saturday, and Miami (11 to 5 Eastern) on Sunday. These one of a kind events will be discussing the full spectrum of journalism and news, including business models, formats and hopefully not too much Twitter.

Check out this interview David Cohn did with Jason Kristufek to learn more:

If you can’t make it, or don’t live in these cities, NewsInnovation Portland will be livestreaming and liveblogging and NewsInnovation Miami will be livestreamed if connectivity allows.

Around the Network

#collegejourn is hosting a conversation Sunday from 8 to 11 Eastern called “Bring A Prof.” The goal is to figure out how to bring j-school into the 21st century and, considering it’s a controversial topic and been well-publicized, it should be quite the conversation.

In our Google Group, J. Ryan Zambon started a thread on bounce rates for college newspapers, wondering if the numbers he was seeing for The Hoya were anything out of the ordinary. Max and Joey reported similar statistics, and Joey added that “the bounce rate stat is very inaccurate. Compare it to your exit rate which theoretically should be 100%-bounce rate. This is rarely the case. Don’t worry too much about those detailed analytics – they’re just not accurate enough to really be trusted.”

I spent part of the summer studying analytics, and one of the biggest takeaways was that the numbers themselves don’t matter. It’s what you do with them. For instance, in a study of bounce rates you take what you start with as your baseline and judge your experiments on how you shift your numbers from the baseline. If your goal is to lower the bounce rate, then you might A/B test with a couple of new designs and see which produces the most favorable results.

We started off the week (well, Tuesday actually) asking, “what strategies do you have for bridging the print/digital divide?” In terms of engaging the campus audience, integration with Facebook appears to be the easiest win. Mo Jangda argues that it’s important to tailor your services to your core demographic, saying that ”it’s nice to incorporate Twitter, Digg, etc, etc. into your site, but if they students that read your paper aren’t on board with those services, then there’s really no point.” He says that they installed the share button on their site a year and a half ago with “huge success.”

If you’re looking for numbers to quantify success, I would (and this is building off the previous paragraph) set a baseline for number of referrers from Facebook, install the widget, and see how your traffic coming from Facebook grows over the next six months and a year. It doesn’t really matter what those numbers are; rather, you’re looking at the rate of change from point A to point B.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers - Another roundup of ideas for newspapers. My favorites: “Focus on original content, do not rewrite wire stories or press releases. If newspapers start charging for content people are more likely [to] pay for content they can’t get anywhere else. [...] Become the host for all important discussions about local issues and politics. Moderate the discussions to ensure civil discourse. Nothing kills discussions faster than offensive comments made by anonymous people. [...] Hire additional salespeople. It is is a different sales environment today and it requires a fresh approach. Salespeople used to selling full page or half-page print ads are not the going to be able to transition easily.”
• Washington Times releases open source projects – The Washington Times development team releases four projects under the Apache license: django-projectmgr, django-supertagging, django-massmedia, and django-clickpass.
• Group Action Just Got Much Easier: Video Interview with Clay Shirky - Shirky talks more about the power of people to organize with out organizations, and brings up an interesting example of steamboat design to illustrate how technology can make us rethink our fundamental assumptions. CoPress is all about this.
• MediaShift . 5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them | PBS - Bryan Murley has some ideas for addressing the paradigm shift challenges at college newspapers, including marketing websites better. I think they need to be more ambitious.

Have an idea for a discussion topic in the forum for next week? Leave it in the comments!

Hosts/Guests: Greg Linch, Joey Baker, Albert Sun

Summary: Three members of CoPress’ team spoke on a virtual panel as part of BarCamp NewsInnovation at the University of Missouri on Feb. 24. Joey Baker, Greg Linch and Albert Sun discussed the importance of collaboration and innovation as they related to college news organizations, in addition to other topics such as open source software and CoPress itself. The trio fielded questions from the dozen participants at Mizzou, as well as from as many as 40 live viewers on Mogulus, where the virtual panel took place.

Links:

• CoPress channel on Mogulus (archive of the video)

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

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Tune into CoPress‘ Mogulus channel, embedded below, on Jan. 24 at 2 p.m. EST (1 p.m. CST) to see Joey Baker, Albert Sun and I speak as part of BarCamp NewsInnovation at the University of Missouri.

Unfortunately, no one from CoPress could travel to Mizzou, but we’ll be there virtually.

Be sure to participate in the chat and ask questions – we’ll answer as many as possible.

Please share the link via Twitter, Facebook, IM, e-mail, etc. Thanks!

This is cross-posted at Greg Linch‘s site.