CoPress

The background

College news organizations need to move beyond advertising. Now.

Hold that thought.

Some background: The topic of generating revenue to sustain news organizations has begun to consume my thoughts about journalism. There are a number of reasons why, but this mostly came after a little meetup last Saturday in DC called RevenueTwoPointZero (Rev2oh on Twitter).

This isn’t the first time our humble CoPress crew is talking about the business side of journalism. Namely, check out Joey Baker’s post from December, “But we make all our money from newsprint!”.

But why? Aren’t we just about technology and college news sites?

No. That’s a main theme, but we would be remiss if we left revenue off the table. It’s hard to run a news site without money, unless you’re an exception.

Actually, one of our three main goals directly relates to making money: We want student news organizations to generate more online revenue by having full control over their sites.

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Anticipating a controversial speaker at my university (William Ayers), we knew there were going to be two stories: the actual lecture and any protests outside. The event sold out on the first day, prompting leaders to add an additional simulcast location to handle capacity. Our paper had secured four press passes for inside, and we planned for an additional five reporters (two photographers and three reporters) outside. I wanted to be a part of this event, so I decided, “What would be a better way than a live blog?”

I had previously participated in blogs that had used the CoverItLive software and wanted to try it out for myself. I signed up and it could not have been easier. They even have a way to launch a “practice session” to test out everything. For an upcoming event, the software shows an e-mail reminder form where the live coverage will be.

Preparing for the live event, you can add many media items in folders. I used this to post a map of campus I edited to show where everything would take place. I also used the pre-written text feature to write a welcome message, saving time when we went live.

Another nice feature is saved links. I used these to remind my readers that there was a live audio and video feeds also available to see/hear the event.

I set myself up in the middle of the action, outside the simulcast, across the street from the actual lecture to watch the protests outside. I had my laptop, cell phone and a card reader for photos. I designated one of our reporters to be a runner while I texted others to get updates.

For about an hour I posted every few minutes. For photos, I found a tiny Java program that resized and watermarked photos very fast. (Fast Image Resizer for Java). I used this software to quickly copy photos off of memory cards before using the CoverItLive media uploader in to post them.

With more readers came more comments. In CoverItLive, pending comments appear in the right of the window. You then have the choice to show (or not show) the comment, to allow all comments from a certain reader and to send a reader a private message. Many comments were about problems with the audio and video feeds (set up by the university and TV station, respectively). It was interesting to know that I was some people’s only source for the news.

I should add that CoverItLive uses Javascript, so it works for just about everyone. They even have a mobile version to post updates from any cell phone, including the ability to upload pictures and video directly.

Most of the protesters left by the time the actual lecture started, so things quieted down as the night progressed.

By the end, CoverItLive’s statistics indicated we had about 25 viewers. After stopping the live blog, the event can be “replayed” with everything listed just as it happens. You can see this on the post of our live coverage.

I thought the coverage was a success, and I would encourage any web team to look at this — maybe set up a breaking news plan-of-action to use CoverItLive when news breaks. And it’s not just for news- just think of how a sports reporter can cover a game with this kind of software.

Joe Moore is a sophomore meteorology major at Millersville University. He built the Web site for The Snapper using WordPress. The site is hosted at Site5. The weekly newspaper has a circulation of 4,000 and the Web site has about 1,000 weekly visitors.

Last week, the Whitman Pioneer broke out of its weekly publication mold a bit to cover a story about the administration’s decision to cut varsity sports funding to the Alpine and Nordic ski teams. The same day the announcement was made we had an article written by one of the Editors-in-Chief posted, and started spreading the word around campus for students to visit the site and weigh in. As I posted earlier here at CoPress, one of the major goals we wanted to accomplish with our new site was to use it as a forum for student discussion about heated topics; we saw this as a great chance to test it out.

Breaking the News

Once the story was posted and the official announcement by the President’s Office was made we started to spread the word through a variety of means: posting on Twitter, sending emails to the student list-serve, and good old word of mouth. Our goal was to get students and community members onto the site to read about the decision and comment on it. The results showed some interesting information concerning the roles these different modes of communication played.

First, Whitman is far from a “Twitter-heavy” campus. I know of a few dozen students and staff who use it, and most of those don’t post too frequently. Thus, I was definitely interested in what type of traffic our posts on Twitter would drive to the site. The results aren’t so encouraging though. Out of over 1,200 visitors over a 3-day period only 9 (less than 1%) came from Twitter. Furthermore, these visitors only spent an average of 2 seconds on the site. Not very heartening to someone trying to use Twitter to increase traffic to our site.

While the community may not be awake to the power of Twitter, Whitman is definitely fond of email list-servs. Over the course of a couple days we posted multiple announcements to the general student list-serve about the article. This drove over 100 visitors (more than 10% of our traffic). Also, these visitors were much more likely to spend time reading the article as most spent over 2 minutes on the page.
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This post is a behind-the-scenes look at how the Amherst Wire team produced Economic Stimulus 101, an example of deep-information journalism in an online multimedia format.

>Why deep-information journalism?

The Internet is awash with information that is, too frequently, miles wide and only inches deep. News organizations add to the problem when they bombard readers with commodity news (only the “facts and updates,” says the AP’s 2008 study on news consumption, as opposed to depth and breadth).

Deep-information journalism is one way to balance out shallow coverage by providing context, background and analysis for topical issues. BBC’s Special Reports accomplishes this with a clean design that encourages exploration. News wikis are another promising development that would achieve a similar goal if implemented well.

Economic Stimulus 101: The project

At the Amherst Wire, we wanted to turn an analytical lens on the federal economic stimulus bill that passed last month and capture various aspects of the questions and debates surrounding it. We also hoped to frame the topic in a broader context including historical parallels and general economic theory distilled into simple terms.

To do so, we interviewed six professors (five in economics and one in entrepreneurship) from UMass Amherst and Mt. Holyoke College, edited the videos into short clips, and arranged them by subject in an online guide.

1. Preparation

We did extensive research and planning before setting up the interviews so that we would know the right questions to ask. This was particularly important when tackling a topic as complex as the U.S. economy — we had a lot of ground to cover, but at the same time, didn’t want to stray too far afield.

During the preparatory stages, we compiled a FAQ about the stimulus package from students blogging for a journalism class. This gave us an idea of what college students were wondering about the bill and shaped some general themes that ended up in the final project.

2. In-person interviews

To land interviews with professors, we simply scanned department contact lists and sent e-mails to faculty whose areas of expertise lined up with our topic. Out of maybe twenty professors contacted, six replied saying they were interested. We sent our questions in advance to give them time to prepare, and then conducted the interviews in their offices over the course of two weeks.

Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes and covered areas the professor was most familiar with. We didn’t follow a strict Q&A format or ask the questions in any particular order, but let the interview unfold more like a discussion. We would be reorganizing everything in the editing room later, anyway. Read more →

Words of warning. The following post is hotly contested internally among us CoPress folk. Very likely this is controversial to the greater community as well. But at the risk of having people with pitchforks or angry twitterers show up at my door, I’ll go ahead and share my opinion.

I’d like to propose a simple rule:

Tags should never contain a proper noun.

This is a maxim is intended to avoid frustration from both users and content creators by implementing tags in a useful way.

Tags are the darling child of the social networking, web 2.0 community. The concept is simple really: words or short phrases that, as metadata, can be attached to anything on the web to enable easier searching, better SEO, and greater user ease of use. But, when misused they become overwhelming, hard to use and irrelevant.

Here’s the logic behind the rule to never put a proper noun in a tag: the term you’re entering is likely already in the article and therefore searchable. If it’s already there, then putting it into the tags is not only a repeated, wasted effort, but it is going to confuse the reader by culttering up the tag cloud.

• Wasted effort. If you’ve already put the proper noun in the article than the information is already there. Likewise for photos, the information should already be in the caption. Why would you spend the extra time trying to get the information in two places?
• You’re giving the reader too much info to sort through. A ton of information is good for computers, but if you want tags to be user-friendly (often the argument for putting proper nouns into the tag cloud), you need to limit what you choose to use.
• The whole post is already searchable. If you’ve got the person’s name or the place in the article, caption, description, whatever it is you’re writing, the data is searchable. Tags are there to add additional information that you couldn’t writing directly into the post.
• There’s no way you’re going to be able to remember every single proper noun that could possibly be affected. Let the semantic web (when it finally comes about) take care of that for you.

What should be tagged

Tags are meant to be used for conceptual information that you would never write in the post, but you’d like to attach to your data. Read more →

When copy editors tell me how they feel lost in the Web-first world, I know how they feel.

When section editors tell me they don’t think their copy desk is ready for Web duties, I know how they feel, too. I know because I’ve felt the same way at one point or another in the past couple years. My background is primarily in copy editing, and I’ve made the move to the online side of our paper only in the past year. In that time, we shifted our Web uploading duties to our copy desk. It’s not a perfect system, but I think it’s a start.

The old system vs. the new one

We used to have one person come in late at night and upload the entire issue shovelware-style: no links, no related stories attached, no Web-first mindset.

Now, copy editors upload stories one at a time after they’ve been edited.

It’s not a perfect system and it’s not necessarily built to accommodate a 24-hour news cycle, but it’s an improvement. When most of your staff is in class during the day, it’s tough to keep the site fresh during the day, but we’re working toward that goal.

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This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform; and while the Web can do that, the idea of re-purposing news content had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild. It permitted the press to delay the date of migration.

– Migration Point for the Press Tribe, Jay Rosen

Newspapers got it all wrong when the went online—simply shoveling their content from the print product into a template Web site and saying, “There, we’re online.”

They’ve never really been ‘first class citizens’ of the Web, however. Newspapers are still not doing simple things like linking or tagging or using social media. They’re online in that they have a Web site, but they’re still using a print mentality to maintain it. Read more →

News wikis haven’t make it big yet but, in my opinion, their day is soon.

In a conversation I was having with Joey Baker the other day, we were talking about micropayments, monetization, and how news differs from music, movies, and other forums of content. His argument is that news is “read once, and then file away” while the other forms have “repeat use” value which makes them easier to charge for. This got me thinking. Journalism shouldn’t just be about broadcasting the most recent event of the day, but also providing accurate, vetted, and independent information to educate the community. In fact, news websites are pretty bad with this other side of journalism. If I want to understand the context for an issue’s current situation beyond what’s presented in the article, I’ve got to use an atrocious site search tool to find previous articles on the issue. There has to be a better way to get me to the information I need to know.

Enter: the wiki. 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 →

As I’m sure everyone is aware, there’s been a lot of talk in the media as a whole about the fate of print news as more people (supposedly) turn to the Internet as their favored information source.

This got me thinking quite a bit about exactly why that is. Many who write about the murder of newspapers at the hands of digital media make it seem as if it is inevitable. As if to say, it must be so, because the Internet is much more shinier and newer than newsprint, and therefore must obviously be newsprint’s destroyer.

I find fault in this attribution of Darwinian evolution to our forms of media.

For the most part, our industry has looked at the Internet as either an opposing force or a distasteful side-dish that has to be served in order to appease the people. Again, I don’t believe that either has to be the case. There are ways of harnessing digital content and making it work in partnership with your print content, meshing the two together. Read more →