• Among all of the announcements made by Google this week, Living Stories struck me as by far the most interesting. This has serious implications the near future of news. Why? Because it’s experimenting with a few important concepts: the topic as the base element of journalism, time as a perspective on a topic, filtering to learn more about specific elements of a story, and personalization to tailor the learning experience. Currently there’s no functionality for users to participate in the production of the page, a key component of the news wiki idea I’ve written about before, but what they have is a very cool start. Paul Bradshaw has more. (tks Brian Manzullo!)
• BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly, aka the second annual mecca for innovation in journalism, will be at Temple University on April 24th, 2010.
• On PBS MediaShift, Roland Legrand covers the biggest reasons why young journalists are the most risk-averse in the newsroom. The most astute observation: the younger journalists in a newsroom could have higher opportunity costs in regards to exploration and experimentation because the traditional method of getting ahead in a career is to “acquire the skills and emulate the behaviors displayed by the older leaders within that environment.”
• Google Analytics recently added 8 new features. Analytics intelligence and custom alerts look mighty interesting.
• Andrew Spittle built another at-a-glance visualization for the Whitman Pioneer: Grid View.
• On College Media Matters, Dan Reimold has an exclusive interview with the founders of the College News Network. They’re bootstrapping a content-sharing network to fill the void of UWIRE and hope to eventually partner with a publication in every state.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

Around the Network

This past week Greg Linch started an interesting conversation on the Forum by asking, “Do you plan to redesign or in any other way redo your college news site this summer? If so, please explain.”

Responses came in quite quickly with Connect2Mason, Whitman Pioneer, TheCampusBuzz, and The Daily Tar Heel are among the sites that are looking to redesign this summer.

On the wiki this week, Emily updated the WordPress Examples page with a list of college media organizations currently on WordPress.

In the News

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

• CoTweet! – How business does Twitter – Designed for businesses using Twitter to engage existing customers and attract new ones, CoTweet is a comprehensive Twitter business platform that supports both proactive marketing communication and response-driven customer support.
• Courant News Project Site – The Courant News Project has launched a site with more detailed information on their open source CMS based on Django.
• Getting Journalism Education Out of the Way -  Just maybe journalism education gets in the way of cultivating good journalists. After all, more than half of the 59 percent of print journalists who won Pulitzer Prizes never studied journalism.
• Announcing WordPress Plugin Competition (3.0) – The competition runs for three months from May 1st to July 31st.
• First Look at the Daily Tar Heel -  The Daily Tar Heel and it’s brand new look.

Around the Network

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.

On the wiki, there’s now excellent information and background on the Tulane Hullabaloo website, Miles started a new page on editing WordPress themes, and Daniel started a page on tools for measuring engagement

In the News

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

• A reputation economy is a good model for comments – Mark Briggs thinks you should tie a reputation system to commenting. If you take it one step further and assign semantic data to the comments, you could come up with a very interesting database of information.
• Rebooting the News podcast for April 19 – Excellent discussion between Dave Winer and Jay Rosen on the future of news. Of particular interest is Dave’s observation that the newspaper industry is going through the first revolution that the tech industry has already gone through more than a dozen times. Jay also introduces an idea for open news assignments that I think has legs.
• Measuring user engagement: Lessons from BusinessWeek – Great post by Eric Ulken on how BusinessWeek measures user engagement on their website. It’s time to understand traffic better than uniques and pageviews.
• Sesh Ideas for BCNI Philly – A couple of ideas for what to discuss at BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly.

In 140 characters, what is BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly?

BCNI is a journalism conference in Philly where there is no set schedule. 100s of news people will present on whatever topic they want.

Why a BarCamp, and how is this going to help reinvent the industry?

The industry has tried professional conferences, CEO meetings, and expensive expos with little to show. The open schedule that a BarCamp provides lowers the barrier of entry so that anyone interested in thinking differently can attend with other like minded people and help hash out a vision for news in the 21st century.

There won’t be a silver bullet. But we can put aside the usual negativity and canned arguments and opinions for something new and fresh.

Who is the one person that everyone should try to get a conversation in with on Saturday?

If the event is successful, it will be somebody that isn’t particularity well-known that ends up making a splash with their presentation. Everybody is on an even level, so talk to everybody!

What topics do you expect to be covered? Will there a track for revenue, website design, or citizen journalism?

There will be no tracks. I’m a firm believer that the stodginess of traditional conferences is a detriment. Some wonderful things have come out of previous Barcamps on other topics. Creating tracks would be a mistake. The only requirement is that your presentation topic deal with news.

Are there any presentations in particular that you’re looking forward to?

There are no planned presentation although some people have given me a hint about what they are presenting. I, personally, would like to see any idea involving revenue and money.

Why did SPJ decide to move venues for their conference, and how do you think this will change their event?

I had been in contact with Phil Beck, the organizer of the SPJ conference, for a few weeks now and I couldn’t be happier. Phil told me that dozens of attendees had approached him about attending BarCamp. After the number started to climb, he figured it would be in SPJ’s best interest to move the event a few blocks north to Temple.

I had feared that the event would be too centered on online journalism and was in the process of reaching out to print and broadcast media members. The addition of SPJ makes that process much easier.

If you can’t get to Philly, how can someone follow along with BCNI?

The hashtag is #BCNIPhilly. I’d like to think that with 200+ tech savvy journalists that a lot of live-blogging, tweeting, and streaming will be taking place. However, there is no official plan to record every presentation as it would require six separate people recording each hour. However with more sponsorship money or volunteers, it’s something I have not ruled out.

Courant will not really be ready for actual use or consumption upon its open-source-ing. The core set of functionality is essentially complete, which means you can build a news website which functions well for the visitors. However, we still haven’t had time to implement our vision for the admin interface, which is really the whole point of doing a specialized “news CMS.” It’s currently just a more-or-less stock Django admin, which, while functional, is far from ideal and really only marginally better than using Drupal with CCK or similar options.

As I’ve said publicly and privately in the past few days, the acronym “CMS” stands for Content Management System. That implies that the purpose of the system is actual management of content, which for a website would be through an admin interface. So I claim that the most important part of a CMS is the admin interface, and thus I can’t consider Courant ready for an actual site until we’ve taken at least our first pass at a news administrative interface.

Needless to say, we’ve very excited to see a nearly final product of what Max and company have been working on for 9+ months. There should be a spec out for community review later this week.

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!