The main goals

Our goal is to create an environment within which college news organizations, web developers, and editors can come together to collaborate and exchange ideas about their summer website design projects.

An inherent problem that college news organizations have to deal with is the high rates of staff turnover every four years. This means that some years the tech/web staff is robust and at others it is scarce. By providing virtual space in which everyone can exchange code, ideas, and projects we are hoping that everyone will gain web development skills that can be passed on down to future staff members.

Finally, in the spirit of transparency and collaboration, all training sessions and demos will be recorded and posted online. This will provide examples of all the code used in the sessions so that anyone can download and implement the ideas presented.

The first collaboration session

The first session will be held on May 28th at 5:00 p.m. PT. It will serve as an introduction for everyone to the project and to each other’s sites. We’ll seek to answer some of the questions below:

• What does your site look like now and what are the main goals that you hope to achieve during the summer?
• What skills does everyone have? Are you ridiculously good at creating gorgeous drop-down menus in WordPress? If so, then perhaps you’d be interested in leading a session for everyone.
• What have you found to be some of the biggest obstacles to successful college web development to be? What would have helped you along the way?

From there I’ll draft up a more detailed list of the sessions involved and who will be leading them. Keep reading for a list of what I’m hoping to cover!

What will be covered

A lot of the material will depend upon who participates, so if you see something in the list below that you’re an expert in then let us know in the forum. Below is a rough list of what we’ve come up with thus far:

• Navigation menus
• Creating category/topical landing pages
• Creating a radical homepage design that focuses on the community’s social activity
• Incorporating a wiki into the site
• Incorporating a forum into a site
• All about typography (how do you create a consistent feel?)
• Article pages (where do you put ads? serif or sans-serif?)
• Working with CSS3 techniques and how they can help you

These will be more than just how-to sessions though. When we cover navigation menus, we will spend time critiquing the existing menus of everyone involved so that you can get a feel for what others like or dislike about you existing design.

In addition to the involvement of student developers around the country, we’re planning on having a few professionals join the camp too.

Sign up

The schedule for these sessions is tentatively set to begin on May 28th and to run every week through early to mid-July. This will give all involved a half dozen tips, tricks, and opinions to take with them as they finish their design projects throughout the rest of the summer.

Made it all the way through that and still interested? There are two things you need to do. First, sign up for the entire series via our online form. Second, RSVP for the first session on Facebook. Depending on the interest, we may have double up sessions or limit the number of participants.

Get ready for a fun summer of happy designing!

Around the Network

Conversation on the forum was light this week with Andrew Spittle of the Whitman Pioneer asking for feedback on the upcoming Web Design Collaboration Series that is likely to take place this summer.

Responses came in quite quickly with several community members saying they would be on board for the project and even offered their own ideas.

Kevin Koheler suggested,

Instead of focusing each session on a particular WordPress trick or CSS technique, perhpas it’d be better to focus on a particular element of news site design. List of potential topics:

1. Article pages
   • Typography: headlines, body text, etc
   • Photos, captions
   • Media – slideshows, video, maps
   • Sidebars
   • Links, and other attachments
   • Comments
2. Advertisements
3. Navigation
4. Front page
5. Breaking news
6. Blogs

On the wiki this week, Lauren updated and organized the CoPress Network Page while Emily updated this week’s TWiC show notes with Max Cutler and Richard Baskin of Courant News.

In the News

Last but not least, here are the top four links from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• On Forward Thinking in College News – Max Cutler looks at why the news industry needs developers.
• Mustang Daily considering 4 days a week, front page ads – Media Board is considering going to four days/week and running advertising on the front page.
• 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites
• Young journalists should learn how to write a business plan – Christopher Wink thinks that student journalists should know how to write a business plan

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.

Add and Learn from the Wiki

Help educate your peers by adding your school, plugins, and other resources to the wiki. On the Network side of things,we’re compiling information on student news organizations around the country by looking for CMSes in use, blog posts you’ve written about the site, and contact information for the online editor and any web developers. Check out The Whitman Pioneer and The Daily Orange for example of “what’s good.” In the near future, you’ll be able to search against this data for ideas and the right person to go to for troubleshooting, among other things. 

In the next week or so, we’d also enjoy help adding screenshots to the list of WordPress themes and adding to our meager Django documentation.

After over two hard weeks of work from Adam, Miles, and the rest of the team, CoPress has a new look. It’s actually been live since Thursday, but we’ve been tweaking things and squashing bugs since then and we’re finally ready to for new visitors. If you find something that needs fixing, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Along with a new, gorgeous theme generously donated by Woo Themes, we’ve got two new places to interact:

A brand new wiki to collaborate on knowledge around WordPress, Django, or even College Publisher. We’ve got the following areas ready to go, and would love your contributions:

• The Network. We’re creating a directory of student news organizations and the software they use so that if you want to find some help, you’ll know where to look. Add your news organization to our directory, and use your page to describe how your website works, who maintains it, and how it fits into the operation of the news organization. Check out the Miami Hurricane, the Whitman Pioneer, and the Daily Gazette as examples of what we’re looking for.
• The resources. Please add your favorite WordPress plugins, themes, or links to Django applications, and educate your community on what works best.

If you have suggestions as to how we should improve the wiki, we’d love the feedback.

We’ve also launched a forum for general discussion amongst the community. You’re more than welcome to propose your own questions, but every week we’ll propose a question of our own. Our plan is to also have topic-specific forums (i.e. WordPress or Django) that you can subscribe to via RSS. To kick things off, we’re asking:

• What are ways in which student news organizations can collaborate to succeed online? More specifically, what type of resources, support, or knowledge is your news organization lacking, and how can cooperation change this?

Weigh in by signing up for an account. As a caveat, we ask that you please be transparent in who you are and who you represent. Thanks!

Last, but not least, our RSS feed has been broken the last few days (thanks Feedburner). We’ll hopefully get that back up tonight. In the meantime, though, there’s an audio version of our presentation to BarCamp Mizzou online now and Miles Skorpen has written an excellent post about online workflow at the Daily Gazette. I encourage you to check both out.

“What’s that?” you say.  Sign up and check it out.

Until Tuesday, the group was mostly a listserv for keeping members in the know about CoPress. But Alex Klein (@alexklein), editor for new media at the Duke Chronicle, added a new element that we’re very happy to see: member discussion and sharing experiences.

Here is what Alex asked:

The Duke Chronicle is looking to spend some money on our Online Department, because we currently have no office space, no special software, and no hardware of any kind.

I’m looking for a few items from anyone who’s willing to provide them:

1. How much does all your Online Department stuff cost? (hardware, software, even things like tables, chairs, etc.)
2. What do you have? (computers, audio/video equipment, software, gadgets, monitors, etc.)
3. Where can we find the most cost-effective stuff?
4. What are 3 things we MUST have?
5. How many people are in your Online Department?
6. How much space do you get in the office? (as a percentage or in square feet)

Thanks, everyone. Also, anyone who wants to provide strategies for recruitment is welcome to do so! A/V and developers are our main priorities.

If you work for a student news organization, I strongly encourage you to read the full thread. Nevertheless, we’re here to help, so here is a summary of the six responses:

1. Most organizations don’t know exactly how much their online department costs. It could a simple $300 monthly stipend for the Web editor or thousands in different pieces of equipment.
2. Almost everyone had Macs and Adobe CS3. Final Cut Express HD was the most common video editing software, but Adobe Premiere popped up in one.
3. NewEgg dominated for hardware suggestions, with B&H Photo in second.
4. Essentials were hard to pin down, but audio/video equipment, the proper computers/software and good people were the top three answers.
5. Online staffs ranged from two to six people.
6. As for office space (hey, where’s my stapler?), it varied from two desks to two offices.

Want to weigh in? Feel free to answer the question in a comment below. Or, better yet, join the Google Group and responded via e-mail to add to the thread.