• According to Mathew Ingram, Communities Editor for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, there are things commenters can actually be useful for: fact-checking, new angles to stories, and market research. “The surest way to improve the tone of the debate in forums or comments is to get involved in them.”
• Ten points for each of Brian Manzullo’s five goals for the CM Life website this fall. Other student newspapers should follow his lead and share lessons learned from the experiments. Building “Hot Topic” landing pages is one of the ways you can change up how news is presented, and educate readers with better context.
• Son Hunyh walks through some of the design considerations of relaunching mndaily.com. In my opinion, the category and landing pages are amongst the best in the nation.
• If you on the web today or Sunday, WordCamp Portland is all over Twitter and livestreaming too. There was a great session this morning on speeding up WordPress and Matt Mullenweg showed up at lunch to answer questions from the attendees. WordPress and WordPress MU might become the same software in version 3.0, and BackPress, an abstraction of the WordPress admin, is being used by Automattic in a few projects but has no timeline for release.

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CM Life

Brian Manzullo, Editor in Chief

After a summer-long process of transitioning from College Publisher and building a new design, Central Michigan Life launched its new WordPress-powered site on Aug. 20. One aim for this site was to create a more simple, clutter-free look that was visually appealing but also straightforward enough that readers don’t have headaches trying to find what they’re looking for. Our photos and social networking elements are more prominent and the different story subtopics that people might want to follow exclusively are visible (e.g. football, money). Most of all, though, we wanted freedom with our Web site. We have control of all advertising and all of the different elements on our site, meaning we can try new things quite easily if we wish. My hope, however, is that we don’t stop with the makeover. The real goal is to keep readers engaged with our online presentation, whether it is through live chats, Twitter, Facebook or story comments. We feel that we can better connect them to issues that matter, and we will work hard to utilize our site in doing so.

Daily Titan

Chris Ullyott, Webmaster

We launched our new Web site, www.dailytitan.com, on Aug. 10. It was a task to learn WordPress from the very beginning but, in short order, we began to see how the theming system worked and were able to successfully make fundamental changes to the software. With the help of the nice people at CoPress, brilliant plugins, and some elbow grease, we were able to customize our WordPress theme to suit the specific needs of both our editorial and advertising staffs. Now we have a much more attractive, intuitive, and useful online presence.

The biggest advantage over our previous system is the amount control we now have over both the visual and technical aspects of our site. We now have complete control over:

• Roles and privileges of staff user accounts for a better workflow
• Sizes and placement of advertisements for more revenue opportunities
• Distribution of content with RSS feeds, accommodating for breaking news
• Integration of third-party services like Twitter and ISSUU
• Linkage throughout the site for a better user experience

We can see major opportunities for university media using open-source content management systems. The amount of control one can have takes a little getting used to! However, WordPress is fairly simple to learn, and any committed media student can quickly learn the HTML, CSS and PHP coding techniques needed to make improvements to a WordPress theme without re-inventing the wheel.

Currently on our site, we’re particularly proud of the “stay connected” widget bar we added, which lets users immediately connect with our social media presence and use other distribution channels like podcasts and email subscriptions. We also can’t get over how cool our new media kit is, courtesy of our talented design staff. The Issuu viewer makes the presentation sing.

The custom navigation bars proved a fruitful project for us as well. By rewriting the header navigation code with plain old HTML and CSS, we strictly separated editorial from advertising content and gave special pages more appropriate homes. Users clearly now have it easier in finding what they need. Since we launched, our bounce rate has dropped a whopping 30%.

We have already received very positive response both in online traffic and personal comments. We look forward to seeing what our experience will be like once the school semester starts this year. New additions we’re working on include section forums, dining and housing guides, creative online use of editorial columns, and integration of a gutsy “furlough edition”…

Thanks to CoPress for all of your help. Let’s show our campuses what news is really all about!

UA Traveler

Jon Schleuss, Web Developer

It’s better to teach someone a skill rather than do a task for them. Our move to WordPress allows for more control by the individual students rather than lumping the responsibilities onto one Web guru. Choosing the Gazette theme, we followed similar steps taken by the Mustang Daily and implemented a custom header logo different from our print edition to make a distinction between our products. This year’s staff includes students focused on the print edition and others focused on the Web. That’s not to say the content doesn’t intermingle, however. We’re now prioritizing content based on the delivery method. Moving forward, we’re strategizing an innovation of Web advertising and diversifying our Web delivery methods. Expect a mobile version of our new site and one that’s delivered in an e-mail sent each week.

• It’s the season of new sites. On Wednesday, we helped Brian Manzullo take the new CM Life live. He has since written a thoughtful post to the community, as well as a more detailed post about the new features of the site. Late last night, a new, more Drupally Daily Tar Heel went online. Andrew Dunn, Sara Gregory, and other staffers give a short introduction and talk about their plans for the upcoming year.
• Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better When It Comes To Online Ad Formats – “The study, which was based on 2,390 online display campaigns running over the past three years, found that so-called “half banners” (those measuring 234 x 60) and rectangles (180 x 150) were more effective than ads that frame the page such as high profile leaderboards and skyscrapers.” (tks Joey Baker)
• Will Davis deserves significant props for the amount of work he’s been doing to improve the wiki. The focus of what he’s doing is configuring Semantic MediaWiki to make all of the semi-structured data on a newspaper profile available in aggregate form. We now have over 120 newspapers listed in the directory; if you see that yours is missing detailed information, please add to it!
• Max Cutler would like to see a “feature matrix with links for college news sites.” I’d like to see that, as well as a page on the wiki dedicated to just brainstorming and listing out new ideas. For instance, in the forum, Brian asked about a “breaking news” box that could occasionally appear on the home page, as well as ideas for sweet author pages. It would be great if we could capture these on the wiki in such a fashion that, if I wanted to get some inspiration for author pages regardless of CMS, I could go to that page to see what other people have done.

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