CoPress

Greg, Vanessa and Joey talk with Sara Gregory, Managing Editor for Online at the Daily Tar Heel, who helped to launch a new site on Drupal on Saturday and Will Davis, Editor in Chief at The Maine Campus, who brings light to their switch at the beginning of the summer from College Publisher to WordPress MU.

The Daily Tar Heel switched to Drupal, Sara Gregory says, because is more compatible with paper’s existing structure, size and content. She’s making online publication simpler by eliminating copy editors and desk editors from the process. Now only one desk level and one management editor read each online story before publication. Thanks to the redesign, readers can now subscribe to two different newsletters (regular and breaking news) and choose from numerous RSS feed options. The paper’s staff also added a new Community Manager position that is responsible for both of the paper’s regular and breaking news Twitter accounts as well as its Facebook account. Gregory’s upcoming projects include incorporating major linking within stories.

Will Davis made the transition to WordPress MU because he wanted The Maine Campus to have a variety of plug-ins and the potential to build a blog community. He set up custom-user permissions so writers post drafts to the Web site as well as a plug-in that emails staff when a draft is posted, cutting down the workflow to just two steps. The site also has a RSS feed for the entire site and newsletter for subscribers. Davis is in the works of launching “Campus Currents,” a user-generated wiki-based community site, and a user-generated restaurant guide. He hopes to integrate more multimedia production and interactivity online in the near future.

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Standard Podcast [ 42:43 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (539)

In a search for projects to work on this summer, Will Davis, incoming EIC of The Maine Campus which migrated this summer to WordPress MU, has decided to build a better email newsletters plugin for WordPress. A free option available right now is MailPress but the feature set offers a lot of room for improvement. From a thread we had last week brainstorming ideas, Will put together a feature list for the first iteration he hopes to produce by the fall:

• Ability to ignore certain categories/posts
• Text and E-mail editions
• At least a per-issue and breaking news e-mail option. Best case scenario, customizable newsletter categories
• A basic, customizable template that supports advertising spots
• Ability to send e-mail to all users without an article
• First version will use PHP mail() function

There’s a new thread for those who want to help him refine the feature set for this first version. I’m looking forward to seeing this develop; it’s something that would even be useful in our publishing workflow.

The big news this week was Google’s Eric Schmidt and his speech to the NAA, where he told newspaper executives a rather radical (to them, at least) business model includes “not pissing off the readers.” Of course, the speech was not well received by many new media leaders who wanted Schmidt to take a more of a stance on the AP and newspaper’s reluctance to accept new media.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was pretty good this week, with Joey soliciting questions for its FAQ page.

Some interesting questions that are likely to make the list:

• Will you have control of my site’s design or do I get admin access to the back end?
• How long will the transition take from College Publisher to WordPress?
• Is CoPress building a content management system (CMS)?
• How is CoPress different than a CMS, and why is this necessary?
• How did CoPress get started?

Also on the forum, Greg asked what schools are using for e-mail newsletter and alerts. It seems, at least, from responses in the forum that Feedburner is still a common option.

Mo Jangda said, “From a content delivery standpoint, we haven’t really used subscription or newsletter services. I’ve always relied on the idea that FeedBurner has got us covered since it has email email subscription built-in — though I imagine we’d be better served actually publicizing that by having a subscription box in the sidebar of our home page.”

Lauren Rabiano asked a question that addresses a common problem in newspapers everywhere, “How do you deal with people who think backwards (espeically when they’re the people who control your money)? You can’t just ignore them or hope that they’ll “get it” sometime soon. How can you show them and change their minds? And can you do it alone?”

Read more →