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.

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!

• 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.

• 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.

Chronology

After being a missing persons case for almost 5 days, Annie Le’s body was found and suddenly it became a homicide investigation. When we published the breaking news at 8:51 p.m., our server was immediately slammed by an unusually large swell in traffic; in the few hours remaining in that Sunday night, we had twice as many visitors as we typically get in an entire weekday. As the night wore on, I kept updating our editorial staff on the impressive numbers: 6,000; 8,000; 13,000 hits in 70 minutes. I eventually went to bed proud that we had survived the spike without any problems, but I was in for a surprise.

Out of curiosity before heading to breakfast on Monday morning, I decided to check on the server’s health. Server utilization was at 100%, and the server was really straining. I immediately went to the Drudge Report and found that they had placed a link to us at the top of their front page. Out of all the national coverage available, the editor(s) at the Drudge Report had decided linked to us, and the flood gates were opened.

For the first six hours after Drudge posting the link, we received over 70,000 pageviews per hour before traffic slowly declined to “only” 30,000 pageviews per hour by the end of the day. In the 48 hours following, we handled a total of 1.1 million pageviews; in the 10 day period starting when she went missing, we saw over 2 million pageviews. At peak traffic, we were serving 30Mbps in data from our server, which continued for several hours. Despite the 3000% increase in traffic, we had zero downtime and our site was fully operational the entire time.

Courant News’ Role

In the last week of August, the YDN Editor-in-Chief and I decided to make the switch to Courant News for our first issue instead of waiting a bit longer to refine it a bit more. One of the aspects of Courant that had not yet been properly tested was performance; Courant News was designed with the lessons learned from operating a high traffic site and surviving Drudges in the past, but no special effort had been made to optimize performance yet. Fortunately, the few steps that we had taken in the spring were sufficient, and the system performed like an absolute champ throughout the spikes.

Hourly traffic during Drudge Report coverage (blue); Typical weekday traffic (green)

One of the tricks that Courant employs is a full-page cache for anonymous (non-logged-in) users: when an anonymous user attempts to access a page, our load balancer (nginx) serves them a cached version directly from RAM using memcached. Nginx is amazing, and can handle enormous amounts of traffic with minimal server resource usage; however, Django (served by an Apache server instance), is more resource intensive, and would quickly be bogged down by too many simultaneous requests. Having nginx serve the full page caches to the swarms of anonymous Drudge Report referrals meant that very few requests were being passed through to Courant (mostly our EIC and MEs who were adding new content as the day went on).

Nginx log during Drudge Report spike (requests/second)

No downtime is great, but ultimately it’s all about the content, and our editors and reporters did an outstanding job covering the Annie Le case. Unlike many mainstream media outlets that published unsubstantiated rumors, the Yale Daily News supplied top notch coverage and provided unique angles that only Yale students can provide (such as photos from inside the basement before it was identified as the scene of the crime).

One of the new features that Courant News brought to the YDN site was the ability to post multiple media elements in a given article. We made judicious use of this capability, including upwards of three or four items on many articles. Our old system only allowed a single photo on each article, which would have crippled our ability to cover this story.

Another key capability was the ability to use multiple templates for articles and the homepage. We created a new “Big Photo” article template to highlight the top media item on many of our stories. We also created a number of new homepage templates to highlight our breaking news coverage. (Note: because we only archive one version of the homepage per day, I cannot show  some of the additional templates we used.)

To support the amount of content we were publishing, Courant News allowed us to give limited access of the administrative interface to our Photo Editors and some Production & Design staffers, who helped the EIC and MEs upload content and publish new information in a timely manner. This distribution of work is something that we would like to continue going forward, eliminating the excuse of publishing extra content online being too much work at the end of the night.

Finally, Courant News included new email and analytics tracking systems, which allowed us to push breaking news updates to our email subscribers and track engagement from emails and our Twitter updates. Such data nicely complements our Google Analytics reports regarding readership engagement and has provided insight into ways we can improve our coverage in the future.

Conclusion

Moving to a new CMS and publishing platform can be a risky endeavor, but Courant News has pulled its weight and played a critical supporting role in our ability to cover this story and survive the massive influx of traffic it brought us. With a promising future ahead of it, including the digital newsroom and other exciting new features, Courant News will help us at the Yale Daily News innovate and experiment with our website in the coming years. I see many interesting projects in our future this year, and I look forward to helping other news organizations take the next step and join us in developing the Courant News platform for the betterment of all college news organizations.

Max Cutler is a junior at Yale University where he is Online Devleopment Manager at the Yale Daily News. He can be contacted on Twitter, via email or through his Web site (from where this piece was cross-posted).

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.

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

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.

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.