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.

Size of Staff: Hard to tell, really. Mizzou’s J-school is huge, so we’ve got people coming and going all the time. As a whole, the paper’s really dedicated, regular staff is probably a few dozen; our regular online staff is probably around 6 or 7.

Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: This past month, we had almost 45,000 visitors. Only about a quarter of our visits are from Columbia, which probably has to do with being the main UM system campus, having some great sports teams (especially football and basketball lately) and our generally wide array of coverage. Actually, one of our most widely read articles ever online was a review of a The Cure album, which somehow got picked up by a major fan blog of theirs. Sometimes you never know where your audience will come from next, I suppose.

What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? (i.e. do your readers leave comments, forum topics, classified ads?) Right now, we’ve simply got comments on blog entries. We had an experiment early last fall called “Ask The Maneater” in which we’d answer questions people sent in and posted those answers to a blog, but we didn’t get that many questions.

What’s the best way to reach your community? (RSS vs. email vs. Facebook vs. Twitter) Virtually all of our editors are avid users of Google Reader, so we’ve made sure our RSS feeds cover all the bases. (Django’s syndication framework makes this wonderfully easy.) That said, we’re also on Facebook and Twitter (including support for tweeting article links from within the Django admin), but we’re still looking into the best ways to make use of those tools.

Hosting Company: WebFaction

Server Size: Shared 1 (10 GB storage, 80 MB RAM for long-running processes)

What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Since I’m not going to be in this position much longer, I’m probably not the best person to ask–but I’ll see what I can do.

There are a couple of things that come to my mind at the moment (said moment being just after midnight on the eve of my last week of classes): There’s been some discussion about completely redoing our classifieds system so it isn’t just a copy of the ads that ran in print, and we’re trying to figure out what we should do about MOVE, our Arts and Entertainment magazine. MOVE’s print edition is being folded back into The Maneater’s regular A&E section, and we’re trying to see where the MOVE website fits into the larger picture.

As I said earlier, this year’s been a bit of a transition year, and we’ve come a long way in building up themaneater.com into a better publication; while I’m sad to be leaving the staff, I’m excited to see what the next year will bring.

The Daily of the University of Washington

Your Name (or your Web Editor’s Name): David Estes

How Often Do You Publish (Online): Every weekday, plus occasional breaking news.

How Often Do You Publish (Print): Every weekday.

In your opinion, what’s the most unique feature or piece of functionality on your website? I started an experimental project last week that will eventually allow full direct modification of the site from the frontend, rather than the Django admin. Currently, only image/article reordering via drag and drop is implemented, but the user response has been good so far.

What does your editorial workflow look like? Does it involve the Django admin? The subeditor of each section copies their articles from the InCopy documents into the Django admin, and uploads the relevant images/videos/etc.

Size of Staff: Between editorial, advertising, marketing, and design, I’d guess around 50 people, not including writers.

Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: Quantcast says 68.6K people per month.

What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? (i.e. do your readers leave comments, forum topics, classified ads?) We used to receive around 50+ comments per day, but requiring registration cut that down to ~10-20 per day.

What’s the best way to reach your community? (RSS vs. email vs. Facebook vs. Twitter) We have 440 RSS subscribers, 172 daily email subscribers, 538 Twitter followers and 146 Facebook fans. Twitter has so far been the best method for direct conversations.

Hosting Company: We keep a small Debian box in the closet.

Server Size: P4 3.0Ghz, 1.5GB RAM

What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Over the summer, I’m planning on building an iPhone app and an editorial workflow/story assignment system. I’m also hoping to add more community-focused features.

Daily Gazette at Swarthmore

Your Name (or your Web Editor’s Name): Miles Skorpen (EIC), Dougal Sutherland (incoming EIC, formerly Tech Editor)

How Often Do You Publish (Online): Frequently, but with email ‘issues’ every work day.

How Often Do You Publish (Print): Never.

What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? We’ve got a workflow through Django, which is nifty. Our reviews website needs a facelift, but is also pretty nice.

What is your workflow? Does it involve Django? I wrote a blog post about our editorial workflow on the CoPress blog.

Size of Staff: 20-25

Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: 6k uniques/week, 2,500 email subscribers (student body of 1,400)

What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? (i.e. do your readers leave comments, forum topics, classified ads?) Enormous numbers of comments, we have a very popular announcements website, housing guide, reviews site, etc.—interactivity is heavily on the way up.

What’s the best way to reach your community? (RSS vs. email vs. Facebook vs. Twitter) Email—since we publish a daily announcements email, we get into people’s inbox at least twice a day. Dashboard links to our stories which drives content.

Hosting Company: Webfaction

Server Size: Shared, with heavily boosted RAM.

What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? We’ll be doing a visual overhaul of the whole website. Again. This summer.

The Chimes at Biola

Your Name (or your Web Editor’s Name): Dave Lowe is our Web Developer (he programmed the site); Michelle Rindels is Editor-in-Chief, Kelli Shiroma is Web Content Editor and Kelsey Heng is Web Multimedia Editor.

How Often Do You Publish (Online): We add new content daily and have web exclusive stories, photo galleries and videos.

How Often Do You Publish (Print): One a week.

In your opinion, what’s the most unique feature or piece of functionality on your website? Our redesign, launched April 15 of this year, focused on raising the prominence of video content. Video is central on the home page, and the new admin makes it easier to add – we simply enter the Vimeo ID number to simultaneously attach a video to a story, publish it on the front page and multimedia tab, and assign it to a section.

What does your editorial workflow look like? Does it involve the Django admin? Editors assign stories with deadlines staggered throughout the week so time-sensitive stories are published within 24 hours of an event. Our two web staffers are responsible for uploading the stories and multimedia through the Django admin.

Size of Staff: 22 people work on the holistic Chimes operation; the Web staff includes two editors and two videographers.

Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: About 5,000 unique visitors per month.

What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? (i.e. do your readers leave comments, forum topics, classified ads?) Our readers were involved via commenting before the redesign — we’re having to re-teach them to comment via the Facebook Connect system, but it’s only been about two weeks so we’ll see how quickly they catch on! Readers also participate through polls, reader-submitted photos and a weekly video called “Campus Talk,” a man-on-the-street style Q&A.

What’s the best way to reach your community? (RSS vs. email vs. Facebook vs. Twitter) Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming our primary mode of reader communication. We use it to communicate news updates and promote new videos.

Hosting Company: WebFaction

Server Size: It’s a dedicated server (which hosts a number of Biola sites): Celeron 2.4Ghz, 1GB RAM, 250GB disk space

What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Since Biola has a strong film program, we want to harness that talent and increase our video content so new material is up daily. This semester, we’ve been partnering with our campus broadcast journalism program, which provides some of the content you see on the site. But we also hope to experiment more with Flash design and do more showcase projects.

Another big goal is to take advantage of the blog capabilities, both to cover breaking news faster and to increase reader interaction with niche Chimes blogs.

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!

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.

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.

We created a unit in our database (called a “model” in Django-lingo) called a “Story Concept.” These concepts are only visible to our staff and store three pieces information: the assigned staff, notes and description, and a due date. We’re still finishing the system, but when complete our software will automatically email our staff with an up-to-date listing of everything we expect submitted in the next three days.

All of these stories are always visible on our internal staff page. This means that if a reporter misses a meeting, they can quickly hop online and see every story that our editors dreamed up but couldn’t get a writer for.

Once the stories have been written, it moves to the next model—the article. The first thing reporters do when submitting their story to our system is select the corresponding story concept from a big drop down menu–from then on, the two are linked in our database, and it automatically is removed from our “Claimed Stories” listing (and our daily incoming story emails).

The second flag our reporters have to set is the story’s status. For writers, it is either “Draft” or “Pending Review.” Any story marked draft is only touched by the reporter, since it is easy to destroy edits if two people are working simultaneously. A story marked “Pending Review” has been officially submitted to the night’s editors.

It goes through a three stage process. First, we have reporters who aspire to join the Editorial Board review each piece. These Reporter-Editors generally do editing and stylistic changes, and when finished they flag the story as “Edited (1).” Then, a traditional Copy Editor comes in (usually a member of our Editorial Board) and does a second more thorough review, marking the story “Edited (2).” In the final stage, another Editor makes sure the story’s formatting is correct, checks all images are properly inserted, and then sets the status to “Published” which sends the story live on the site.

This workflow has been pretty effective, but is constantly getting tweaked on the technical side of things. Until recently, concepts were pointed to articles, instead of the other way around—-which meant that the connection was rarely made by all but the most dedicated staff members. There is no fail safe way to make sure editors or reporters change the flags properly, which has meant that stories have missed their issues because we didn’t realize they were complete. And we have yet to implement inline editing for concepts on our staff page—assigning them is roundabout and difficult.

Still, the ease with which we built this system reflects a lot of the strengths of the Django system: making, storing, and connecting data is really easy, even for fairly inexperienced developers.

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.