CoPress

Last Thursday a few of us gathered to talk about the development projects that will be seeing heavy work over the winter break. Max Cutler, Andrew Dunn, Will, Daniel, and Lauren joined me for a half hour conversation covering the various projects that we are all working on. The full audio is attached at the bottom of the post and here are some highlights of what we talked about.

Nando

First up Max gave us an update on where development on Nando stands. As Lauren mentioned last week, Nando is the administrative side of the Courant News CMS. Max and Rob Baskin will be developing the templates for the interface and I’ll be working with them on designing the user interface and experience. The project is in the early stages right now but wireframes for the interface will be released soon so stay tuned to the Google Group for updates.

Edit Flow

Daniel also recapped what will be happening with Edit Flow over break. Work will be ramping up on version 0.3 of the plugin which will include more granular control over email notifications and user groups. Other features include some bug fixes as well as visualizing posts through a calendar-like interface.

Courier

Will Davis also filled us in on some of the work that will be done on Courier, his plugin for better email notifications. Courier already has support for custom templates and will be gaining further subscription options. The plugin update should be released before the end of break so stay tuned for updates.

Tar Heel iPhone app

Finally, Andrew Dunn talked a bit about The Daily Tar Heel’s iPhone app that he announced on Thursday. The app includes their Housing Guide as well as all the news, classifieds, and radio that you’d expect. It also has a feature that Andrew talked about on the call: a drink specials mini-app.

To hear more about all of the above projects listen to the full audio below.

Hacking the Student Newsroom Session #3 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (758)

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).

Max Cutler, Web developer at the Yale Daily News and Courant News, recently started a forum topic about presenting multimedia on a student news site that we’ve been meaning to start a conversation around. The YDN recently launched a new landing page for their multimedia that offers a much more graphic view. What’s your reaction to how the page presents different type of media? Is it better to have content organized by topic or content type? What’s your ideal multimedia browsing experience? Weigh in on the thread!

Recommended links for the weekend:

• Columbia Daily Spectacle (UPDATED) – Details on what went down at the Columbia Spectator over last weekend. Frustrated with the leadership of the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, the Online Editor decided to take the site offline until a list of demands had been met.
• WordPress 2.8.5: Hardening Release – Minor security updates including a fix for a Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently affecting a subset of users. You should probably upgrade as soon as possible.
• What does a mobile journalist need? – Paul Bradshaw streams a class on mobile journalism, and lists hardware, software, systems, and mindset required for mobile journalism. (tks Megan Taylor)
• How To Use Your Custom Yourls Shortener with Tweetie 2 – Simple tutorial on how to use your self-hosted URL shortener with Tweetie 2. Yourls is a slick piece of software for hosting your own URL shortener.
• Jonathan Pichot at the Campus Chronicle is looking for the best plugin for Facebook Connect and any tips for implementation.
• News Orgs Make Gradual Progress in Site Navigation, Use of Social Networks – Ken Sands walks through design considerations of recent changes to the Washington Post, Toronto Star, and Spokesman-Review. Ryan Pitts at the Spokesman-Review seems to be doing the most radical rethink of navigation; it would be interesting to know whether they’re tracking user interaction and iterating based on usage.
• Max Cutler and Robert Baskin have been doing a bit of work on Courant News today, including finishing up powerful search functionality I’ve gotten to take a peak at and building an “elegant way to vary site display based on User-Agent or other HTTP headers.”
• Announcing Managing News: A Pluggable News & Data Aggregator – The code is in open beta and available for download. The key selling point to this product seems to be that you can import data from multiple sources, run persistent searches across the incoming data, and visualize it on a map.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

Recommended links for the weekend:

• On value and valuation - Interesting discussion of the difference between a company or tool’s value and its valuation. Hint, it’s those with the higher value that will have a greater effect on the world (tks Andrew Spittle)
• In the forum, Brian Manzullo introduces an experiment at CM Life to contextualize the discussion around tailgating policy at Central Michigan University.
• Max Cutler is “looking for good examples of sports coverage on college news sites.” Screenshots of the best would make a really good blog post.
• Nameless CMS is running on FIUSM.com, but the public release probably won’t be announced until after the launch of Rails 3.
• The end of objectivity – web 2.0 version – Journalistic objectivity is a phantom. WaPo’s social media policy proves it. (tks Brian Manzullo)
• The Daily Trojan at USC relaunched on WordPress recently and has recommendation functionality that might be worth emulating.
• On September 25, Emily Babay mentioned that the new Daily Pennsylvanian site is almost ready to go.
• Re-Tweet This: ‘Austin American-Statesman’ Tries to Make Money on Twitter – The cost is $150 per ad and they must be “actionable,” or offer discounts, coupons, etc.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

On September 2nd, the Yale Daily News published its first issue of the fall 2009 semester. Although appearing to the casual observer to be just another issue, there was one huge difference: it was running on the new Courant News online publishing platform. Just one week later, Yale graduate student Annie Le went missing. The following ten days resulted in enormous national and international coverage of the case and a record surge in traffic to our Web site. Courant News played a huge role in our outstanding coverage and lack of downtime during the traffic spikes. Read more →

A few days back, Max Cutler posted a hefty spec for the administration side of Courant News, code named “Nando.” I’ve finally had the time to start reading through it and boy am I impressed. Most notable thus far are: the pitch system, a genuine workflow based around statuses and user roles, and a heavily customizable dashboard for all of this activity. All of these are features I think most people would find useful if they had access to them; Courant will be in a good position to deploy and then refine usability based on feedback.

Speaking of feedback, Max is still very interested in getting other’s opinions for a few more days. I’d encourage anyone interested in seeing this develop to read through the conceptual section and send him feedback via the Google Group. I’m still working through my notes and will be sending them later tonight.

Also related, Mo is making significant progress on the Edit Flow Project; there should be a working prototype of stage one in the next couple of days.

Hosts: Greg Linch, Emily Kostic, and Miles Skorpen

Guests: Max Cutler and Robert Baskin

Summary: A question and answer session with Courant News, an open source Django CMS for student news organizations. The idea to build a Django CMS specifically for student newspapers came from discussion at an Ivy League news conference last April when people saw that no one had a CMS with the feature set they needed. Max and Robert, along with Paul O’Shannessy, decided they needed to fill the void. The conversation covers a bit of the history, and then goes into the specifics of the CMS. For more information, please check out or add to the wiki show notes.

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Standard Podcast [ 31:54 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (177)

Clarification: Courant News is being developed as a side project of Max Cutler, Robert Baskin and Paul O’Shannessy — independent of the Yale Daily News. It will eventually become the Yale Daily News’ CMS.

Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern (Tuesday, May 5th) Emily and I will record a new episode of This Week in CoPress with Max Cutler and Robert Baskin, discussing their Courant News CMS project. Courant is an open-source Django CMS that Max has blogged about extensively on his site. We’ll talk about main features, the installation process, theme capabilities, and what their vision for the future is.

We’ll be hosting the call on Skype. If you wish to call in, please contact me with your Skype name or phone number at greg [at] copress [dot] org. You will be added to the call and be able to ask questions.

We’re trying this as a higher quality alternative to BlogTalkRadio. Let us know what you think. We’re also still looking at ways to stream it live, so please leave ideas in the comments. Thanks!

As always, the full podcast will be available here on the blog on Wednesday.

If you missed the tweets earlier today, interspersed between BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly updates, Max Cutler announced that Courant News now has a live project website. From the first blog post, it sounds as though the project began in a very similar environment as CoPress:

It all began last summer, when we came up with an idea for a startup company: an online publishing platform for college news organizations. We wanted to be a better alternative to College Publisher – a content management system for college news organizations designed by college news organizations.

They’ve built a CMS, we’ve gone the community organizing route. Because we consider CoPress platform agnostic, it will be interesting to see how our paths intersect.