These are just a few of the project ideas we’ve discussed at CoPress. Do you have a better one? If so, head on over to our forums or leave a comment on this post and let the community help you brainstorm.
That’s right, Greg Linch has gotten hella hired and is upgrading to business class. (He’s sticking around CoPress as an advisor though.) Which means we’re now looking for an energetic, forward-thinking, and helpful individual to take his place as CoPress’ Community Ninja.
This talented, network-focused, person will focus their efforts on increasing the quantity and quality of interactions between student news organizations. It’ll be your goal to know of all of the different projects going on, who is working on what, and finding ways for them to work together.
We’ve got lots of tools for you to do this with too, including our social network accounts, forum, etc., and it would be wonderful if you can analytically track how well these engagement efforts are working.
Like the rest of the core team at CoPress, the position is not paid at the moment. The flip side, however, is that you’ll get to work with really smart people on a rapidly expanding project. We’re looking for a student who can commit between 15 and 20 hours/week.
Sound interesting? Send an email to apply@copress.org and we’ll hook you up with the job description and application. The position is open until filled.
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 →
I think it begs a mention, however, that there are not one, not two, but three BarCamp NewsInnovation jam sessions going down this weekend: Portland (9 to 5 Pacific) and Chicago on Saturday, and Miami (11 to 5 Eastern) on Sunday. These one of a kind events will be discussing the full spectrum of journalism and news, including business models, formats and hopefully not too much Twitter.
#collegejourn is hosting a conversation Sunday from 8 to 11 Eastern called “Bring A Prof.” The goal is to figure out how to bring j-school into the 21st century and, considering it’s a controversial topic and been well-publicized, it should be quite the conversation.
In our Google Group, J. Ryan Zambon started a thread on bounce rates for college newspapers, wondering if the numbers he was seeing for The Hoya were anything out of the ordinary. Max and Joey reported similar statistics, and Joey added that “the bounce rate stat is very inaccurate. Compare it to your exit rate which theoretically should be 100%-bounce rate. This is rarely the case. Don’t worry too much about those detailed analytics – they’re just not accurate enough to really be trusted.”
I spent part of the summer studying analytics, and one of the biggest takeaways was that the numbers themselves don’t matter. It’s what you do with them. For instance, in a study of bounce rates you take what you start with as your baseline and judge your experiments on how you shift your numbers from the baseline. If your goal is to lower the bounce rate, then you might A/B test with a couple of new designs and see which produces the most favorable results.
We started off the week (well, Tuesday actually) asking, “what strategies do you have for bridging the print/digital divide?” In terms of engaging the campus audience, integration with Facebook appears to be the easiest win. Mo Jangda argues that it’s important to tailor your services to your core demographic, saying that ”it’s nice to incorporate Twitter, Digg, etc, etc. into your site, but if they students that read your paper aren’t on board with those services, then there’s really no point.” He says that they installed the share button on their site a year and a half ago with “huge success.”
If you’re looking for numbers to quantify success, I would (and this is building off the previous paragraph) set a baseline for number of referrers from Facebook, install the widget, and see how your traffic coming from Facebook grows over the next six months and a year. It doesn’t really matter what those numbers are; rather, you’re looking at the rate of change from point A to point B.
Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers - Another roundup of ideas for newspapers. My favorites: “Focus on original content, do not rewrite wire stories or press releases. If newspapers start charging for content people are more likely [to] pay for content they can’t get anywhere else. [...] Become the host for all important discussions about local issues and politics. Moderate the discussions to ensure civil discourse. Nothing kills discussions faster than offensive comments made by anonymous people. [...] Hire additional salespeople. It is is a different sales environment today and it requires a fresh approach. Salespeople used to selling full page or half-page print ads are not the going to be able to transition easily.”
Washington Times releases open source projects – The Washington Times development team releases four projects under the Apache license: django-projectmgr, django-supertagging, django-massmedia, and django-clickpass.
Group Action Just Got Much Easier: Video Interview with Clay Shirky - Shirky talks more about the power of people to organize with out organizations, and brings up an interesting example of steamboat design to illustrate how technology can make us rethink our fundamental assumptions. CoPress is all about this.
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.
Although the Whitman Pioneer has had a web presence since 2007 when it launched a self-hosted version of WordPress by Daniel Bachhuber and Andrew Witherspoon, we wanted to launch this semester with a redesign from the ground up. The result of this process launched last week with our first print issue of the semester.
The Design Process
When thinking about how to redesign the site, we wanted to create something that could be used as the homepage for Whitman students. Essentially, we wanted a site that would incorporate information about a lot more of what happens on campus. By getting a fresh WordPress design we were able to do this by creating a place for photo galleries, a campus calendar, student forums, featured videos, and the potential for student and/or athlete blogs. Some of these features went live with the launch of the site, and others will be rolled out in the coming months.
One of the other main goals with this redesign was creating a site that encouraged student, community, and general participation. To this end we changed how the website displays comments as well as creating the potential for the occasional online forum. In the past comments were just listed one after the other in the sidebar of the article and there was no real way to promote a discussion. Now comments appear at the bottom of the article and people are able to reply to each other. With this, as well as maybe adding forums in the future, we’re hoping that the site serves as a place for students to read about and discuss events and issues on campus. Whitman is a campus that is full of too much email and occasionally there are some pretty heated debates that occur on list servs. With this new site part of what we’re hoping to do is give the campus a more central place to come together to calmly discuss these issues as they come up. Read more →
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