Brian Manzullo says: Spokeswoman Stacy Green says: "The pay model will be designed so readers that are referred from third party sites such as blogs will be able to access that content without hitting their limit, enabling NYTimes.com to continue being a part of the open web."
Brian Manzullo says: Lean-forward mediums engage people using the Web, while lean-back mediums put people in consumption mode. Just interesting to think about, as the author puts it.
Daniel Bachhuber says: Google has released a WordPress plugin that enables a user to mimic the Google Living Stories format based on content in their content management system.
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.
Kristin Millis (University of Washington) and Jason Manning (Arizona State) shared ways to market your newspaper both online and offline.
A few things they’re doing to market themselves and make money:
Build a full multimedia company and sell campaigns. Example: University of Washington charges to do “chalk on the ground” campaigns for $30/chalk
UW Gave away 10k condoms when releasing their sex edition a week before Valentine’s Day
Live tweeting, live video updates from sports events
House ads in print product to promote their social media products
Univ. of Washington charges thousands to do viral marketing videos (see example below)
Social media
Undoubtedly, social media is one of the strongest and easiest forms of marketing a college newsorg can do. A few tips:
Don’t need official “Twitter staff,” but when posting to social media it’s important to be organized about it in breaking news situations
Be personal about it. For example, if your newsroom holds a “pie week,” tweet, “What’s your favorite pie?” to loop your readers into newsroom happenings
Do Facebook advertisements. They can be as cheap as $25 and give you the opportunity to bring more people in (plus, you can target it specifically at people from your university)
Be on their minds all day, no shotgun effect
Congratulate staff members who have won awards
Don’t just put it on your newsorg newsfeed, but double post to your own newsfeed
Ethical standards that apply to jour apply to social media realm
These are just a few of the project ideas we’ve discussed at CoPress. Do you have a better one? If so, head on over to our forums or leave a comment on this post and let the community help you brainstorm.
After three months of hard work, the Minnesota Daily has a brand new design to improve its layout and usability. Son Huynh gives us his take on theming Drupal, changing a paper’s workflow and reorganizing news content.
In addition, just last March, the Minnesota Daily teamed up with developers from NewsCloud to create a Facebook application as part of a not-for-profit research study sponsored by the Knight Foundation to find new ways of engaging young people in news readership and community engagement. As an incentive, the Minnesota Daily hosts challenges and implemented a point system to reward active readers with prizes for their participation (such as posting on the Facebook page, tweeting, following the paper on Twitter).
Son also talks about the challenges of building an online community around the paper and his plans to revamp the app by adding Facebook Connect, so users can access the paper while being logged on to Facebook, and a selection on the paper’s site to better connect student groups and campus events. The newest version of the Minnesota Daily is set to launch on Sept 8th. Be sure to check out the new multimedia section, which was in part inspired by the Onion.
Have feedback for the Minnesota Daily? Leave a comment or email Son at shuynh [at] mndaily [dot] com.
The New York Times is leveraging the communication skills of their journalists in an entirely new way: by having them teach. It’s a first-time experiment for the publication that hints at the importance of area expertise for the 21st century journalist. (tks Brian Manzullo)
Need ideas for reinventing your J school this fall? Suzanne Yada has your back. The best, most pragmatic idea, in my opinion, is hosting a BarCamp. Make it happen.
Rebooting the News, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s podcast loved by everyone (or Joey, Greg, and I at least), had Zach Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab on as a guest this past week. Zach presents a thoughtful, well-informed perspective on the Associated Press’ DRM announcement that caught me completely by surprise, and Jay and Dave conclude the episode with a conversation about the type of information news stories traditionally lack that would actually make the reporting more useful.
‘Tis the season for college media makeovers, and this week we’ll be discussing the soon-to-launch redesign of the Minnesota Daily — and getting a sneak peek. Last fall they switched to Drupal for their content management system and now they’re looking to build on that with a fresh coat of paint.
Listen live as Online Manager Son Hunyh and others from the Daily’s staff discuss the redesign and their ideas and plans for this year, including tactics to increase readership engagement. Be sure to join our live text chat below and call in to give feedback.
If you’re not able to listen live, please add your question as a comment.
When: Sunday, Aug. 30 at 5 p.m. ET
Where: BlogTalkRadio (or listen here with the embedded player)
I used to be skeptical of using Facebook as a means of marketing and branding. The problem was that I never had enough fans to really make my Facebook page functional.
A Fan Box widget fixed that problem. And it can do the same for you.
What is a Fan Box?
I first saw a Fan Box in use with the launch of StudLife.com and immediately knew I had to use it too. It’s a minimally customizable widget that you can throw into the sidebar or footer of your website.
Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):
Facebook news application source code open to college news sites – NewsCloud has open sourced a Facebook application specifically for student news organizations. The application reportedly incentivizes activity around the news org’s content through a point system and rewards.
TWiT 197: Steal This Diploma – Jeff Jarvis joins Leo Leporte for a discussion on newspaper collusion, Google Wave, and education.
The Daily Tar Heel’s new social media policy – Sara Gregory, incoming Managing Editor for Online, lays out the DTH’s remarkably open and earnest social media policies for the coming year.
In my experience/opinion, the reality is that that most college news orgs publish about the same limited set of topics repeatedly, and that’s why the section model can make some sense. That’s not to say that tags shouldn’t be used; they definitely should, and virtually all college news sites could do a better job of integrating tags into their navigation and exploration flow.
On the wiki this week, Daniel edited the Edit Flow Page with the latest info on the project.
The big news this week is that Facebook, arguably the most closed-off social networking site on the internet, will allow users to log into the site using OpenID credentials given to them by other Web sites. As ReadWriteWeb states,
New Facebook users will now be able to create Facebook accounts using their Gmail credentials and existing users will be able to associate and thus log in with Gmail or any other OpenID account that supports “automatic login.”
The move is likely to make the internet a much more open playing field, as other social networking sites and Web sites typically took to Facebook as a leader on the Web.
I am a designer but I have lots of development experience, and I knew how to make a site with HTML and CSS before I knew how to mock one up in Photoshop, so I’d be able to ground a discussion of typography in practical details as well (including issues of web standards and accessibility). We might consider combining the session on article design with the typography session as well, perhaps?
On the wiki this week, Daniel updated the CMS page, while Lauren continued to help with the reorganization.
In the news
Last but not least, here are the top fewlinks from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):
Assuming that your college newspaper is on Facebook as a professional page, there is a good chance it isn’t updated often or doesn’t have many “fans.” Why not?
The best way to get traffic to your site is from links, and if your Facebook page is used correctly it can bring a great amount of traffic to your site.
Here are my top 10 ways to make sure that your Facebook Page doesn’t get overlooked:
1. Use RSS Feeds. It will be a great load off your shoulders to know that every time a new article is put up on your site, it will appear automatically on your Facebook Page. You can bring RSS feeds to your page by do adding Applications in the edit area of your page. The one I recommend is Simply RSS. It’s quite reliable and does the job well.
2. Use the Status Feature. Since the redesign, Facebook now has given Pages the opportunity to update their Fans without having to flood them (the old Facebook page’s version of statuses that went into their own separate inbox which often became overwhelming). Since the newest version of Pages include statuses, you can update your fans that will appear in their News Feed, which will make your publication’s Facebook page that much more visible than before.
3. Update Your Fans. The feature from the old version of Facebook pages can still be effective, so don’t overlook it. Some Facebook users have a tendency to ignore updates when they are sent to them but not all. Updates also allow you longer form communication with your Fans.
4. Use multimedia to make your Facebook a mini website. Consider putting the main slideshows and videos you put on your Web site onto your Facebook Page too. This content can then enter your Fans’ News Feeds. The NY Times’ Facebook Page is a good examples of this.
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.
#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.
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.
Assuming that your college newspaper is on 
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