CoPress

Recommended links for the weekend:

• 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.

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

In the age of interactive media, there’s an infinite opportunity for open discussion and idea sharing through comments. Turning these comments into a real conversation, however, is a challenge that news organizations confront on a daily basis.

“We want to position ourselves as the center of community while at the same time driving out hateful, hurtful and trollish commenters,” said Jack Lail, Director of News Innovation at the Knoxville News Sentinel, in an email. “It has proven difficult to say the least.”

One of the great things about the Web is that it allows anyone to comment what they think — but perhaps the biggest downfall to that is many of these comments are crude, malicious, self-promotional or plainly irrelevant. Read more →

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.
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 →