There’s a lot student media can learn from the web-centric setup of the Texas Tribune newsroom, from its use of open source software, to its strong development team, to its depth and excess of useful content.

Yesterday I spoke with Brandon Taylor, the lead developer for the Texas Tribune. He said the Texas Tribune development team built the entire site in four weeks, during which time Brandon pulled a few all-nighters in the newsroom and even broke a keyboard because he was typing incessantly — in other words, it was an intense turnaround.

Here’s what Brandon had to say about their development logistics (the audio of the interview is posted below):

Texas Tribune in numbers:

25: Percentage of the staff that are web developers

4: Number of weeks it took to build the entire front-end of the site

80: Percentage of desired features that were complete by the launch date

400: Hours of work Brandon put into the site in a single month

On the development workflow

Brandon Taylor

Because the site launched a week ago, there haven’t been too many new projects to plan. Brandon referred to the current state of development as the “bug-squashing” phase. But in general, specific steps of the workflow process are assigned based on skillset and priority. Brandon said the general categories are “get it done now,” “like to haves,” and “maybe someday” projects.

On hiring a development team

Brandon’s advice for hiring web staff is to choose the person best fit for the job, even if that means choosing someone outside of the journalism department. Taylor’s personal background is in graphic design, meaning a lot of his work was done in ad agencies. But switching to news has been equally as high-pressured and fast-paced.

“The most important thing to keep in mind when you’re hiring  is, ‘Do I have the personnel that has the skills to pull off this project?’” he said.

On the editorial/development relationship

Brandon said projects dealing with site functionality are primarily lead by the development team. But because he’s new the news world, editors lend a guiding hand on editorial features that should be built into the site, and he figures out a way to make it happen.

What College Media can learn from it

Brandon encourages the use of open source software. He’s a strong advocate of Django, which the Texas Tribune is built on:

“Because it’s open source, it’s free basically, it’s extremely cheap to host — you can host a Django site for $10/month — it’s fast, it’s flexible. . . it’s got a very low barrier to entry,” he said.

For students thinking about learning Django, he recommends a few key steps:

• DjangoProject.com
• Learn about semantic HTML
• Read Practical Django Projects
• And read Pro Django

As an easier but less flexible starting point, Brandon recommends students should get started with WordPress (which CoPress is a huge advocate of) because it’ll give you a fully functional “blog on steroids” that is themeable and will get you started on the basics of a CMS.

“There’s really nothing stopping somebody from learning this stuff,” he said. “Frankly, if it wasn’t easy, I couldn’t do it.”

If anyone has specific technical or workflow questions about the Texas Tribune, feel free to e-mail Brandon at btaylor@texastribune.org.

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!

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

In the “Townsquare” session, led by Arvil Ward and Anthony Pesce, the Populous Project was demoed. The Populous Project is a Knight News Challenge funded project that is working to build a content management system for student news publications based on Django.

Among the technologies demoed were the Digital Newsroom, which is a system of tracking story assignments that is currently implemented by the UCLA Daily Bruin. As Arvil said, “this provides a communication tool with the ability to manage the newsroom online.” It has threaded commenting for story ideas and notifications for when an assignment changes. Interestingly, it is not yet integrated with the content management system and how closely it will be able to manage content is to be determined.

Also demoed was Campuswalk, UCLA’s project to create a unified, cohesive, and searchable campus gateway. The current system is not up to the task in the eyes of Arvil and they’re working hard at building something better. It will make professor reviews, housing reviews, and swapping books more social.

The final piece of the demo was Localresearch.com. Arvil described this as focused marketing to small local businesses that seeks to reinvent the decreasing value of print advertising. They provide a database of local business listings and for $45 a month they work with companies to create more full-featured listings that include links to social media, reviews, and more.

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.

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: 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.

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.