CoPress

For today and Friday, I’m hanging out at the 2nd annual ICONN conference in Knoxville. ICONN is a “set of individuals, academic programs and professional organizations dedicated connecting student web journalists and campus news websites and to advancing education in web and online journalism” and, from what I know, has a very similar set of goals as CoPress. The first talk at ICONN this year was Mark Johnson on failing faster.

“We have to accept the fact that what we have done as journalists and journalism educators for the last fifty years doesn’t work anymore.” Mark is currently working on completely rebuilding his program from the ground up. During his career, he’s failed at certain things including college (twice), 1st job (fired 3 weeks in), freelancing, the last job before coming to academia, and changing college curriculum.

For college, his dream out of high school was to go to Northwestern University. He did everything he thought he needed to do to get in. When he was rejected, he ended up going to Syracuse instead. There he realized that, instead of writing for a career, he wanted to be a photojournalist.

At the university, Mark teaches three courses a semester and his boss gives him the freedom to do whatever he wants. He failed at getting the entire curriculum changed, but that failure led to this opportunity and inspired some of his colleagues to do radically new things in their courses as well. “If you’re doing the same thing as you did last year, you’re doing it wrong. You need to try something new.”

Embrace failure, Mark says. The standard career ladder for a journalist is completely broken. The New York Times is a billion dollars in debt. Innovation, however, is “how new ideas address issues.” What this means for reporting is to look at the essence of the story, and figure out the best way to tell the story. That’s what’s more important right now. Sometimes you need articles in column inches, but other times you may need maps or infographics.

Norm Larson was a chemist in the 1950′s. The air force needed a chemical to repel water on pipes in their rockets. He failed 39 times before he got it right. On the 40th try, he had a working product that eventually became WD-40.

There’s a difference between innovating and creating. Innovating is trying new things. Instead of covering the council meeting and writing about it, bring an audio recorder, a couple of microphones, and try to tell the whole story without using your own voice. That’s innovating. Creating, however, is about developing a routine that makes you prepared to produce.

Technique isn’t creativity. The people who know all of the ins and outs of Photoshop, but can only produce within the scope of the assignment aren’t creative enough.

Today was the last day of the 2009 ACP/CMA Conference in Austin, TX and this morning the winners of the annual “Best in Show” awards were named. You can view the full list on the ACP website.

We want to extend a very special congratulations to the College Heights Herald, winner of the best Publication Website among large schools.

Andy Dehnart from Reality Blurred demoed Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, and Google Voice among other things at the ACP/CMA 2009 conference. He started with a recap of how Facebook fan pages can benefit your news organization. Among other things the insights that Facebook offers could prove useful to figuring out how effective campaigns are.

He said that while a few years ago Google was the main traffic source for his site it has now become Twitter and Facebook. He says that “you need to speak to people where they already are” and that the top “neighborhoods” for online activity are now those sites.

Next up was Twitter and a quick introduction to how it works and how to use it. Andy mentioned that you need a solid vision of what you’ll be using Twitter for before you just start posting tweets. There needs to be a purpose in order for it to be effective for your news organization.

Quote URL was mentioned and looks like an interesting tool for aggregating conversations or reactions to a specific topic. You’re able to enter in links to various tweets and then Quote URL aggregates them into a central list.

Toward the end the subject moved to general site comments. Andy said that if you don’t yet have comments “it’s worth having a conversation about whether you want and/or need comments.” He cited the concerns over turning the comments list into a string of irrelevant posts. The takeaway: make sure that people will be using the comments and that you have a clear purpose for wanting them.

Much of the general conversation centered around how to make all of these tools as frictionless as possible. For both Facebook and Twitter tools that turned your stream into an automatic RSS list dump were brought up as great and efficient solutions.

After the demo some asked how much standard English conventions matter on Twitter. Andy’s response was that it really depends on your audience and purpose. If they won’t be bothered then it won’t be as large of a concern. However, there need to be some parameters and guidelines set beforehand so that everyone is clear going into the tool.

When hacking the student newsroom, you need a safe sandbox with which to experiment. That’s why this Thursday — at 4 PM Pacific/7 PM Eastern — we’re going to show you how to set up a WordPress instance solely for development purposes. If interested, you should RSVP to the Facebook Event as space will be limited.

Why a sandbox?

The advantage to having a sandbox is that these sites can be a great way to test out those ideas that you’re not sure quite how to implement or design. They provide a great test environment where you can experiment with ideas and code without having to worry about breaking things. Your Web staff and any others that are interested in learning about WordPress can use it to teach themselves some great new skills.

Thursday’s session is open to everyone, and we’ll be leading you through from start to finish on how to set up a demo instance of WordPress. We’ll show you how to create a subdomain on which to install WordPress plus lead you through each step of configuring the software. From creating the database to installing themes and plugins or getting some dummy content in there, we’ll cover it all.

If there’s time left over, we’ll also be open to discussing any and all questions you may have.

This is a great opportunity if you’ve ever wanted someone to show you how to start hacking a WordPress theme. CoPress team members will be there to answer your questions in real time — no more clogging up your inbox!

Sound interesting? Head on over to the Facebook event to RSVP and we’ll get the details out to you. Let’s start hacking!

If you’ve been keeping watch in the forum lately you may have seen some talk about a College Web Design Camp for student newspapers. I posted some preliminary information on the wiki a couple days ago and this is a more formal introduction to the idea.

The main goals

Our goal is to create an environment within which college news organizations, web developers, and editors can come together to collaborate and exchange ideas about their summer website design projects.

An inherent problem that college news organizations have to deal with is the high rates of staff turnover every four years. This means that some years the tech/web staff is robust and at others it is scarce. By providing virtual space in which everyone can exchange code, ideas, and projects we are hoping that everyone will gain web development skills that can be passed on down to future staff members.

Finally, in the spirit of transparency and collaboration, all training sessions and demos will be recorded and posted online. This will provide examples of all the code used in the sessions so that anyone can download and implement the ideas presented.

The first collaboration session

The first session will be held on May 28th at 5:00 p.m. PT. It will serve as an introduction for everyone to the project and to each other’s sites. We’ll seek to answer some of the questions below:

• What does your site look like now and what are the main goals that you hope to achieve during the summer?
• What skills does everyone have? Are you ridiculously good at creating gorgeous drop-down menus in WordPress? If so, then perhaps you’d be interested in leading a session for everyone.
• What have you found to be some of the biggest obstacles to successful college web development to be? What would have helped you along the way?

Read more →

Sean Blanda first reached national prominence when he announced his college newspaper Temple News would be moving off College Publisher to WordPress MU. Blanda was among the first to publicly champion this idea. Since then Blanda has become a leading voice in innovative online journalism. His latest project, BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly is bringing the best and the brightest in news from around the country to Philly on April 25 to meet, brainstorm, and work together to find solutions to problems during one of the most trying times in the journalism industry’s history. Here is Blanda’s take on what we’re hoping will be a strong, constructive event.

In 140 characters, what is BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly?

BCNI is a journalism conference in Philly where there is no set schedule. 100s of news people will present on whatever topic they want.

Why a BarCamp, and how is this going to help reinvent the industry?

The industry has tried professional conferences, CEO meetings, and expensive expos with little to show. The open schedule that a BarCamp provides lowers the barrier of entry so that anyone interested in thinking differently can attend with other like minded people and help hash out a vision for news in the 21st century.

There won’t be a silver bullet. But we can put aside the usual negativity and canned arguments and opinions for something new and fresh.

Who is the one person that everyone should try to get a conversation in with on Saturday?

If the event is successful, it will be somebody that isn’t particularity well-known that ends up making a splash with their presentation. Everybody is on an even level, so talk to everybody!

What topics do you expect to be covered? Will there a track for revenue, website design, or citizen journalism?

There will be no tracks. I’m a firm believer that the stodginess of traditional conferences is a detriment. Some wonderful things have come out of previous Barcamps on other topics. Creating tracks would be a mistake. The only requirement is that your presentation topic deal with news.

Are there any presentations in particular that you’re looking forward to?

There are no planned presentation although some people have given me a hint about what they are presenting. I, personally, would like to see any idea involving revenue and money.

Why did SPJ decide to move venues for their conference, and how do you think this will change their event?

I had been in contact with Phil Beck, the organizer of the SPJ conference, for a few weeks now and I couldn’t be happier. Phil told me that dozens of attendees had approached him about attending BarCamp. After the number started to climb, he figured it would be in SPJ’s best interest to move the event a few blocks north to Temple.

I had feared that the event would be too centered on online journalism and was in the process of reaching out to print and broadcast media members. The addition of SPJ makes that process much easier.

If you can’t get to Philly, how can someone follow along with BCNI?

The hashtag is #BCNIPhilly. I’d like to think that with 200+ tech savvy journalists that a lot of live-blogging, tweeting, and streaming will be taking place. However, there is no official plan to record every presentation as it would require six separate people recording each hour. However with more sponsorship money or volunteers, it’s something I have not ruled out.

A relatively quiet week, in my opinion.

I think it begs a mention, however, that there are not one, not two, but three BarCamp NewsInnovation jam sessions going down this weekend: Portland (9 to 5 Pacific) and Chicago on Saturday, and Miami (11 to 5 Eastern) on Sunday. These one of a kind events will be discussing the full spectrum of journalism and news, including business models, formats and hopefully not too much Twitter.

Check out this interview David Cohn did with Jason Kristufek to learn more:

If you can’t make it, or don’t live in these cities, NewsInnovation Portland will be livestreaming and liveblogging and NewsInnovation Miami will be livestreamed if connectivity allows.

Around the Network

#collegejourn is hosting a conversation Sunday from 8 to 11 Eastern called “Bring A Prof.” The goal is to figure out how to bring j-school into the 21st century and, considering it’s a controversial topic and been well-publicized, it should be quite the conversation.

In our Google Group, J. Ryan Zambon started a thread on bounce rates for college newspapers, wondering if the numbers he was seeing for The Hoya were anything out of the ordinary. Max and Joey reported similar statistics, and Joey added that “the bounce rate stat is very inaccurate. Compare it to your exit rate which theoretically should be 100%-bounce rate. This is rarely the case. Don’t worry too much about those detailed analytics – they’re just not accurate enough to really be trusted.”

I spent part of the summer studying analytics, and one of the biggest takeaways was that the numbers themselves don’t matter. It’s what you do with them. For instance, in a study of bounce rates you take what you start with as your baseline and judge your experiments on how you shift your numbers from the baseline. If your goal is to lower the bounce rate, then you might A/B test with a couple of new designs and see which produces the most favorable results.

We started off the week (well, Tuesday actually) asking, “what strategies do you have for bridging the print/digital divide?” In terms of engaging the campus audience, integration with Facebook appears to be the easiest win. Mo Jangda argues that it’s important to tailor your services to your core demographic, saying that ”it’s nice to incorporate Twitter, Digg, etc, etc. into your site, but if they students that read your paper aren’t on board with those services, then there’s really no point.” He says that they installed the share button on their site a year and a half ago with “huge success.”

If you’re looking for numbers to quantify success, I would (and this is building off the previous paragraph) set a baseline for number of referrers from Facebook, install the widget, and see how your traffic coming from Facebook grows over the next six months and a year. It doesn’t really matter what those numbers are; rather, you’re looking at the rate of change from point A to point B.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers - Another roundup of ideas for newspapers. My favorites: “Focus on original content, do not rewrite wire stories or press releases. If newspapers start charging for content people are more likely [to] pay for content they can’t get anywhere else. [...] Become the host for all important discussions about local issues and politics. Moderate the discussions to ensure civil discourse. Nothing kills discussions faster than offensive comments made by anonymous people. [...] Hire additional salespeople. It is is a different sales environment today and it requires a fresh approach. Salespeople used to selling full page or half-page print ads are not the going to be able to transition easily.”
• Washington Times releases open source projects – The Washington Times development team releases four projects under the Apache license: django-projectmgr, django-supertagging, django-massmedia, and django-clickpass.
• Group Action Just Got Much Easier: Video Interview with Clay Shirky - Shirky talks more about the power of people to organize with out organizations, and brings up an interesting example of steamboat design to illustrate how technology can make us rethink our fundamental assumptions. CoPress is all about this.
• MediaShift . 5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them | PBS - Bryan Murley has some ideas for addressing the paradigm shift challenges at college newspapers, including marketing websites better. I think they need to be more ambitious.

Have an idea for a discussion topic in the forum for next week? Leave it in the comments!

A few things to note for the j-students out there:

• Esteemed CoPress consigliere Bryan Murley and the Center for Innovation in College Media are searching for their first intern this semester. He or she would help produce content for their blog and, thanks to the magic of the Internet, can telecommute to work from anywhere. The January-April gig pays a modest stipend, too. It’s a great opportunity for some practical experience in new media with the non-curmudgeony CICM. More details are here and here. (CoPress kids would apply, but isn’t that a conflict of interest?)
• Twitterers, get thoughts about college journalism off your chest – in 140 characters or less – this Sunday from 8 to 11 p.m. EST. Just use hashtag #collegejourn to join discussion with other tweeple. Run by Benjamin Leis (@benleis) of PR shop The Campus Buzz, this is the first of what he hopes will be weekly chats. See the web site.
• The Online News Association will begin offering free webinars for their members through Poynter’s NewsU. First up on Jan. 28, a lesson on the “Semantic Web.” Links, tags, and metadata, oh my! The ONA puts on a number of solid events throughout the year, and costs students just $25 to join. It may be well worth your while.