CoPress

A round-up of the student news organizations running Django in April 2009 as part of our end of the school year retrospective.

The Maneater

Your name (or the Web Editor’s name): We have two online editors. Currently, I [Justin Myers] am the online development editor and Esten Hurtle is the online content editor; after Tuesday’s issue comes out, though, we’ll be handing those jobs over to James Vestal and Erin Kaplan, respectively.

How Often Do You Publish (Online): Continuously, though mainly with our print issue (see below)

How Often Do You Publish (Print): Twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays)

In your opinion, what’s the most unique feature or piece of functionality on your website? We spent a fair amount of time this past summer working on our campus guide, which we intend to be a resource for students to be able to find useful contact information for various departments and administrative offices; filterable maps of residence halls, computing sites and other kinds of places on campus; and upcoming events taking place on campus and around Columbia. That said, it could still use quite a bit of work; this year was definitely one of transitioning for us from being a simple shovelware site to one with a bit more content and utility to it.

What does your editorial workflow look like? Does it involve the Django admin? Our print workflow actually consists of a well-established directory structure of text files until they reach our design staff, which places the text and other content into InDesign. (Not at all elegant–but it works, it’s cheap and we can work on it from anywhere.) Our online workflow then consists of copying the same text and other content into the Django admin.
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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

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Got feedback or ideas for an upcoming podcast? Let us know!

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Or maybe it’s 2.5. We haven’t really been keeping track of version numbers around here.

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.

This was the question facing my paper last year, when we were developing a new Django based CMS.

Some background: We (The Daily Gazette) are a small online-only daily news organization. We assign stories at a weekly dinner meeting when editors present story ideas and then our writers volunteer to cover them.

We had gotten really used to using email. The Editor-in-Chief would mail out the list of stories with all the assignments on it to the staff list. This wasn’t a great solution though. Stories got lost or forgotten easily. And since the status of stories constantly changed (a new reporter assigned, a different kind of multimedia attached, the deadline altered), the system was clearly failing us.

When we started our new site, moving from WordPress to Django, we resolved to do it better. Read more →

Welcome to the first podcast from CoPress. Each week, we’re going to be talking with student journalists, professional journalists, and others about technology, innovation, college media, and the way forward.

In the first podcast, we talk with Miles Skorpen, editor of the Swarthmore Daily Gazette and Cody Brown of NYULocal about running online-only news organizations. The Daily Gazette is built on Django, and NYULocal runs on WordPress. Enjoy! Please leave feedback in the comments. The iTunes subscription link will come shortly.

Up Next: Albert Sun talks about the Daily Pennsylvanian’s new entertainment site 34st.com in all its Drupal-based glory.

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