CoPress

CoPress ended in the same way it started: a conference call. Wednesday evening, roughly 20 people joined us on a final debrief call as we explained our decision to terminate operations.

Full audio of the hour-long call can be heard below.

During the debrief, each team member wrapped up a significant takeaway that they’ve gained from being involved with CoPress:

Andrew Spittle, Hosting Director:

“I think the biggest takeaway I’ve found both from working with CoPress and also starting out as the web staff at the Whitman Pioneer is that a lot of things seem sort of intimidating at first … the best thing to do for yourself as an individual and the news organization you work for is to just jump in.”

Lauren Rabaino, former Creative Director:

“The power of collaboration… Aside from the annual conferences we go to, newspaper editors we meet once, we brainstorm and then never see each other again. CoPress provided the platform for us to actually continue that interaction beyond the face-to-face meeting. The community we built was something that didn’t exist before and I think it will continue to exist after CoPress the organization has gone away.”

Albert Sun, Hosting Associate:

“This stuff, it’s not that hard. The best way to go and try something … We didn’t come in just knowing a huge ton about what we’re doing now. It was just a learning process through the same thing, the same sort of process anyone can go through. Don’t be afraid.”

Will Davis, Hosting Associate:

“What I’m really proud of is just really being able to delv into projects and set my sights on finer problems … and really take time to delv into that problem and solve it. For example, Courier was the answer to a problem we had on our website and it was something that CoPress allowed me to do.”

Daniel Bachhuber, Executive Director:

“What I most wanted to see come out of CoPress and what I’m most happy to see happening now is people taking initiative, but then having this community discussion/place/area where people can convene and share knowledge … I’m happy to see that starting to happen finally. That’s what it was all about in the beginning.”

Why is CoPress shutting down?

The question that we received on Twitter and that was echoed in the call boiled down to the cut and dry: Why is CoPress shutting down now?

As Daniel noted, the honest truth of why we’re closing down operations is because the money-making side of our business wasn’t covering the effort we were putting into it and the business wasn’t scaling.

We encourage innovation. We encourage experimentation. We believe that the best way to learn how to code is to build something and break it — and CoPress would have your back to save it. While it’s a great philosophy, it’s not a business model.

“As it turned out, we were answering a lot of stuff for free, meaning we weren’t billing people for it,” Daniel said. “The way we structured our turnkey hosting is that you get full access to the server, you get full access to the software, install whatever plugins you want, and break the site as much as possible and we’ll answer your questions and help you bring the site back up. Our pricing strcuture didn’t reflect that offering in a logical way.”

What services will fill the void?

We’ve learned that the biggest challenge in moving to open source software is how to transition site data and archives from proprietary software. After that process is complete, organizations have the ability to be largely independent.

One option is to open source our transition process and allow other entrepreneurs to sell those services as independent contractors to set up newspapers on third-party hosting.

Even with CoPress’ operations terminated, we’d like to see the network that formed around CoPress continue to rally for innovation. Whether that looks like a Google Group, weekly conference call, forum, etc. is yet to be determined.

It’s time for the community to take ownership.

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Leading into this week’s Hacking the Student Newsroom session, here’s a quick preview of online projects individual student journalists and newsorgs will be conducting over the upcoming winter break:

Investigative multimedia site from McKenna Ewen

McKenna Ewen, a multimedia journalist at the University of Minnesota, is doing an investigative piece about a journalist’s mysterious death in Minneapolis in 1945. This winter break, he’s putting together a custom site and documentary about the story. Ewen says:

[Investigative reporter James Shiffer] approached me in August about helping build the project into a website and making a short documentary of it. I agreed and made it part of my senior thesis, which is about increasing video views on the web. We’re going to launch project independently and see how much traffic we can pull in without an advertising budget (it should be interesting).

The anticipated publish date is early in January (we’ll link you to it when it launches). Update: This post originally stated the project was part of a collaboration with the Star Tribune. It is not.

Development continues on Nando from Max Cutler, Rob Baskin, and Andrew Spittle

Yale student Max Cutler has been working on a workflow tool for the administrative side of the Courant News CMS, code named “Nando.” A few features for the tool include a pitch system, a workflow based around statuses and user roles, and a heavily customizable dashboard for all of this activity. He’s recruited CoPress’ Andrew Spittle to continue development on the project over winter break. You can hear more about what they’ll be working on specifically at today’s Hacking The News workshop.

SR2 Blog from Josh Halliday

Josh Halliday, a journalism student at the University of Sunderland, is starting a project for community-based blogging as part of his final project. From the blog’s about page:

SR2 Blog is the new community-run neighbourhood news website, dedicated to the SR2 area of Sunderland.

We’re recruiting community reporters who either want to keep their neighbours on top of what’s going on down their street or vent on an issue that’s not being dealt with. If you live, work or know SR2 why not get involved?

SR2Blog features news broken down by neighborhood, video, liveblogs, and social media. The project is an interesting experiment in -hyperlocal, community-generated news and we’ll be interested to watch its progression.

EditFlow updates from Mo Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Scott Bressler and Will Davis

Edit Flow is a WordPress plugin being developed by Mo Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Scott Bressler and Will Davis to help tailor the CMS’s workflow for an editorial environment. Although the first few phases of the project have already been released, the plugin is still actively in development. Here’s what they’ll will be working on this winter as part of the next phase (via the CoPress wiki):

• More granular email notifications, including the ability to have a notification go to a predefined group of people
• User groups with functionality to define specific groups of users within WordPress.
• Visualization of the editorial workflow data within WordPress, let it be through a calendar view, an activity stream, or other.
• The ability to define newsroom-specific metadata for each post.
• Functionality to allow custom definition of a required set of actions for each piece. These could be “copy-edit,” “fact-check,” etc.

SB Statesman redesign and restructuring from Bradley Donaldson

The SB Statesman — the student newsorg at Stony Brook University in New York – has a winter goal that every student publication can and should be pursuing this break: redesigning and resturcturing their site. From editor-in-chief, Bradley Donaldson, here are a few goals they have:

• Create a website that has a greater focus on multimedia.
• Make the site much more user-friendly and student-centered
• Harness social media to both spread the word about the newspaper and have a presence in student communities

What I really like about this redesign project is that it’s not a feat accomplished by a few web editors, but the staff as a whole. Donaldson said they’re finally taking a step they’ve neglected in the past:

Fortunately we have a good number of staffers who are interested in helping out with this, and the entire newsroom on a whole is excited about the changes being made. We’ve neglected our online presence too much or been very inconsistent with it in the past, even though we had the manpower and know-how to really improve it.

Full disclosure: The Statesman plans to launch its new redesign on CoPress’ Managed Hosting plan.

If you want to hear about what’s going on specifically with Edit Flow, Nando and Courant News, or just want some feedback on what you’re working on now’s the chance: join today’s Hacking the Student Newsroom session. The session will be run through TalkShoe so just call (724) 444-7444 at 4 p.m. PST and enter the Call ID when asked (it’s 67693).

There are oh so many wondrous things for you to click on this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism? – Crowdfunding may or may not be the future of journalism, but crowdlinking is one way of determining which stories are hot. Everyone who’s anyone linked to this story on Twitter. The story covers some of the successes and challenges of projects such as Spot.us and Chi-town Daily News. It will be interesting to see who in the college market follows suit.
• DjangoCon is coming to town. My town, at least. DjangoCon will be in Portland this September 8th through 12th. The first three days will be conference days, and the last two will be code sprint days. If you can make it to Portland, student tickets are only $135.00 for all five days. We might even be able to put together a small, college-media specific component.
• Announcing the Publish2 WordPress plugin: Do more with your links – Full disclosure: this was my baby that we finally released officially into the wild. With a feature called Link Assist, It makes it much simpler to access your Publish2 links while writing a story. The plugin also makes it simple to add your links to your sidebar or create a “What We’re Reading” page for your readers. /shameless self-promotion
• How Useful (and Usable) is Your Site? – A simple set of exercises to tell whether your newspaper website is actually worth using or not. See if yours passes the test; if not, you probably have work to do.

On the note of WordPress, you should upgrade your Google Analyticator plugin. Among a new set of features released with version 5.0, the plugin now offers one-click authentication with Google and makes it super easy to access your analytics on the WordPress dashboard.

This morning, I started a thread on commenting policy best practices based on a question we received. The success stories I’ve heard in the past year have been coming from the Daily Gazette at Swarthmore and NYU Local. Both have actively engaged communities. The Daily Gazette keeps things civil by recording the location of the commenter (whether they’re on campus or off), encouraging them to sign up for an account, and allowing fellow commenters to vote on the quality of comments. NYU Local requires all commenters to use both first and last names. Depending on the amount of participation on the thread, I might roll the results into a blog post.

On the wiki, The College Voice has started maintaining a list of their current projects which include “designing a new icon and masthead to go along with its new website, all launching in September 2009 as part of its online development project” and also “developing a pdf archive of its issues, from the 1990s, and hopefully scanning its editions from its premiere in 1977.” For anyone else interested, if you include this section on your organization’s profile then it’s an easy way for us to keep up to date on what you’re working on.

At The Maine Campus, Will Davis is finishing up a classifieds system he built in PHP from scratch. One advantage? If you want to add a feature, you just build it. There’s a new feature on Will’s project every time I look at it (most recently, an RSS feed of all items posted). I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it this fall.

Ok, I can’t get much hokier than that. Now is the time to get involved with CoPress! If you’d like to, we’ve started outlining a few golden paths to do so:

Contribute to the Blog

Redesign your website recently? Have an idea for the next killer student news application? Join the growing list of contributors to the CoPress Blog by pitching your idea to blog@copress.org. 

Connect in the Forum

When we relaunched the website a few weeks back, we installed a super powerful WordPress plugin called Simple:Press Forum. Our goal is to provide ways for our community, you guys, to connect on a regular basis about all things tech, student media, and journalism. At the moment, you can leave questions about WordPress, Django, and Drupal, and also participate in the weekly discussion group. This week Greg asks, “what ways are you generating revenue right now, how would you would evaluate your success and what would you like to do in the future?” We’d certainly enjoy having you weigh in. Read more →