CoPress

Lauren Rabaino and I spoke with a few Web staffers from The Chronicle at Duke University for the latest episode of College Media Lab (the renamed This Week in CoPress). Our guests were:

• Alex Klein (@alexklein), online editor
• Dean Chen (@deanchen), lead developer
• Chase Olivieri (@chasefoto), multimedia editor

As you might have seen, Alex wrote a blog post for CoPress about their recent switch from College Publisher to Drupal. Here’s a summary of what we discussed in the podcast:

• Why they chose Drupal
• How the switch went
• How they’re building a Web staff
• Multimedia
• New commenting policy and their comment system

Listen in!

 

 College Media Lab: The Chronicle at Duke switches to Drupal [45:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (177)

Recommended links for the weekend:

• The New York Times is leveraging the communication skills of their journalists in an entirely new way: by having them teach. It’s a first-time experiment for the publication that hints at the importance of area expertise for the 21st century journalist. (tks Brian Manzullo)
• Need ideas for reinventing your J school this fall? Suzanne Yada has your back. The best, most pragmatic idea, in my opinion, is hosting a BarCamp. Make it happen.
• In the forum, I’ve released the 0.1 version of a plugin for properly redirecting your old College Publisher URLs to your new WordPress website. It should work with both College Publisher 4 and College Publisher 5 URLs, although the caveat is that I haven’t tested it fully yet, and requires that your old article IDs are stored somewhere in the database (or that they are your new post IDs). Also, Andrew Robinson of the College Heights Herald has done a bit of research into the best plugin for integrating Facebook Connect into your website.
• Rebooting the News, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s podcast loved by everyone (or Joey, Greg, and I at least), had Zach Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab on as a guest this past week. Zach presents a thoughtful, well-informed perspective on the Associated Press’ DRM announcement that caught me completely by surprise, and Jay and Dave conclude the episode with a conversation about the type of information news stories traditionally lack that would actually make the reporting more useful.

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

Another two great milestones over the weekend for student newspapers moving from College Publisher to WordPress. William P. Davis of The Maine Campus published an epic tome on how he migrated their CP 4 archives to WordPress MU:

The database they gave us contained almost 12,000 entries and was much to big to be handled by a program like Excel or even Access. I’m telling you right now: don’t even try. What you should do is dump the entire CSV into a MySQL database. I found the easiest way to do it was with Navicat MySQL. They offer a free trial. If you have problems, make sure you have enabled database access for your IP address. The easiest way to drop data in is to convert the CSV to an Excel file and then it will go right in using Navicat. Otherwise you might have serious problems with special characters and such. Also, I had a problem with a few spam entries (from where, I wonder?) that broke the database, but I took those out in Excel.

If manual steps aren’t your thing, then the CP Import plugin released by John Luetke could be the ticket. If you convert your College Publisher export files from CSV to XLS, it will import each entry into WordPress through the WordPress API. He reported that it took about 30 minutes to import about 50 MB of pure text for The Marquette Tribune’s coming website. It will also reportedly add your related media as galleries attached to a post. CoPress is currently converting databases with a Python script but, if it turns out to work well, this might compel us to switch.

Today — four months after first learning about CoPress through Twitter —  the Mustang Daily launched its new WordPress site, hosted and supported by CoPress. The Mustang Daily, a 2008 Online Pacemaker Winner and 2009 Pacemaker Finalist, had been with College Publisher since 2006.

Website Design

We went with the Gazette Edition from WooThemes because it gave us all the basic capabilities we were looking for:

• Prominent ads
• Wigetized sidebar
• Slick, rotating slideshow
• Auto-generated thumbnails

Advertising

During a time when revenue is falling, having full control over priority ad space is a must. We have a top banner (468 x 60 pixels), a sidebar ad (300 x 250 pixels) and up to four square ads on the lower sidebar (125 x 125 pixels).

We installed a WordPress plugin that allows for a “page peel” style advertisement in the top corner of the site. Although probably annoying to some, people like playing with it.

Read more →

Bloggers are the anti-journalist.

Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among “true” journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of… blogging: consistently producing good content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.

The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.

Now, some strategies for getting readers engaged. Read more →

The CoPress hosting plan is doomed to failure according to Dean Chen, lead developer at The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper.

In an e-mail forwarded to the CoPress Googe Group, Dean wrote: (emphasis added)

I don’t like the idea of sharing a server with other papers, the primary reason being that if another site receives record traffic the response time of our site will suffer as an result. The specifications for the server hosting all the virtual servers is actually lower than what I was planning for our site only. To put it in perspective, the desktop in my dorm is much better configured than that server.

Their hosting plan also seems to be geared towards wordpress, which i much less demanding resource wise than drupal.

After receiving so much good press lately, it sure is refreshing to have someone take us to task on a technical issue — something that we’re supposed to be teaching other people about.

Dean makes some good points and got the CoPress team talking on New Year’s Eve. We’ve realized that there are several things that our organization, which strives for transparency, hasn’t made entirely clear. Read more →

A few days ago, Journalism 3.0 proprietor Emily Kostic sought feedback on Twitter. The topic of discussion? CoPress, of course.

In the process of writing a blog post, Emily was hoping for someone with good knowledge of our project to explain to her the benefits of CoPress versus College Publisher. This post is my response.

Before I being outlining some of our organization’s tenets, however, I must address the potential danger of publicly replying to a query like this. I feel it is important to note that CoPress, despite being in a position to help sway some (or many) publications from using the services of College Publisher, is not explicitly aimed at doing so.

This is because our strategy and focus are fundamentally different. Above all, CoPress seeks to spread knowledge and easily accessible resources—whether or not we turn a profit. We feel it is safe to say that the same ideology is not held at College Publisher. Read more →

Well, almost. Just two weeks ago, we closed our very first survey to new responses. Since then, we’ve been slowly compiling the results (I’m a student with brutal mid-terms, just like many others on the CoPress team). Over the weekend, I’ll continue working on the final report with the CoPress team. In the meantime, however, I thought I might share interesting findings I’ve come across about both our respondents and how they responded:

• Out of a total of 40 respondents, 10% identified as Publishers, 22.5% as Advisers, 27.5% as Online Editors/Webmasters, and 12.5% as Editor in Chiefs. With all of the other respondents included, it appears as though there is a wide spectrum of interest in the project.
• From that same batch of respondents, 27.5% are running College Publisher 4, 30% are running College Publisher 5, 10% are on Wordpress, and 5% are on Drupal and something Django-flavored. College Publisher 4 scored the longest average deploy at 46.5 months.
• College Publisher 4 wins props for an automatic email version, ad management, and free tech support. There are suggestions to include a WYSIWYG editor, more design flexibility, and better multimedia management.
• Wordpress received positive comments for its ease of use, plugin architecture, and comment management. It could use improvement in user management, backend customization, and an email edition (it currently requires a plugin).

Surprisingly, we received an entry stating that the paper used Dreamweaver to publish online. That, my friends, is dedication. My sympathy goes out to them. We’ll have a better solution for you soon enough.

Stay turned for stats such as the average number of developers, what languages they generally know, and CMS satisfaction. When the final report from the first survey is announced, so too will be our second, extended, even more amazing survey. We want to map out the technological workflow in your newsroom, as it will help us better understand what we’re working with (and feed you tips based on your current setup). Our second list of questions is comprehensive [Google Doc], but not yet complete. What do you think we’re missing? What do you want to learn about your community’s newsrooms? Please leave your feedback in the comments. Thanks for the support!

Yesterday I took an hour or so to synthesis one thing I’ve been working on, the Organizational Development Roadmap [Google Doc], in to responses that better fit the questions on our Knight News Challenge application. Right off the bat, Ryan Sholin responded with questions I thought it would be easier to clarify in a blog post. First, he says:

1. OK, you need two years and more money.

The first year, you can roll out a prototype school or three in the fall, a few more in the spring, and by the time the next summer rolls around, you have a service you’ve taken a school year to develop and improve before you bring it out on a larger scale.

To this, I partially agree. Currently, we’re asking for $70,000 from the Knight News Challenge and have a time scale of one year. I am opposed, at the moment, to asking for more money than I think is necessary. We have little understanding of what our costs will be (plus I’m sure they will scale over time) and the other applications in the garage that have asked for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, seem outlandish. I don’t want CoPress to be taken as an outlandish project.

For me, the one year qualifies the amount of time it will take to build part of something cool. CoPress, by no means, would be “finished” at the end of the first year. A year, though, sounds good for project scope and two years sounds too long.

Second, Ryan asks:

2. Other than it feeling warm and fuzzy, being based on open-source software and thus extensible, what’s the advantage to a student news org to use this instead of College Publisher? It’s free, and hosted, and if you ever get enough traffic, there’s a rev share on the national ads, right? How is this different. (I’d emphasize that it will be built on a platform that students can learn and adapt to their own needs, right?)

Boy, do I ever agree with you. As I’ve written before and before, “hackability” is critical. Student news organizations need to be working on an open source platform (or, bowing to Kevin, Ken, and Expression Engine, at least one with a plugin architecture) so that they have the ability to innovate as fast as they can. If anyone tries to argue with me that student news organizations don’t need digital distribution platforms they can innovate with, I won’t listen to you. The software College Publisher uses is, from all of my experiences, clunky, janky, and proprietary. We’ll win people over when we show them we have an easy-t-deploy, maintainable, and open and innovate platform to use. Hell, we’re friendly too.

At the moment, we’re not working on a national ad network, although ability to deploy ads will be functionality we provide in some capacity. I’ve heard rumors that there is another group working on the ad coop, however.

3. If you’re going to offer hosting, that’s going to cost money to maintain after a News Challenge grant would run out. What’s the business plan moving forward? And if you’re not going to offer hosting, what super-easy-to-install platform are you going to build the service on?

(WordPress or Drupal? Maybe… An Ellington-like Django-based CMS would actually be difficult, unless the student news orgs in question all have access to and control of their servers.)

The business plan is being worked out. Currently, we’re looking at a few different potential revenue streams:

• Fee for service: core CoPress developers offer technical support (database porting, site theming, temporary support if you don’t have an online editor for a term, etc.) for affordable rates.
• Flat rate fee for basic hosting, management, and support
• Grants and donation drives; foundation support
• Using The Point for raising money for plugins/add’l functionality; money raised will fund development by a web developer from the CoPress community

And it’s funny you ask about what platform we’re going to use. We’re in the process of researching the best one for our needs through our surveys and CMS audit. We’ve developed a list of what we think is critical functionality [Google Doc], and are in the process of researching how well Drupal, WordPress, Django, and/or Ruby on Rails could be hacked to fit these needs.

The million dollar question:

4. One of the winners last year is building a CMS/community network tool (plus some front-end print scheduling?) for student media. How is this different (hosting? other services?) and why is it (also) necessary?

Ryan, I think what you’re referring to is the Populous Project. We actually were talking with them about a month and a half ago, but haven’t heard anything since. What we’re doing is similar in the CMS sense (although we preferably won’t be building an entire CMS from scratch) but different in approach: we’re focusing on the technical ecosystem first. The medium to long term survival of CoPress requires a vibrant ecosystem of student Online Editors, etc. because they’re going to be the ones hacking away, educating and supporting each other, and advancing innovation in student news.

We’re working together in an open, transparent, and collaborative fashion, and that’s how we’re different.

Update: Oddly enough, the CoPress Google Group received an email from one of the Populous Project grantees a couple of hours ago in regards to why we shouldn’t consider Ruby on Rails. Hopefully we’ll hear more about their development soon.

For student newspaper Web sites, College Publisher is the big kahuna.

Most of the country’s collegiate publications use the service — more than 550, according to the MTV-owned company. It offers a content management system, prefab design templates and hosting, all free of charge. The other big selling point: It’s simplistic enough that no technical expertise is required.

It’s a good set-it-and-forget-it product. However, it’s not without its costs.

How do we dislike CP? Let me count the ways…
Large banners from national advertisers dominate the top and side of every page. Revenue sharing with papers for this ranges from nil to minuscule, if you’re lucky. Local ads can be added too, but the prime real estate belongs to CP.

Customization is a challenge, to put it mildly. That’s why CP sites look very similar in style and structure. Unfortunately, the standard isn’t a very good one — cluttered, outdated, clunky, often slow and hardly user-friendly.

If your publication is lucky enough to have a geek on staff, he or she will be limited in attempts to redesign, add new media or create outside-the-box features. Such efforts are either rendered impossible or made  tedious. Though College Publisher is attempting to address this problem with a new version of its CMS, they’ve been behind the curve for years now.

It hasn’t been an open, adaptable system that allows students to truly innovate. You can’t open up the hood and fiddle around, or even replace the tires, because you don’t own the car. CP just lets you borrow it, in exchange for taking the profits from those gargantuan ads. That’s their business model, not necessarily a bad one for all customers, but inherently limiting.

So online college media lags behind, with sites staid and shallow, standing in stark contrast to the ever-evolving, ever more dynamic Web at large.

The WordPress alternative
These complaints have been oft-repeated. Yet the few other options that do exist are daunting to most editors, those poor souls already short on time, money, and internet know-how. So they make do with CP for now.

However, several adventurous papers have recently turned to WordPress as an alternative. The popular open-source blogging software runs millions of blogs, including this one. It is endlessly customizable through a large number of themes and plugins offered by third parties.

Though not initially designed to be a full-fledged CMS, WordPress can be used as one with a little hacking. Both the Temple News and Miami Hurricane bought professional “premium” themes to do much of that work for them. You can read a report from Temple’s Sean Blanda on the process and get greater technical detail from Miami’s Brian Schlansky.

We’ll have more info on using WordPress for a college newspaper CMS in the days ahead.

What now?
WordPress is not alone. In the last few years, open-source CMSs have taken great leaps, making more power attainable and affordable to more people. Other quality tools we’re looking at include ExpressionEngine, Drupal and Django, the last of which is a Python-based framework more than a CMS.

Yet, to varying extents, all require coders and Web designers to build a site, including WordPress. That’s something few college publications have, or at least have much of. CoPress is trying to bridge that gap.

But how? What do you think? What are your priorities for your Web site? What must a viable College Publisher alternative offer? Take our brief first survey or let us know in the comments.