CoPress

Max Cutler says that Courant News should be out by BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly, however:

Courant will not really be ready for actual use or consumption upon its open-source-ing. The core set of functionality is essentially complete, which means you can build a news website which functions well for the visitors. However, we still haven’t had time to implement our vision for the admin interface, which is really the whole point of doing a specialized “news CMS.” It’s currently just a more-or-less stock Django admin, which, while functional, is far from ideal and really only marginally better than using Drupal with CCK or similar options.

As I’ve said publicly and privately in the past few days, the acronym “CMS” stands for Content Management System. That implies that the purpose of the system is actual management of content, which for a website would be through an admin interface. So I claim that the most important part of a CMS is the admin interface, and thus I can’t consider Courant ready for an actual site until we’ve taken at least our first pass at a news administrative interface.

Needless to say, we’ve very excited to see a nearly final product of what Max and company have been working on for 9+ months. There should be a spec out for community review later this week.

This week held big news for conference go-ers who wondered how they would be able to attend two big conferences taking place later this month. Luckily for all, the SPJ regional conference will be attending BarCamp NewsInnovation in the Annenberg building in Center City Philadelphia along with the rest of us. Meanwhile on the technology front, the big news seemed to be that Skype would now be coming to the iPhone, quite possibly bringing the ease of use associated with doing interviews with Skype to mobile.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was light this week, with Greg posting the question on everyone’s minds:

How will student media (in general or on your campus) change in the coming academic year?

While Jared Silifes and Daniel Bachhuber discussed the most productive ways to implement QR Codes, Ben Leis said he wanted to see different college media outlets “all come together into one well orchestrated online narrative.” He said he wanted to see more community involvement, stating:

I think that while investigative journalism is surely something to be valued and featured in the media, different groups on campus should be approached to provide content in short form. I think that this approach will get more people across campus introduced to new ideas and new perspectives and it will bring new audiences to interact both online and off. The short form will allow for content providers to easily make deadlines and not have the sense of feeling overwhelmed with the obligation.

On the blog, Greg’s post on Revenue Two Point Zero generated a lot of buzz. Among them were several inspired college journalists who hope to bring this sort of unique innovation to their own campus publications.

As far as the wiki goes, Miles Skorpen and Joey Baker updated the WordPress Guide and Themes pages.

Remember: your contributions are always valued! Share some love (or at least some knowledge)!

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):

• Aim the gun the right way – Joey Baker gets quoted by Jeff Jarvis: “The kool-aid of the bass-akwards mind fuck that the ‘old media’ folks try to sell you.” Well said, brotha.
• Courant News: A history and status update – Max explains the thinking behind his delay in relaunching the Yale Daily News website, and what he hopes will come of the CMS, Courant News. I personally am really excited to see whether this will be adopted by the community.
• django + facebook connect – Ryan Marks has a Django app for a better Facebook Connect.
• How Do You Feel About the Economy? – This interactive feature at NYTimes.com is yet another example of how they’re leading the pack in multimedia.
• Newspapers Not Harnessing Readers’ Social Power – Among the key findings were, “When asked what they do when they find interesting content online, 52% of respondents say they usually read it immediately. Only 9% said they bookmark it to read later.”
• Old Journalism Standards that Should Remain -  A great list of skills every journalist should know, no matter what direction we move in.
• How Many Homegrown News Stories Are in Your Daily Paper? – On MediaShift, Jay Rosen asks for your help in his research on how much original reporting there is in local newspapers. Help him out!

Host: Adam Hemphill

Guests: Anthony Pesce, Miles Skorpen, Joseph Agreda, Max Cutler, Justin Myers, Rick Martinez, David Estes

Summary: Excerpts from a roundtable discussion among student developers from across the country regarding Django-based content management systems (and a Ruby On Rails system from FIUSM). The entire conversation is available as a MP3 download.

Links:

• Populous Project
• Ochs
• Nameless CMS
• The Maneater
• Gazjango

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