Experimentation in the newsroom is one of the best ways to learn new skills and discover full potential of your team. Now that you understand why it’s time to innovate, how to create a web-centric newsroom and how to invest in your staff, it’s time to start experimenting.

To get you thinking, this video presents a few ideas as a starting point for your next staff meeting.

If you still need a little more ammunition, CoPress’ summer design camp has a great series of discussions about news wikis, landing pages and article layouts, among other ideas to get you started.  Our blog and wiki also have resources  about setting up a Facebook fan page, e-mail newsletter, web-first workflow and open-source software.

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.

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.

We were also interested in seeing how word spread about the article over Facebook. We didn’t post anything to the site, but it appears that others used it to send the link to friends. Over the 3-day period we received 19 visitors from Facebook (about 2%) without having to do a thing. College students may not be using Twitter to communicate yet, but they definitely use Facebook.

Finally, it seems that the best method for getting people to visit the site was to place a banner on the top of the homepage. This linked directly to the article until we were able to put together full coverage of the event. This method resulted in more than 700 visitors (or, 68%) over the 3 days. Furthermore, this visitors spent far longer (almost 4 minutes) on the page.

Takeaways for Next Time

Overall, the whole experience was very informative. Our new WordPress-powered site really made it all possible because, were it not for having a quick and easy way to push out content digitally, the Pioneer would have had to wait until Thursday to print an issue with articles about the cuts. It was also a bit of a reality check for my expectations of Twitter. Ultimately, if the campus community isn’t using it, then updates sent out via Twitter will largely be irrelevant.

Also, with more than 20 comments left on the main article this really showed the need for the site to have a forum feature (which I’ll be adding over the coming weeks). If we had this in place at the beginning, I think that student and community discussion would have been much more productive.

In the end, this was our first real test of covering breaking news digitally and then covering in print later on. We seem to have done alright, but I know there’s things we could have done better. Anyone else cover a recent breaking news story on their campus? I’d love to hear suggestions, ideas, and solutions.

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.

Check out this interview David Cohn did with Jason Kristufek to learn more:

If you can’t make it, or don’t live in these cities, NewsInnovation Portland will be livestreaming and liveblogging and NewsInnovation Miami will be livestreamed if connectivity allows.

Around the Network

#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.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• 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.
• MediaShift . 5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them | PBS - Bryan Murley has some ideas for addressing the paradigm shift challenges at college newspapers, including marketing websites better. I think they need to be more ambitious.

Have an idea for a discussion topic in the forum for next week? Leave it in the comments!

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.

More specifically, a topical wiki that would emphasize finding information by subject as opposed to date. I’m building off of two examples that do part of what I’m thinking about: NY Times Topics and the Guardian website. What I like about the Times Topics website are the *pedia-esque articles that synthesize the latest information into a two to three minute summary. It’s a good starting point, much like Wikipedia, for learning more about a subject. The Guardian website strikes my fancy because of the ability to choose what I’m interested in by subject, and then be able to drill down deeper a la Delicious:

I think these ideas should be merged with a few more in the mix. The context for the design of this news wiki is student government on a university campus, specifically the Associated Students of the University of Oregon (ASUO). This is what I would call a real-life example.

At the moment, if I as a student want to have any idea of what’s going on in student government, what bills are being voted on, and where my money is being used, I’d have to do some sleuthing. The most recent articles about the ASUO in the Daily Emerald will get me started, but I’d have to search across multiple sites, sift through a lot of information, and draft my own conclusions.

Instead, a landing page for the ASUO (and, a la the Guardian website, with nested topics) that was provided, developed, and maintained by a student news organization would be the first place I would go to get myself better acquainted with where the student government was currently at. Here is how it would present information:

• A *pedia article moderated by the beat reporter that anyone in the community could contribute to. To keep the conversation civil, all edits would have to be verifiable. This article would be a four to six paragraph synthesis of what the ASUO was about, what the history was, and what the current issues were.
• Content (including articles, images, and video) within the news organization by most recent, most commented, and most favorited. You’d be able to visualize all of these across a timeline too, in order to get a better understanding of what conversation was happening when.
• By bringing in the conversation from the community. If bloggers used “ASUO” as one of the tags for posts about the student government, that content too would be automatically pulled in and linked to. The same thing would apply for tweets, images on Flickr, and video conversation on Seesmic.

The cool thing is that you could have topics nested within your taxonomy, too. For instance, as a student wanting to educate myself about the student government, I’d start with the primary topic page. If there was an issue that caught my eye, I could click through to get a more refined *pedia article, list of posts on that specific subject, and maybe even the ASUO documents related to their discussion. 

I present the student news wiki, a living topical archive to inform the community.

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.

Our Workflow

We print the Pioneer for distribution every Thursday afternoon. In the past, the website has been updated at some point after this, but this semester we’re working on getting the online content to go live once the papers hit campus. Once we finish the article for print on Wednesday night (or in the wee hours of Thursday morning if it takes that long) the process of uploading then begins. I basically copy and paste the content from the InDesign files that the Production Assistants make and upload the corresponding images. (This is probably not a very efficient way of doing things, and we’re certainly open to hearing how the CoPress Network works through their content).

There is some special formatting that goes into the Featured section articles. These articles span the center pages of the print edition and are generally much more design heavy than the rest of the print layout. Since so much work goes into the layout of these articles, I’ve implemented a way to give the layout people some recognition for their work. If you read one of our featured articles the thumbnails at the top of the article expand to show you how the page looked in print. For now this is the best method that I have been able to come up with, but it’s probably something that will undergo some changes in the future.

The Future

The Pioneer’s site is definitely something that is still a work in progress and probably will be one for a few months. Within the next week we’ll be launching newly designed category pages as well as some design changes that will hopefully help to make the site seem even more professional and fitting for a newspaper. In addition, the Pioneer is currently supported through funds from the Associated Students of Whitman College and we’re hoping that through advertising in the print addition as well as online we’ll be able to become a little more self-sufficient.

Also, with the spread of Twitter I’m personally hoping to move the newsroom through at least a little bit of the stages of Twitter adoption. By doing this I’m hoping that the Pioneer becomes somewhat of a hybrid between a daily paper (which Whitman is just too small of a campus to support) and a weekly paper (which doesn’t do a great job of covering events that pop up). We already have a Twitter account and will be posting updates there as our site advances and as anything significant happens on campus that doesn’t make it into the paper.

Part of what excites me about working with online journalism is the potential for people to come together and really perfect what works and what just doesn’t. With that in mind I’d love to hear about the workflows that you out there go through and what you’ve found has worked. Also, it’d be great to hear from anybody at a paper that has successfully created ad revenue through their site and how they did that.