CoPress

Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Rebooting The News #13 – Excellent discussion about how news coverage is already rebooting itself in the context of Iran, and the “newsroom as a cafe” concept gets discussed (and recommended).
• Gary Kebbel on the Knight News Challenge: Repetitive ideas, tougher judges hurt some applicants – Josh Benton asks questions related to the current round of News Challenge grantees.
• WooThemes GPL’ed - All of themes released by Woo from June 2009 onward will be licensed under the GPL.
• Co-Authors Plus Upgraded to v1.2 – Mo Jangda updated the Co-Authors plugin to be compatible for WordPress 2.8 and a couple other bug fixes.

Around the Network:

In the forum this week, conversation was focused on the design camp, with Andrew Spittle discussing article pages. He suggested:

I thought I’d get it going by including a list of some of the sites that I think do a good job with articles. Among others I like the design of:

• The Atlantic – Great job of creating a consistent design between the site in general and article pages specifically. Bold typography and borders keep it flowing.
• The New York Times (sometimes) – I know a lot of people love to hate on the New York Times, but I think that their article pages are superb a lot of the time. The line length and fonts work well for me. Also, I think the way in which they incorporate links to other related content (slideshows, video, other articles, etc.) is great.
• Instapaper – Yeah, it’s not technically a news site, but I think that Marco is on to something with the design. Instapaper provides not only the ability to save articles to read later, but also allows for you to view the article as text only. This removes ads and some of the more distracting elements of some sites. Sometimes simplicity is great.

On the wiki this week, John Mrystad added a number of free, high-quality WordPress themes including Hybrid News and Joey edited the ethics page.