This idea for a distributed network of support is still a very real dream for us but we soon realized, thanks to Bryan Murley, that there were intermediate steps we needed to cover first. Most importantly, this included supporting student news organizations with a turnkey hosting solution they could experiment with. We started our Managed Hosting program in January 2009 and launched our first site, The Whit, shortly after that.

Since then, we’ve migrated and launched more than 35 WordPress-powered websites, including The Red and Black, the UWM Post, and the QU Chronicle in the past week. It’s a learning experience for us as much as it is for the news organizations with which we work. For instance, as the largest site we’ve worked with thus far, The Red and Black has offered unique performance challenges that I had the fortune to work on during my wifi-enabled flight back from our team meetup in Philly this weekend.

As a part of our goal to increase the number of opportunities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing in 2009, we also held regular workshops throughout the summer and fall, published reports from the field on our blog, started development on the Edit Flow Project, and connected with the network at conferences including BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly and ACP/CMA in Austin.

We’re committed to executing our vision for the future of journalism. Our original philosophy for hosting and support, though, involved a one-size-fits-all solution that we’ve come to realize isn’t the best long-term approach to scaling our efforts. As such, we’ve relaunched our hosting and support plan again (we did it once in August too) with four tiers of service: basic, standard, full, and premium. Based on our experiences of the last year, we think the offerings better reflect the needs of different types and sizes of publications; for some, it’s fine if theme changes are made on the production site whereas others should have a development sandbox and deployment process. The new prices will be applicable to all of our new sign-ups, and existing publications will be guaranteed their current prices through the end of their invoice plus three months.

For the spring and into the summer, our goal is to ramp up the collaboration opportunities. That’s the true value of having a well-connected network of student webmasters and developers.

Let’s do it.

CM Life

Brian Manzullo, Editor in Chief

After a summer-long process of transitioning from College Publisher and building a new design, Central Michigan Life launched its new WordPress-powered site on Aug. 20. One aim for this site was to create a more simple, clutter-free look that was visually appealing but also straightforward enough that readers don’t have headaches trying to find what they’re looking for. Our photos and social networking elements are more prominent and the different story subtopics that people might want to follow exclusively are visible (e.g. football, money). Most of all, though, we wanted freedom with our Web site. We have control of all advertising and all of the different elements on our site, meaning we can try new things quite easily if we wish. My hope, however, is that we don’t stop with the makeover. The real goal is to keep readers engaged with our online presentation, whether it is through live chats, Twitter, Facebook or story comments. We feel that we can better connect them to issues that matter, and we will work hard to utilize our site in doing so.

Daily Titan

Chris Ullyott, Webmaster

We launched our new Web site, www.dailytitan.com, on Aug. 10. It was a task to learn WordPress from the very beginning but, in short order, we began to see how the theming system worked and were able to successfully make fundamental changes to the software. With the help of the nice people at CoPress, brilliant plugins, and some elbow grease, we were able to customize our WordPress theme to suit the specific needs of both our editorial and advertising staffs. Now we have a much more attractive, intuitive, and useful online presence.

The biggest advantage over our previous system is the amount control we now have over both the visual and technical aspects of our site. We now have complete control over:

• Roles and privileges of staff user accounts for a better workflow
• Sizes and placement of advertisements for more revenue opportunities
• Distribution of content with RSS feeds, accommodating for breaking news
• Integration of third-party services like Twitter and ISSUU
• Linkage throughout the site for a better user experience

We can see major opportunities for university media using open-source content management systems. The amount of control one can have takes a little getting used to! However, WordPress is fairly simple to learn, and any committed media student can quickly learn the HTML, CSS and PHP coding techniques needed to make improvements to a WordPress theme without re-inventing the wheel.

Currently on our site, we’re particularly proud of the “stay connected” widget bar we added, which lets users immediately connect with our social media presence and use other distribution channels like podcasts and email subscriptions. We also can’t get over how cool our new media kit is, courtesy of our talented design staff. The Issuu viewer makes the presentation sing.

The custom navigation bars proved a fruitful project for us as well. By rewriting the header navigation code with plain old HTML and CSS, we strictly separated editorial from advertising content and gave special pages more appropriate homes. Users clearly now have it easier in finding what they need. Since we launched, our bounce rate has dropped a whopping 30%.

We have already received very positive response both in online traffic and personal comments. We look forward to seeing what our experience will be like once the school semester starts this year. New additions we’re working on include section forums, dining and housing guides, creative online use of editorial columns, and integration of a gutsy “furlough edition”…

Thanks to CoPress for all of your help. Let’s show our campuses what news is really all about!

UA Traveler

Jon Schleuss, Web Developer

It’s better to teach someone a skill rather than do a task for them. Our move to WordPress allows for more control by the individual students rather than lumping the responsibilities onto one Web guru. Choosing the Gazette theme, we followed similar steps taken by the Mustang Daily and implemented a custom header logo different from our print edition to make a distinction between our products. This year’s staff includes students focused on the print edition and others focused on the Web. That’s not to say the content doesn’t intermingle, however. We’re now prioritizing content based on the delivery method. Moving forward, we’re strategizing an innovation of Web advertising and diversifying our Web delivery methods. Expect a mobile version of our new site and one that’s delivered in an e-mail sent each week.

We announced the first iteration of our turnkey hosting solution last December, and launched our first client by the end of January 2009. Now we’re announcing round two.

We call it Managed Hosting.

The first version of our strategic development roadmap [PDF], a fancy name for a document with big ideas for the future of CoPress, had hosting and support as an “optional” project if we absolutely needed to do it. Bryan Murley convinced us of the need in college media for a turnkey hosting solution. This “optional” project is now the current flagship of CoPress’ product line.

Since the beginning, demand for our services has skyrocketed past our initial estimates. By the end of this month, we’ll have helped move more than 25 student newspapers to WordPress – a highly-flexible, and open-source CMS. To meet the almost-overwhelming demand – we actually needed a waitlist for part of the summer – we have a new approach that will allow us to scale while providing the same high level of support.

Until now, CoPress’ hosting and service model was run on servers we operated. Although a good approach, it had a few weaknesses.

First, it wasn’t a cloud service. This meant that we needed to make sure every server had extra capacity in case any of the sites end up a massive surge in traffic. This extra capacity is generally wasted on a day-to-day basis.

Second, because each server works for five or six newsorgs, our launch schedule was highly restricted; once we filled one server, we had a difficult time launching another until we had at least five more clients ready to go.

Finally, our dedicated hosting services provided the same resources for all of our clients, big or small. This effectively means that our smaller clients were subsidizing the hosting of our larger clients, clearly not an equitable situation.

Managed Hosting means we can focus on our real strength: support. We’re working with one of the world’s top hosts, WebFaction, which lets us offer different levels of cloud hosting to fit each school. As a part of our transition package, we’ll move you to WordPress from virtually any other content management system and provide ample support to get your website up and running.

Once you’ve launched your new website, you have the opportunity to become a member of our Priority Support System. In a nutshell, the system is a safety net. We want you to innovate without fear. We’ll be there to help you with your website when you need it the most, as well as help you with all the bigger projects you want to do (classifieds, housing guide, etc.) at an affordable rate.

More specifically, partnering with CoPress means that you’ll get fast access to all of our support offerings. We’ll be monitoring your site’s status and sending out warning messages in case of downtime. We’ll store your username and password for your hosting and WordPress installation so that our team can respond immediately to serious issues. We’ll also backup your entire site every day to two different data centers to make sure that your information is always safe — even if you accidentally break your theme.

Sound intriguing? Contact us for more information or get started today.

Oh, by the way. We’ve redesigned our website too. If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, you should come check it out. It’s a bit more bold, dashing, and integrated, and we’ll be launching new features and content bit by bit. If you’re looking for a bit of design inspiration, we’ve chronicled most of the process on our team blog. Also, we’ll be making tweaks and changes throughout the week so pardon our dust.

Website Design

We went with the Gazette Edition from WooThemes because it gave us all the basic capabilities we were looking for:

• Prominent ads
• Wigetized sidebar
• Slick, rotating slideshow
• Auto-generated thumbnails

Advertising

During a time when revenue is falling, having full control over priority ad space is a must. We have a top banner (468 x 60 pixels), a sidebar ad (300 x 250 pixels) and up to four square ads on the lower sidebar (125 x 125 pixels).

We installed a WordPress plugin that allows for a “page peel” style advertisement in the top corner of the site. Although probably annoying to some, people like playing with it.

Plugins Used

The following plugins give us functionality that College Publisher would never allow for (or at least not easily).

Twitter Tools lets us easily post new articles and tweets straight from the admin end of WordPress. Why this is great: We don’t have to give every reporter the Twitter password and it streamlines the process of tweeting a new article. Posting links to articles is acceptable in moderation and when it’s supplemented with plenty of converstaion.

WP-Touch generates a mobile version of our site. If you don’t have a smart phone, you might not care, but this fall at Cal Poly, six hundred students on campus used iPhones — 500 more than in the spring, according to Ryan Matteson, the university’s technical security officer. My point: mobile is on the rise.

Another mobile plugin we’re excited about is for the non-smart phone users who want to get SMS updates. SMS Text Message is a plug we’re excited about, but have yet to use. It allows users to subscribe for text message alerts and lets us send out those alerts from the dashboard.

We’re using the Add to Any plugin for users to share our content over any social network. Although Share This is more widely recognizing for sharing, I chose Add to Any because it lets us customize the look of the button.

Structural Changes to the Daily

On a CICM post, I briefly mentioned the structural changes that came with the switch. To elaborate, this is how our workflow will function from here on out:

• Reporters save their articles as a WordPress draft (instead of e-mailing articles to editors)
• The reporter contacts copy editors when the article is in the CMS, copy editors will edit from the newroom or home (wherever they happen to be)
• We’ve hired an additional copy editor and switched up the shifts so there is always a copy editor on-call during the day
• There is an ongoing Google Spreadsheet of most recent articles posted. After editing the article, the copy editor signs off on the article on the spreadsheet
• The third editor to read over the story pushes “publish” if they think it’s ready. If it still needs work, it can go through the process again
• In the evening, designers pull already-edited articles from WordPress for page layout

The delay time between when a reporter writes the article and the editor posts it is about four hours. Right now, it’s not to efficient because our reporters are new (and therefore their articles need much editing) and the workflow is still slow. It will only get better from here.

The Back End

The hierarchy is broken down as such:

• Three administrators (not including CoPress) who have full access to all features
• About ten editors who can publish articles
• Ten contributors (reporters) who can save drafts, but not publish

New Features

Although we certainly didn’t need WordPress to implement the following new features to our website, having WordPress has made it way easier to execute these ideas we’ve had:

• Crime map: WordPress pages make adding new, easily-accessible features very easy. Within a few minutes, we were able to throw together a Google Map of the police log that we plan to update daily.
• Hot topics: We’ve always wanted to re-ignite an old feature called “What’s the Buzz?” but creating and maintaining pages was always a headache. Again, within minutes we were able to generate pages around controversial issues on our campus. Eventually, we’ll have a wiki to supplement each topic.

What’s Next?

Now that the process of posting is more streamlined (or, it’s getting there), the goal is to produce better multimedia. My efforts can be focused on training reporters one-on-one instead of copying and pasting articles at the end of the night.

Our hosting project is aimed at giving schools fast, reliable service on a well-supported open source platform. We’re doing this because we see a distinct need in college media to move online in a meaningful fashion and we believe that many current solutions are poor.

It’s our thinking that a centralized place to share resources among many newsrooms can benefit everyone, and apparently we were right. There is a very widespread need for services just like these, and we’ve been growing a lot faster than we had anticipated. While this makes us ecstatic, it also means that we don’t currently have the money to support the growth on our own.

CoPress is a non-profit initiative that has thus far been funded entirely out of our own pockets. We’ve come to realize that our small group of college students alone isn’t capable of raising the money necessary to do all that we want to do, however, so we’re asking for your help.

We’d like to offer you this challenge: the next time you go to buy a soft drink, a bag of pretzels or think about super-sizing that burger, pocket the cash and pledge it to helping us. We could really use the extra dollar.

Led by the tireless efforts of Miles Skorpen, we helped the student paper jump from the College Media Network (College Publisher) to an independent site running WordPress on our server.

“I’m more than satisfied with the end result,” says Whit Web Editor Emily Kostic. The staff was initially hesitant about the switch, but now, according to Kostic, “Everyone is in love with the new site.”

“I like how it was collaborative with Miles, ensuring that we had a say in what the site would look and feel like,” she added.

Here’s a rundown of the what it took.

Archives. Years of articles from The Whit’s archives were imported, using files provided by CMN. Such transfers of legacy data can be an onerous task, and this one took longer we than expected. But along the way, Miles wrote a script to automate the migration as much as possible, smoothing the trail we hope for future moves.

Look. The Whit’s new design is based on a Revolution Two theme, for an un-bloggish layout. Designer Brian Gardner has unfortunately decided to start charging for these “premium” themes again, just two months after announcing he was offering them for free. We at CoPress were thoroughly unimpressed with the Revolution templates after working underneath the hood. With a growing market of paid themes — see WP Remix and WooThemes, among many others — we’d be hesitant to recommend Revolution.

Backend. WordPress, flexible though it may be, and becoming more like a full-fledged CMS in recent versions, is still basically blogging software out of the box. It takes a slate of plugins and a good bit of tweaking to fit the dynamic needs of a collegiate newspaper. Some inelegant workarounds are required. We’re hoping that adaptation can be made much more efficient.

Our work is not yet done. We’ll continue improving and polishing the Whit’s site. And learning how college newsrooms can better utilize open-source tools like WordPress.

Questions and critiques, as always, are welcome.

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.

We’re in beta

CoPress should have emphasized that our hosting plans our in a beta stage right now. We do have the server capacity to host three to five college news organizations and we will be capping our initial service there.

Yes, part of the reason we are doing that is because we don’t think that server can handle much more. Yes, it is possible that our server might not be able to handle even the relatively small number of organizations.

That’s why we’re in beta. That’s why we’re going with LiquidWeb, which will allow us to expand our server capacity almost instantly to deal with problems if/when they appear.

With all due respect to Dean’s dorm computer, LiquidWeb servers offer enough bandwidth to allow roughly 1.2 million visitors a month to a newspaper website. We think that’s plenty to start with.

CoPress isn’t trying to host the world, but we’re going to give a solid start to a few folks who sign up with us. If we become popular, we’ll be expanding our plans to more news organizations and thus increasing our server capacity.

We are equal opportunity CMS users

CoPress is currently focusing on WordPress-based solutions, but we’re not exclusive. As a matter of fact, we’re not in anyway convinced that WordPress is the long-term solution. It is, however, the best solution that we’ve seen that can be deployed now, and that is valuable for those who want a more dynamic site.

We’ve taken on a long-term project to evaluate many different CMS solutions available (there are several we’re excited about), but our priority to help organizations using College Publisher or other less-than-desireable platforms as soon as possible. WordPress offers a good, workable solution that does much of what we’d like.

If you’d rather host a Drupal, Django, Ruby on Rails, CakePHP or any other sort of site on our servers, please let us know! We’re not making any money off of our hosting — we just want to help you host your own site. It’s up to you what CMS you want to use.

CoPress = easy

Alex Klein, The Chronicle’s editor for new media, and the gentleman who forwarded Dean’s e-mail, said he’s a little disappointed with their progress developing a Drupal-based CMS.

Their project has a lot of support from the school, including a $100,000 budget (there’s politics associated with that number, but according to Alex it’s probably still there). Yet, despite the large budget and institutional support, and a working mockup of their new site, Duke’s nine-month project still hasn’t launched.

This is where CoPress can help!

We’re here to help you avoid these problems. We’ve designed our hosting to be about getting your paper online as quickly as possible on a platform that works.

We’re as transparent as Windows isn’t

(Pardon the geek humor in the subhead.) Here’s the point: we don’t want to make money. Our motivation is based on the idea that the more college media outlets that keep pace with the “new media” evolution, the better off we’ll all be.

Our hosting plan is just an extension of this philosophy. It seems to us CoPress folks that many schools have not been able to adapt to the Internet quickly due to a range of technical barriers.

We’re here to remove those hurdles.

Now.

Keep it coming

We really, really appreciate any and all feedback. The more honest the better. Keep it coming and we’ll keep using it.

What Dean’s criticisms pointed out to us it that

• We need to make it clear that we’re going to be taking just a few schools on our servers to start. We’re not trying to host the world (yet) but we think speed and reliability are critical, so rest assured, we’ll do our best to keep the servers at full speed.
• We think WordPres is a pretty darn good solution, but we know there are others out there. We’ll continue to look at them as they are developed. But if you want a site up quickly, WordPress is a great solution that is ready now.
• We need to step up our efforts to prove to college media that there is a solution to your technical difficulties. We’ve got it ready to go and are more than willing to help you out. Mostly because we’re hoping that you’ll jump far enough ahead to help us with the next big problem we all face.

CoPress is here to advocate for college media. One of the ways that we can do that is offering cheap, well supported, easy hosting. We’re still working on other avenues of support. Look to us to be the community that supports college media.

edited by Greg Linch

Update

Jan 1 14:36 PST — Link to The Chronicle test site removed per their request. Apparently, there was some miscommunication on that link being made public.

Our first partner publication to sign on is The Whit weekly student newspaper at Rowan University. Their online editor Emily Kostic let the cat out of the bag a few days ago on her blog.

CoPress set up a capable server and will collaborate with partner publications to install a site with WordPress tweaked to their need. (Use of other CMSes is possible if desired, but right now we’re really liking WordPress. New version 2.7 is sweeeeet.) Along the way, our team of experienced editors and geeks can offer advice and ideas.

Publications will pay a small monthly fee. We’re volunteering our efforts and offering this service at cost, though not to make a profit. CoPress is committed to newspapers being autonomous online; we won’t run any ads on your site, so any revenue you make is 100 percent yours.

We’re looking for more student news organizations to join the program this semester. See the swanky hosting page for full details. If interested, get in touch A.S.A.P. to take advantage of the winter recess.

We’re calling this a “beta” run, not because there will be anything half-hearted about the sites hosted. Rather, we’re only taking on a limited number of schools – a number we know we can handle as CoPress gets off the ground. And the service will evolve in future semesters.

Right now, besides helping a few papers out, we’re using the program to

• Document and the process to share with all.
• Show that – yes, skeptical business managers of the world – it can be done.
• Better learn in practical detail what student newsrooms need to build up robust online operations.

That knowledge will guide our organization going forward, working to connect students with the tools they need – however that can best be done.

Questions? You can also read the hosting page or leave a comment below.

First off, and possibly most notably, CoPress has made it into round 2 of the Knight News Challenge. Several of us were up to the wee hours of the morning putting the finishing touches on our application. As it turns out, though, round 2 isn’t due until Dec. 5. We’re quite happy that this will give us more time to hone our selling points. If you’re so inclined, please read through our application and send feedback. We’d be more than happy to hear what you think.

On the editorial side, we’re finally going to start blogging about technological innovation in student news on a more regular basis. This week will also see the launch of our podcast, yet to be named but already including some pretty content. We’ve launched a wiki to be soon filled with wonderful tutorials, lists, and links to amazing videos on how to pimp your WordPress install.

On the technology side, Miles is putting together a plan to offer hosting at affordable rates. To bring this to reality, we’ll need between four and six student news organizations to launch with us. Like to learn more? Please contact us.

If you’re on FriendFeed, you can join the discussion in our room. And from the RSS burp I received today, I can see our feed is now working again. Onward!