CoPress

Last Thursday a few of us gathered to talk about the development projects that will be seeing heavy work over the winter break. Max Cutler, Andrew Dunn, Will, Daniel, and Lauren joined me for a half hour conversation covering the various projects that we are all working on. The full audio is attached at the bottom of the post and here are some highlights of what we talked about.

Nando

First up Max gave us an update on where development on Nando stands. As Lauren mentioned last week, Nando is the administrative side of the Courant News CMS. Max and Rob Baskin will be developing the templates for the interface and I’ll be working with them on designing the user interface and experience. The project is in the early stages right now but wireframes for the interface will be released soon so stay tuned to the Google Group for updates.

Edit Flow

Daniel also recapped what will be happening with Edit Flow over break. Work will be ramping up on version 0.3 of the plugin which will include more granular control over email notifications and user groups. Other features include some bug fixes as well as visualizing posts through a calendar-like interface.

Courier

Will Davis also filled us in on some of the work that will be done on Courier, his plugin for better email notifications. Courier already has support for custom templates and will be gaining further subscription options. The plugin update should be released before the end of break so stay tuned for updates.

Tar Heel iPhone app

Finally, Andrew Dunn talked a bit about The Daily Tar Heel’s iPhone app that he announced on Thursday. The app includes their Housing Guide as well as all the news, classifieds, and radio that you’d expect. It also has a feature that Andrew talked about on the call: a drink specials mini-app.

To hear more about all of the above projects listen to the full audio below.

 Hacking the Student Newsroom Session #3: Download (149)

Leading into this week’s Hacking the Student Newsroom session, here’s a quick preview of online projects individual student journalists and newsorgs will be conducting over the upcoming winter break:

Investigative multimedia site from McKenna Ewen

McKenna Ewen, a multimedia journalist at the University of Minnesota, is doing an investigative piece about a journalist’s mysterious death in Minneapolis in 1945. This winter break, he’s putting together a custom site and documentary about the story. Ewen says:

[Investigative reporter James Shiffer] approached me in August about helping build the project into a website and making a short documentary of it. I agreed and made it part of my senior thesis, which is about increasing video views on the web. We’re going to launch project independently and see how much traffic we can pull in without an advertising budget (it should be interesting).

The anticipated publish date is early in January (we’ll link you to it when it launches). Update: This post originally stated the project was part of a collaboration with the Star Tribune. It is not.

Development continues on Nando from Max Cutler, Rob Baskin, and Andrew Spittle

Yale student Max Cutler has been working on a workflow tool for the administrative side of the Courant News CMS, code named “Nando.” A few features for the tool include a pitch system, a workflow based around statuses and user roles, and a heavily customizable dashboard for all of this activity. He’s recruited CoPress’ Andrew Spittle to continue development on the project over winter break. You can hear more about what they’ll be working on specifically at today’s Hacking The News workshop.

SR2 Blog from Josh Halliday

Josh Halliday, a journalism student at the University of Sunderland, is starting a project for community-based blogging as part of his final project. From the blog’s about page:

SR2 Blog is the new community-run neighbourhood news website, dedicated to the SR2 area of Sunderland.

We’re recruiting community reporters who either want to keep their neighbours on top of what’s going on down their street or vent on an issue that’s not being dealt with. If you live, work or know SR2 why not get involved?

SR2Blog features news broken down by neighborhood, video, liveblogs, and social media. The project is an interesting experiment in -hyperlocal, community-generated news and we’ll be interested to watch its progression.

EditFlow updates from Mo Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Scott Bressler and Will Davis

Edit Flow is a WordPress plugin being developed by Mo Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Scott Bressler and Will Davis to help tailor the CMS’s workflow for an editorial environment. Although the first few phases of the project have already been released, the plugin is still actively in development. Here’s what they’ll will be working on this winter as part of the next phase (via the CoPress wiki):

• More granular email notifications, including the ability to have a notification go to a predefined group of people
• User groups with functionality to define specific groups of users within WordPress.
• Visualization of the editorial workflow data within WordPress, let it be through a calendar view, an activity stream, or other.
• The ability to define newsroom-specific metadata for each post.
• Functionality to allow custom definition of a required set of actions for each piece. These could be “copy-edit,” “fact-check,” etc.

SB Statesman redesign and restructuring from Bradley Donaldson

The SB Statesman — the student newsorg at Stony Brook University in New York – has a winter goal that every student publication can and should be pursuing this break: redesigning and resturcturing their site. From editor-in-chief, Bradley Donaldson, here are a few goals they have:

• Create a website that has a greater focus on multimedia.
• Make the site much more user-friendly and student-centered
• Harness social media to both spread the word about the newspaper and have a presence in student communities

What I really like about this redesign project is that it’s not a feat accomplished by a few web editors, but the staff as a whole. Donaldson said they’re finally taking a step they’ve neglected in the past:

Fortunately we have a good number of staffers who are interested in helping out with this, and the entire newsroom on a whole is excited about the changes being made. We’ve neglected our online presence too much or been very inconsistent with it in the past, even though we had the manpower and know-how to really improve it.

Full disclosure: The Statesman plans to launch its new redesign on CoPress’ Managed Hosting plan.

If you want to hear about what’s going on specifically with Edit Flow, Nando and Courant News, or just want some feedback on what you’re working on now’s the chance: join today’s Hacking the Student Newsroom session. The session will be run through TalkShoe so just call (724) 444-7444 at 4 p.m. PST and enter the Call ID when asked (it’s 67693).

This week we’ve combined our inspiring models for college media series and College Media Lab, featuring Technically Philly and News Inkubator. Listen to or download the podcast at the end of the post.

Hey college news, it’s your older brother: hyperlocal.

We’re not so different, you and I. We’re both industries dominated by the inexperienced. We both have to cover a specific community. In fact, it could be argued that collegiate journalism is a subset of hyperlocal.

Fortunately for you this means that we all share the same problems. Both college newspapers and hyperlocal sites are figuring out the best ways to monetize a geographic area of like-minded people, often through the Web.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis and the folks at CUNY, we know that some hyperlocal sites are pulling in $200,000 a year. We also know of some college newspapers that are self-sustaining. There are successful companies in both our spaces, yet many of us struggle to grasp the fundamentals of the business.

That is why the team behind Technically Philly has proposed News Inkubator, a shared office spaces and business services hub for hyperlocal news sites in Philadelphia. Picture a shared office space and a shared sales staff that help hyperlocals generate revenue ideas together, while still maintaining their editorial and business independence.

News Inkubator is also about bridging the entrepreneurial and media communities in Philadelphia to help foster a working relationship were each side learns from the other. All of these concepts can translate to benefit your college publication. In fact, here are three of our ideas that I hope you steal:

Use the existing bureaucracy

Universities have already separated students by interest. The computer science students often belong to a different school than the business students that belong to a different school than the journalism students. Why not bring all three of these sides together?

Each can have a project for the semester and learn from the other students. To survive in 2010, journalism grads are going to need to know how businesses work. Business grads are going to have to understand new media and computer science students need client work to showcase when they graduate.

If time becomes an issue, lobby to create a new class. Department heads love to show each other how innovative they are, so ask them to help.

The space is cheap

Many college newspapers rent (or are given) office space from the university negating one of the biggest hurdles in legitimizing an online hyperlocal entity. Use this to your advantage. Host speakers that are business leaders from local companies. You could even spring for some pizza and host a hackathon or barcamp open to all majors and career paths to build products for the paper.

Spoke, meet hub

Many college have student-run blogs or organization websites. Aggregate and create content partnerships with everyone who also covers what you cover. There is no need for overlap in your college’s media market.

As the college newspaper, you have an established editorial process and revenue streams, so offer to be the hub for your local sites and maybe even work out a revenue sharing plan. It will be good training for covering any niche after you graduate and can free up your paper’s already limited resources to pursue more in-depth journalism and even work on new revenue models together.

The three founders of Technically Philly met at the Temple News, and we use the skills we learned there everyday. Use your time at a college newspaper to not only flex your reporting muscles but also see if you can start a side project that makes a little more money for the paper. Your wallet will thank you when you graduate.

Be sure to give our application a read and offer any criticism. The harsher, the better.

Contact Sean Blanda at sean@technicallyphilly.com or follow him on Twitter, @seanblanda.

 

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In this episode of College Media Lab, Greg Linch and I spoke with two innovative journalism professors about the state of college media.

This week’s guests:

Mindy McAdams (@macloo) is the Knight Chair for Journalism Technologies and the Democratic Process at the University of Florida and the author of Flash Journalism. Mindy is known for online journalism, by way of her blog (Teaching Online Journalism) and her open-source teaching style.

Rich Beckman (@richbeckman) is the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile. Rich is known for multimedia projects and for training students with high-end skills.

A few of the topics from this week’s podcast are:

• How college media organizations can innovate and improve their Web sites
• Comments on college media
• What each professor would do if they were the editor of a college news organization today
• Increasing online and in-person engagement
• Pros and cons of high staff turnover
• Changing and sustaining newsroom cultures

Read more →

 

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August E. Grant speaking in the Austin Convention Center.

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.

August E. Grant from the University of South Carolina shared lessons learned from Newsplex, a project that started in 2002. From the site, the Newsplex’s mission statement:

Newsplex was built to help news organizations adapt to a future in which people acquire news and information in different formats and across platforms. It is a laboratory where new techniques and technologies are evaluated.

A few notes from Grant’s talk:

On retaining traffic

If you aren’t in the habit of posting in a 24-hour news cycle, you aren’t going to retain readers at regular intervals. By planning your updates, you will get more traffic. If you know a different demographic comes to your site at night, change the site content to reflect that change in audience.

Keeping content timely, always

In the online world, content is out there forever in the form of newspaper and Internet archives. It’s not like old media where a broadcast is gone at the end of the hour. Because online content is always there, you need to change the way to present it. The interest will persist beyond constraints of time because the content is always searchable and accessible.

Digital signage

Paper signs as a means of marketing are going away.

“There are going to be more jobs created in the next five years because of digital signage than there were in the 1980s for the Internet,” Grant said.

The concept of putting stickers or posters on the walls of restaurants and stores, Grant predicts those messages will be replaced with LCD screens in the windows that are animated and interactive. Journalists can step into this role because the same concepts of telling a story interactively apply. (But only make the switch if you want to be rich, he noted).

Challenges on the web

• User generated content: If anyone can be a journalist, does journalism matter? Referencing Steve Outing, Grant said to give every reporter a way to interact with the audience and a way to solicit user generated content so it can be moderated and edited.
• Mobile media: It’s instant. There are more contributors. People are reading information in smaller chunks and thinking they know everything they need to know.
• Tools: We sometimes get caught up in the tools instead of the content. Grant says you need to know the tools and the tech, but the content is still the most important.

In college media, the tendency is to regard the Web as a mere afterthought in terms of revenue. For those of us at college news organizations, however, the time to start perfecting our online revenue system is now, not in five years — when it’s too late and you’re bankrupt.

Capturing value on the Web can be overwhelming because the audience and approach is different from what we’re used to with print. Chances are that your Web site users are parents and alumni, meaning that you can’t translate ads directly from print to the Web. Advertising online means leveraging resources like Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate links and tailoring ads to match your user demographics, which you can track using an analytics service.

Making money online doesn’t only come in the form of advertisements — podcasts, minisites, events calendars and other features can be monetized through sponsors. Giving out promotional code coupons on certain days of the week is a way to both generate traffic and engage users with ads.

To dispel a myth about online advertising, we must realize that ads online are not all about generating clicks and traffic to advertisers’ sites. The point of having advertisements on a site is to build brand among readers. A study shows that when exposed to branded ads, the impact may not be direct or immediate, but “users engage better and transact more with brands once they’ve been exposed to them. ” Even if they don’t click the ad, they’re still building brand recognition and creating value in those online ads.

But the key to good money will always coincide with good journalism. The better the site content, the more eyes will come to our news sites. More eyes means more advertising potential, which ties into everything we’ve discussed before; investing in your staff, creating a web-native newsroom, and constantly innovating from within.

What is your approach to online advertising or how do you regard it? What steps can you take to improve your organization’s utilization of the medium? Sound off in the comments.

Recommended distractions for a Sunday of homework for those of you already back in school:

• The Center for Innovation in College Media is now accepting applicants for their fall internship. We’ve worked extensively with Bryan Murley, one of CICM’s directors, and can assure those considering the position that you’ll learn a tremendous amount. The work will primarily focus on producing a variety of editorial content for the weblog, including “podcast interviews with media movers and shakers, reviews of college media online initiatives, and maps and databases of college media online sites.”
• 5 Steps to Increase User Contributions to Your Community Site – Solid synopsis of involving your community from start to finish. Understanding how to incentivize participation, as well as how to foster and educate it, are keys to success. On a related note, Jackie Hai’s new project, PEG Point, is on its way to becoming a highly-recommended read.
• Dan Gillmor has a list of 11 things he’d do if he ran a news organization. Numbers two and three: leverage the intelligence of your community, and make transparency the default. It’s good to see these ideas consolidating; let’s start learning from more experiments.
• andrewspittle: Heading into the first weekend of the @whitmanpio’s new web-first workflow. Waiting for the first, inevitable quirk or bug.
• Max Cutler is looking for a Web/UX designer to assist in the implementation of Nando, the editorial admin interface for Courant News.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

Experimentation in the newsroom is one of the best ways to learn new skills and discover full potential of your team. Now that you understand why it’s time to innovate, how to create a web-centric newsroom and how to invest in your staff, it’s time to start experimenting.

To get you thinking, this video presents a few ideas as a starting point for your next staff meeting.

If you still need a little more ammunition, CoPress’ summer design camp has a great series of discussions about news wikis, landing pages and article layouts, among other ideas to get you started.  Our blog and wiki also have resources  about setting up a Facebook fan page, e-mail newsletter, web-first workflow and open-source software.

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.

Innovation can’t happen without a knowledgeable staff, but a knowledgeable staff isn’t born into existence — it takes training and education on everyone’s part.

That’s what this video is all about: invest in your staff and make sure they’re properly educated for the Web. Furthermore, make sure that their education is a continual process. You can do this by encouraging the knowledgeable people in your newsroom to lead lessons over pizza lunches or by teaming up staff to compete on specific projects.

Investing in your staff isn’t only a matter of training, but of hiring the right people. Newsrooms should have at least one or two Web developers who are proficient in HTML/CSS, PHP, and/or Python to continue developing your website. Be resourceful about it; look to your college’s computer science department for budding programmers who have the skills and the passion.

You’ll be surprised at how many good ideas will come when you all sit down together and brainstorm. Don’t underestimate the power of team planning with your staff. Figuring out how your newsroom is going to work and grow together is the foundation for innovation. If you need conversation starters, we have plenty of ideas to get you started and even more on the way.