• It’s the season of new sites. On Wednesday, we helped Brian Manzullo take the new CM Life live. He has since written a thoughtful post to the community, as well as a more detailed post about the new features of the site. Late last night, a new, more Drupally Daily Tar Heel went online. Andrew Dunn, Sara Gregory, and other staffers give a short introduction and talk about their plans for the upcoming year.
• Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better When It Comes To Online Ad Formats – “The study, which was based on 2,390 online display campaigns running over the past three years, found that so-called “half banners” (those measuring 234 x 60) and rectangles (180 x 150) were more effective than ads that frame the page such as high profile leaderboards and skyscrapers.” (tks Joey Baker)
• Will Davis deserves significant props for the amount of work he’s been doing to improve the wiki. The focus of what he’s doing is configuring Semantic MediaWiki to make all of the semi-structured data on a newspaper profile available in aggregate form. We now have over 120 newspapers listed in the directory; if you see that yours is missing detailed information, please add to it!
• Max Cutler would like to see a “feature matrix with links for college news sites.” I’d like to see that, as well as a page on the wiki dedicated to just brainstorming and listing out new ideas. For instance, in the forum, Brian asked about a “breaking news” box that could occasionally appear on the home page, as well as ideas for sweet author pages. It would be great if we could capture these on the wiki in such a fashion that, if I wanted to get some inspiration for author pages regardless of CMS, I could go to that page to see what other people have done.

Help us out with the curation process by joining the CoPress Newsgroup.

• Rob Curley at the Las Vegas is looking for fall interns that know the latest and greatest of the web and can “write their backsides off.” At Serra Media, Mark Briggs wants “fresh perspectives and top-notch talent” to join his team for 9 to 12 weeks.
• Andy Dickinson released a WordPress plugin on Tuesday that allows the author to comment on individual paragraphs in the post. It’s wonderful to see some of the greatest things about the News Mixer project being ported over the WordPress. Now we wait for the plugin that allows you to do 140 character comments natively. (Tks Greg Linch for the link)
• If better self-branding is a goal for the fall, then Mindy McAdams has an excellent list of ten tips for you. Notable priorities: making sure someone can find you by googling your first and last name, posting your resume online in HTML and not as a PDF (although having it available as a PDF download can also be useful), and being a part of the conversation online. (Tks Brian Manzullo for the link)
• In the past week, Twitter as all about Facebook, FriendFeed, and tr.im. Jeffery Zeldman, a notable designer, has taken the approach of not using any third-party URL shorteners and instead runs all of his posts off his own domain with a WordPress plugin called, you guessed it, “Short URL plugin.” If your domain is short enough that this makes sense, it would probably be a worthwhile approach that would help avoid link rot. On a related note, Max Cutler and David Estes came down to Portland last weekend. One of the projects that actually came to life was a URL shortener app for Courant News.

There are at least a few active conversations going on in the forum that you should check out. Chris Ullyott is putting together a staff page for the Daily Titan and is figuring out a way to automatically pull in profile images to the page. I started a thread for a Featured Posts widget I’d like to build when I have the chance.

Kevin Koehler and Megan Taylor have been working hard on new content for the wiki that we hope to start introducing over the weekend. In the meantime, Kevin is compiling a list of blogs related to specific topics that wants your input.

• Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media – An idea for a better way of compensating the “citizen journalists” who do on-the-spot reporting when an event happens. Sounds like a good business idea to me.
• For those following the Associated Press DRM conversation, there are two important articles which pretty well sum the entire thing up: “AP Launches Open Source Ascribenation Project,” by Doc Searls, and “Microformats, hNews, the AP and the Animals,” by Steve Yelvington. DRM aside, it will be really sweet if the hNews format is codified into something that’s adopted. There’s a lot of semantic data produced by newspapers that’s lost to the machines, and the markup for hNews is relatively simple to incorporate into your website if you can modify the template (open source for the win, by the way).
• Brian Manzullo of Central Michigan Life has started redesigning their website in preparation for an August 20 launch (disclosure: we’re giving a bit of help). It’s worth paying attention, however, because I think he’s going to learn a number of sharable lessons along the way. Check out discussions in the forum about navigational menus and revamping CM Life’s website logo.
• What an AP alternative could look like – A source of material for people to mix, match, and create news packages. An iStockPhoto for news content. This could be useful on the collegiate level as well.
• If you aren’t subscribed already, Rebooting the News is a highly recommended listen. In the most recent podcast, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer cover personalized suggested user lists for Twitter and the expand upon the idea of a virtual assignment desk. If we can meet our delivery timeline (knock on wood), I’m optimistic that the Edit Flow Project will provide a solid foundation for crowdsourcing story assignments.

On the wiki, we now have a really decent editorial strategy thanks to Megan Taylor. We’ll be building our content there over the next month as well as (hopefully) skinning the wiki in alignment with our website relaunch. The goal for the wiki is to have the community take ownership over editorial quality; we’re looking for page editors for each of the topic tubs. If you think you might fit the bill, let us know!

• AP, Media Standards Trust Propose News Microformat – Just announced yesterday, the microformat means a markup specifically for the type of metadata in news articles. They want to make the content even more machine-readable such that more data is exposed in search results. Check out the draft for the spec and a conversation that’s already started in the Google Group. Very interesting.
• Perform Better With AdSense: The Ultimate Round-Up – Joey says this is a solid roundup.
• If you were starting a news organization, where would you put your initial efforts? – Not surprisingly, existing news organizations should be following this advice too. Martin starts out with practical suggestions, and many people weigh in with their input in the comments
• Vote for 2.9 Media Features – WordPress wants your input on what should be in version 2.9.

All of the activity really happened on the wiki this week. Will Davis deserves mad props for doing most of the work getting Semantic MediaWiki working. Check out “Newspapers by age” for an example of how it works. Basically, what it will allow us to do is aggregate all of the semi-structured data in the infoboxes. At the moment, it just lets us then create charts of the data but I’m hoping that we’ll be able to incorporate it into search and navigation as well.

Claire Gould from The College Voice also added a bunch of information about their publication to the wiki, and Rick Martinez has launched a shell of a community wiki for FIU.

• Rebooting The News #13 – Excellent discussion about how news coverage is already rebooting itself in the context of Iran, and the “newsroom as a cafe” concept gets discussed (and recommended).
• Gary Kebbel on the Knight News Challenge: Repetitive ideas, tougher judges hurt some applicants – Josh Benton asks questions related to the current round of News Challenge grantees.
• WooThemes GPL’ed - All of themes released by Woo from June 2009 onward will be licensed under the GPL.
• Co-Authors Plus Upgraded to v1.2 – Mo Jangda updated the Co-Authors plugin to be compatible for WordPress 2.8 and a couple other bug fixes.

Around the Network:

In the forum this week, conversation was focused on the design camp, with Andrew Spittle discussing article pages. He suggested:

I thought I’d get it going by including a list of some of the sites that I think do a good job with articles. Among others I like the design of:

• The Atlantic – Great job of creating a consistent design between the site in general and article pages specifically. Bold typography and borders keep it flowing.
• The New York Times (sometimes) – I know a lot of people love to hate on the New York Times, but I think that their article pages are superb a lot of the time. The line length and fonts work well for me. Also, I think the way in which they incorporate links to other related content (slideshows, video, other articles, etc.) is great.
• Instapaper – Yeah, it’s not technically a news site, but I think that Marco is on to something with the design. Instapaper provides not only the ability to save articles to read later, but also allows for you to view the article as text only. This removes ads and some of the more distracting elements of some sites. Sometimes simplicity is great.

On the wiki this week, John Mrystad added a number of free, high-quality WordPress themes including Hybrid News and Joey edited the ethics page.

MediaWiki

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This is perhaps the most well-known wiki software, especially because of its use by Wikipedia. It’s the open source software that is used on the CoPress wiki.

For your readers, this might be the functionality they’re most familiar with on the front end, but the complexity of the back end could intimidate and deter people from contributing.

If you put a helpful guide showing users how to edit the wiki and use the system’s formatting, they might be more likely to contribute. You have to be able to set up a MySQL database for your wiki, but it’s easily done. Setup is straight forward process that only takes a few minutes.

• Price: Free
• Open source
• Requires installation
• Requires database setup
• Anyone can login to edit
• Customizable skins using CSS
• Must learn MediaWiki markup

Download MediaWiki

WordPress Wiki

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If you want the wiki to match the brand of your site rather than the typical wiki look, you can use the WordPress wiki plugin (assuming, of course, that you’re running WordPress).

Editing is straight forward because you edit the pages just like posts, and simply mark the “wiki page” option to designate wiki status.

The catch, though, is that for users to edit a page, an administrator must create a “Wiki Editor” user who has access to the backend of your site. That user is only allowed to edit pages designated as editable by an administrator, but the notion of having many users access the admin end of your site may make you uncomfortable.

• Price: Free
• Upload and activate the plugin
• Does not require database set up
• Only designated users can edit pages
• Minimally customizable
• Updates are easy once a system is established
• May be hard to organize once you start accumulating many pages
• Users can’t create new pages, only edit existing pages

If you do decide to go with this software, it would probably be best to create one account called “WikiEditor” and post the username and password at the bottom of each editable page. Create a separate page or category under which all wiki posts can fall.

Download WP-Wiki plugin

WikiSpaces

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If this is all too complicated, there is a free service that does the hosting for you. WikiSpaces is a simple solution to your wiki woes. All you have to do is sign up for an account.

• Price: Free
• Doesn’t require installation
• Does not require database set up
• Anyone can make an account and edit pages
• Can change colors; must pay to change CSS
• Free version has advertisements

This is the ideal option if you have no idea how to set up a new database or if you want something that feels more intuitive for your users to update. WikiSpaces doesn’t require users to learn complicated formatting language; it uses a clean WYSIWYG editor. The downside is that if you want full control over the look and feel and ads, you have to pay for a pro version.

Sign up for WikiSpaces

Other options

These are by no means the only wiki software out there. These are just the systems with which I have experience. Wikipedia has a full list of wiki software too. If you have any suggestions or experiences, please share.

New Facebook users will now be able to create Facebook accounts using their Gmail credentials and existing users will be able to associate and thus log in with Gmail or any other OpenID account that supports “automatic login.”

The move is likely to make the internet a much more open playing field, as other social networking sites and Web sites typically took to Facebook as a leader on the Web.

Around the Network

In the forum, Andrew Spittle lead an introduction with the prospective participants of the first session of the Web Design Camp as each described what they were expecting from the virtual camp.

Jake Paul from The Eagle said,

I am a designer but I have lots of development experience, and I knew how to make a site with HTML and CSS before I knew how to mock one up in Photoshop, so I’d be able to ground a discussion of typography in practical details as well (including issues of web standards and accessibility). We might consider combining the session on article design with the typography session as well, perhaps?

On the wiki this week, Daniel updated the CMS page, while Lauren continued to help with the reorganization.

In the news

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

• Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared – The best sites for video sharing seem to be the most restrictive.
• 4 productive summer projects for j-students – Lauren takes a look at some projects for various skill levels of student journalists to partake in this summer.
• Outside.in is looking for summer interns! – Outside.in is looking for unpaid interns this summer to work out of their NY office.
• A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages) – Why topical landing pages will add value to the general web audience.

• Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared – Joey Baker: Video sharing sites treat your copyright differently. Summary: the best sites are the most restrictive.
• 4 productive summer projects for j-students – Daniel Bachhuber: Proactive summer J project ideas from @laurenmichell. It would be sweet to see experimentation with the news wiki.
• 10 Ideas I Want to Try at the Newspaper Where I Work – Daniel Bachhuber: I dig the ideas Will has for community relationship management, as well as using data and APIs well.
• Steve Ballmer, Microsoft – The Future of Microsoft, The Future of Technology – Daniel Bachhuber: Steve Balmer makes a case for entrepreneurship in the economic downturn.

The most notable news of the week, however, is that Greg taught me the stylistic considerations of headlines and subheads.

Activity around the network

In the forum this week, Joey asked the crowd about their editorial workflows within WordPress. Lauren Rabaino left the lengthiest answer, explaining in detail how the Mustang Daily is currently operating their web-first workflow. Writers upload their documents into WordPress, and then the editing happens within the CMS. The information about these interactions is managed in a Google Spreadsheet.

The wiki is where the real party was happening this week. Related to the Mustang Daily’s workflow, a few of us have been sketching out a spec to build functionality into WordPress to enhance editorial workflows, and enable newspapers like the Mustang Daily to conduct their entire operation within the CMS instead of having to add a Google Spreadsheet on top. These ideas have materialized in the form of the Edit Flow Project. Look for a more detail post on the project’s goals next week.

Also on the wiki, Lauren Rabaino has been doing a stellar job adding more student news organizations to the Network directory. Late last night I had an “aha!” moment when I figured out you could apply meta data of a sort to these directory pages. The result? Sorting by CMS, location, or type of publication. As we add more information to the system, hopefully with your help, this will become an increasingly useful database of what student news organizations across the nation are doing with their web technology. If your organization is missing, please feel free to add it by following the criteria at the top of the Network page.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was light this week, with Joey Baker starting a discussion for Web Development ideas, saying:

This is intended to be a place for all you developers and designers to share crazy ideas that you have about newsorg website design. Anything that comes to you, treat this as your open notebook. Chances are good that you’ll find someone around who just might like your idea and try to implement it.

Also on the form, wvanwazer asked asked for advice on advertising rates.

How much does everyone charge for advertising rates? Right now, we (the Tulane Hullabaloo) charge 5 dollars per 1000 impressions. Is this high? Low? We’re in the process of setting our advertising rate for the next year, and I have no idea what a good price is.

On the wiki, Daniel and Miles started the Recruiting Technical Staff page, while Joey updated the Switching from College Publisher page.

In the News

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

• Why top-down syndication is broken – Jackie Hai looks into how the fact that we are all now content producers has changed the top-down syndication model to one which is distributed and bottom-up.
• New York Times Landing Pages: All the Irrelevance That Fits the Pixels – Fascinating analysis by Jonathan Mendez on how the NYTimes’ landing pages present content. Do newspapers just take what is in the print edition and put it online?
• Recruitment -  Max Cutler analyzes solutions to recruiting technical staff for college newspapers.
• MediaShift . College Media Miss Opportunities Covering the Economic Crisis | PBS – A missed opportunity indeed. A look at how college media should be covering the economic crisis.

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.