CoPress

This was the question facing my paper last year, when we were developing a new Django based CMS.

Some background: We (The Daily Gazette) are a small online-only daily news organization. We assign stories at a weekly dinner meeting when editors present story ideas and then our writers volunteer to cover them.

We had gotten really used to using email. The Editor-in-Chief would mail out the list of stories with all the assignments on it to the staff list. This wasn’t a great solution though. Stories got lost or forgotten easily. And since the status of stories constantly changed (a new reporter assigned, a different kind of multimedia attached, the deadline altered), the system was clearly failing us.

When we started our new site, moving from WordPress to Django, we resolved to do it better. Read more →

The CoPress community took a big step forward this week on our Google Group.

“What’s that?” you say.  Sign up and check it out.

Until Tuesday, the group was mostly a listserv for keeping members in the know about CoPress. But Alex Klein (@alexklein), editor for new media at the Duke Chronicle, added a new element that we’re very happy to see: member discussion and sharing experiences.

Here is what Alex asked:

The Duke Chronicle is looking to spend some money on our Online Department, because we currently have no office space, no special software, and no hardware of any kind.

I’m looking for a few items from anyone who’s willing to provide them:

1. How much does all your Online Department stuff cost? (hardware, software, even things like tables, chairs, etc.)
2. What do you have? (computers, audio/video equipment, software, gadgets, monitors, etc.)
3. Where can we find the most cost-effective stuff?
4. What are 3 things we MUST have?
5. How many people are in your Online Department?
6. How much space do you get in the office? (as a percentage or in square feet)

Thanks, everyone. Also, anyone who wants to provide strategies for recruitment is welcome to do so! A/V and developers are our main priorities.

If you work for a student news organization, I strongly encourage you to read the full thread. Nevertheless, we’re here to help, so here is a summary of the six responses:

1. Most organizations don’t know exactly how much their online department costs. It could a simple $300 monthly stipend for the Web editor or thousands in different pieces of equipment.
2. Almost everyone had Macs and Adobe CS3. Final Cut Express HD was the most common video editing software, but Adobe Premiere popped up in one.
3. NewEgg dominated for hardware suggestions, with B&H Photo in second.
4. Essentials were hard to pin down, but audio/video equipment, the proper computers/software and good people were the top three answers.
5. Online staffs ranged from two to six people.
6. As for office space (hey, where’s my stapler?), it varied from two desks to two offices.

Want to weigh in? Feel free to answer the question in a comment below. Or, better yet, join the Google Group and responded via e-mail to add to the thread.

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 →

Social media has the unique ability to turn interpersonal spats into broader points of public debate. A recent “Twitterfight” between the current editor of The Independent Florida Alligator and one of its former editors neatly served to demonstrate that point. The Alligator, it seems, is facing a crisis: Nobody wants to lead it in the spring semester.

I’m not a gossip columnist and I’ve no wish to rehash the gory details of their argument. What I am interested in is the distilled substance of the dispute: What can we, as college newsroom leaders, do to create an environment that attracts, retains and encourages student journalists to invest their time and energy into putting out a product? All the great ideas and all the hot new technology are for naught if we don’t have people willing to create content, because ultimately the content is what matters.

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 →

The Digital Journalist came out with it’s most recent ‘issue’ today. One of the articles is quite phenomenal and well worth a read.
A starting quote:

The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.

I’d be fascinated to hear a discussion on the topic of Newspapers as a platform. In my opinion, CoPress should be attempting to become the platform that all college newspapers are on. That means that collaboration is key. College Publisher attempts to do this, but fails:

• CP doesn’t really allow a way for you to pull in content of the ‘college newswire.’ We should build a system that can aggregate content and suggest to editors a selection of stories that they might cross-post.
• CoPress should get a small cut of the ad revenue of cross-posted stories. We can become a linking service. Do like politico, the content creator shares their content with whomever wants to cross-post, but gets a chunk of the ad revenue. Share content across papers, and we all thrive. 

I’d really like to see a discussion in the comments below. This is a pretty radical plan that, while sounds logical, is gonna get a lot of bean-counters screaming. I know our business manger would hate this plan. In his mind, we’re first and foremost a newspaper. We should be in the newspaper business.
I refer you back to the trains. There is no newspaper business, there is only information media. If we, as an industry, can realize this, we stand a decent chance of avoiding the fate of railroads.

I have the honor of writing the first official post for those of us here at coPress (the ‘About page’ and ‘Hello World’ non-withstanding). I’m a wordy guy, and I love to read myself write. But, there’s a lot to say.
I had originally intended this to be an end-all, be-all post about all things CMS and coPress related. I’ll spare you the endless scrolling for now, and break my thoughts up into several posts. I’ll try to summarize a lot of the things I’ve been saying within coPress and make an argument for UCLA’s Populous Project — which I’m very excited about.
To kick this off, and introduction to…

Content Management Systems

In becoming involved with this project, I’ve come to realize that people have varying levels of technical expertise (duh) and misconceptions about the world of web design. Let me clear the air a little bit and try to dispel some of the common fears and misconceptions I’ve been hearing.

Designers are to Developers…

When someone introduces themself as a ‘web designer,’ ask them if they’re a designer, or a developer.
Yankees, Mets. Coke, Pepsi. Bush, Logic (kidding). Designers, Developers. In every Web site ever created, there has been a struggle between code and design.
Designers want a site that looks … pretty. But they also worry about HMI, UI, and accessibility — there’s a science to that.
Developers are engineers and immersed in the science that is code. But, make no mistake: clean code is an art form.
Disclaimer: I’m a designer. I specialize in clean, minimalist design that is user driven. I hate to make compromises in design because the code is messy. I believe that design should drive code, not the other way around.

CMS

Content management systems are the new way of developing Web sites. They allow developers to do all of the coding work so that the Average Joe can login and add content to the site without knowing any HTML.
Let your fears be assuaged — any CMS that we develop will be as simple to use as any system you’re on now; quite probably easier — if we do our jobs right.
The plan is to be better than College Publisher: faster, easier to use, more modern and ad revenue sharing free. We can accomplish this relatively easily — CP set the bar pretty low.

All your old stuff

A lot of folks have rightly voiced fears about porting their old content over to a new CMS. Rest assured, this can be done.
Folks like College Publisher can’t deny you access to your own (copyrighted) data. There have been several schools that have successfully transitioned off College Publisher onto other platforms. Our CMS will make this process as painless as possible.

Opensource

Ever have a piece of software that does 90 percent of what you want, but just refuses to have that one feature that would make it a killer app? Maybe you’ve been dealing with a really annoying bug in the program for years, and just wish the darn manufacturer would fix it. Opensource is a deceptively simple solution to a common problem: sustainability.
By giving the code behind an program to anyone that wants it, open source ensures that there will be a community of developers fixing bugs and creating new features.
Yes, you’ll have to know code to contribute — but at least you can. That feature you always wanted? It’s a snap to find/hire someone for the few hours of work it takes to add that feature. It’s a lot easier than creating a new program from scratch.
By making our CMS open source, we can virtually guarantee that it will be supported as long as papers continue to use it.

We’re all good

Changing something as critical as your Web site is a huge step — with inherent risks. The important thing to take away from CoPress is that we’re aware of these risks and are will minimize them enough so you won’t have to worry about disaster.

To Come:

• The Pro-Easy: Why WordPress is not a sustainable solution and Django is
• Populous: Pre-alpha impressions
• CoPress.com: How we’ll make this a sustainable solution