CoPress

Now that we’ve shared a few our our ideas, let’s see yours! With the above video in mind, put the information into action. In the upcoming weeks:

Week 1: Plan a brainstorming session. It can be in your newsroom or on a camping trip or at an editor’s house. Make it fun and have lots of food. Make a list of all of the best ideas for how you can better implement the Web in your newsroom. It’s important that everyone is involved in the process.

Specifically, figure out how to (1) Start a Web-first workflow for all articles to be posted in a 24-hour news cycle, and (2) Generate Web-specific content like videos, slideshows and Twitter/Facebook/SMS updates. You can start a staff blog this week and write your first post about the ideas you brainstormed.

Week 2: Help every editor and reporter set up Google alerts for their section or beat as well as create a Twitter account to reach out to readers. At every budget meeting, require an aspect of every article pitch be based on feedback from readers on the Web. Start to build a strong community with your audience online and make sure it’s a two-way dialogue.

If you already have a Twitter account, this can be the week when you set up a system for publishing your editorial calendar for public feedback.

Weeks 3-6: Get out of the habit of updating your site once a day after the newspaper is printing. This is a huge step, so you’ll have to start slow. During this week, try not to post your articles online at 10 p.m. See how early you can post everything (and subsequently tweet the headlines), then figure out how your staff needs to shift roles to have a continuous flow of news throughout the day. This could mean changing the hours of your copy editors, changing deadlines for reporters and training everyone how to use the CMS.

Week 6-9: Really take control of live and breaking coverage. This can be as simple as posting event recaps (e.g. sports games, debates, concerts) online within a few hours after they’re over, because that’s when people will be looking. During those same events, post pictures and tweets that your readers will be interested in, and make sure to keep an eye on feedback from your users too.

Do they have questions? “Is #46 on the bench?” “How many people are at the concert?” Answer those questions. For breaking news like fires, robberies or protests, post as much information as you can as soon as you can. If it’s incomplete, that’s OK — but be accurate. Post updates as you go. Be sure to tweet the information too.

Week 9-12: After your staff starts to get comfortable with the Web, take on a big project like creating a system for an open editorial calendar, a continually updated news wiki or an iPhone app for readers on the go. All of your projects will feed on the other skills you’ve acquired: covering breaking news, thinking Web-first and encouraging community involvement.

Last but not least, report back! Let your peers know how your experiment went and what lessons you learned.

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.

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Recommended links for the weekend:

• It’s the season of new sites. On Wednesday, we helped Brian Manzullo take the new CM Life live. He has since written a thoughtful post to the community, as well as a more detailed post about the new features of the site. Late last night, a new, more Drupally Daily Tar Heel went online. Andrew Dunn, Sara Gregory, and other staffers give a short introduction and talk about their plans for the upcoming year.
• Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better When It Comes To Online Ad Formats – “The study, which was based on 2,390 online display campaigns running over the past three years, found that so-called “half banners” (those measuring 234 x 60) and rectangles (180 x 150) were more effective than ads that frame the page such as high profile leaderboards and skyscrapers.” (tks Joey Baker)
• Will Davis deserves significant props for the amount of work he’s been doing to improve the wiki. The focus of what he’s doing is configuring Semantic MediaWiki to make all of the semi-structured data on a newspaper profile available in aggregate form. We now have over 120 newspapers listed in the directory; if you see that yours is missing detailed information, please add to it!
• Max Cutler would like to see a “feature matrix with links for college news sites.” I’d like to see that, as well as a page on the wiki dedicated to just brainstorming and listing out new ideas. For instance, in the forum, Brian asked about a “breaking news” box that could occasionally appear on the home page, as well as ideas for sweet author pages. It would be great if we could capture these on the wiki in such a fashion that, if I wanted to get some inspiration for author pages regardless of CMS, I could go to that page to see what other people have done.

Help us out with the curation process by joining the CoPress Newsgroup.

The best links of the past two weeks (yes, I missed last week) that you probably should read over the weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup which you can join and contribute to if you’d like):

• Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media – An idea for a better way of compensating the “citizen journalists” who do on-the-spot reporting when an event happens. Sounds like a good business idea to me.
• For those following the Associated Press DRM conversation, there are two important articles which pretty well sum the entire thing up: “AP Launches Open Source Ascribenation Project,” by Doc Searls, and “Microformats, hNews, the AP and the Animals,” by Steve Yelvington. DRM aside, it will be really sweet if the hNews format is codified into something that’s adopted. There’s a lot of semantic data produced by newspapers that’s lost to the machines, and the markup for hNews is relatively simple to incorporate into your website if you can modify the template (open source for the win, by the way).
• Brian Manzullo of Central Michigan Life has started redesigning their website in preparation for an August 20 launch (disclosure: we’re giving a bit of help). It’s worth paying attention, however, because I think he’s going to learn a number of sharable lessons along the way. Check out discussions in the forum about navigational menus and revamping CM Life’s website logo.
• What an AP alternative could look like – A source of material for people to mix, match, and create news packages. An iStockPhoto for news content. This could be useful on the collegiate level as well.
• If you aren’t subscribed already, Rebooting the News is a highly recommended listen. In the most recent podcast, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer cover personalized suggested user lists for Twitter and the expand upon the idea of a virtual assignment desk. If we can meet our delivery timeline (knock on wood), I’m optimistic that the Edit Flow Project will provide a solid foundation for crowdsourcing story assignments.

On the wiki, we now have a really decent editorial strategy thanks to Megan Taylor. We’ll be building our content there over the next month as well as (hopefully) skinning the wiki in alignment with our website relaunch. The goal for the wiki is to have the community take ownership over editorial quality; we’re looking for page editors for each of the topic tubs. If you think you might fit the bill, let us know!

We’re changing things up! Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared – Joey Baker: Video sharing sites treat your copyright differently. Summary: the best sites are the most restrictive.
• 4 productive summer projects for j-students – Daniel Bachhuber: Proactive summer J project ideas from @laurenmichell. It would be sweet to see experimentation with the news wiki.
• 10 Ideas I Want to Try at the Newspaper Where I Work – Daniel Bachhuber: I dig the ideas Will has for community relationship management, as well as using data and APIs well.
• Steve Ballmer, Microsoft – The Future of Microsoft, The Future of Technology – Daniel Bachhuber: Steve Balmer makes a case for entrepreneurship in the economic downturn.

The most notable news of the week, however, is that Greg taught me the stylistic considerations of headlines and subheads.

Activity around the network

In the forum this week, Joey asked the crowd about their editorial workflows within WordPress. Lauren Rabaino left the lengthiest answer, explaining in detail how the Mustang Daily is currently operating their web-first workflow. Writers upload their documents into WordPress, and then the editing happens within the CMS. The information about these interactions is managed in a Google Spreadsheet.

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College media is a funny beast. It seems to lag about a year to three years behind the mainstream media. This applies web-first thinking, blogging, web site design, and monetization. So, this weekend, when the CoPress forum became an active discussion of CPM vs CPC vs CPD ad models, I couldn’t help but grin twice.

First, because this is a conversation that the rest of the media had a few years ago (and has never resolved), and second, because this struck on a particular passion of mine – monetizing online media. (Go figure, the Business Director is interested in monetization)

The following post is an expansion of my forum comments, and still worth a read if you’ve already been through the forum.

The Current System

There are really three ways for advertisers: by impression, by click, and by time period (usually day). Of course, there are hybrids of all three models, which the top ad networks utilize (Facebook, Google). The issue, is that all of these models have some inherent flaw. CPM doesn’t reward for the effectiveness of an ad, CPC necessarily reward high traffic, and CPD, while it guarantees a nice minimum about you can make, has both of the same issues.
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Max Cutler asks one of the big questions on everyone’s mind these days: how do you recruit technical talent to your student news organization?

I’ve often been asked by my colleagues at the YDN what we can do to recruit more people to the web team. There are clearly people with the requisite skills on campus, but running house ads, putting up posters, and sending campus-wide email blasts have been completely unsuccessful this year.

Many college news orgs pay their student staff, which is one way to incentivize work, but the YDN is a volunteer-only organization. No one gets paid, and that’s really not even an option, no matter how desperate we may be. So if you won’t get paid, why would you work for us?

I’ve struggled with this question over the past year or so. There are a number of intangible advantages of working for a news org, especially one with a powerful list of alumni like the YDN, but it is hard to convince people on the basis of intangibles alone, especially when it is so easy to get paying jobs elsewhere on campus or online.

There aren’t any sure fire answers at the moment, but I’ve got one idea: we generate a big ol’ list of possibilities on the wiki, the community adds to the list over the next several months, and then each news organization runs experiments to determine recruitment campaigns work best in which scenarios.

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.

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We love bringing you This Week in CoPress every week, and are working with how to make it more interactive. Next week’s solution? We’ll do it live! Same great guests, only now you get to be a part of the conversation. Here’s a bit of what we’re thinking:

Launch date: Week of April 5th

Length of Show: 30 minutes. This could change after the first week if we decide we need more time, but we think it’s better to run out of time the first week than to scramble to come up with things to say.

Number of Hosts: 2 . We’re going to try to make this more conversational, so it will be best to have two people who are familiar with one another that can also bounce off each other.

Number  of Guests: Ideally just 1. Having too many guests could easily get out of hand, especially since we’ll also be dealing with people calling in and people in the chat room.

When to Record: Dun-Dun-Dun! The controversial question. What do you think?

The background

College news organizations need to move beyond advertising. Now.

Hold that thought.

Some background: The topic of generating revenue to sustain news organizations has begun to consume my thoughts about journalism. There are a number of reasons why, but this mostly came after a little meetup last Saturday in DC called RevenueTwoPointZero (Rev2oh on Twitter).

This isn’t the first time our humble CoPress crew is talking about the business side of journalism. Namely, check out Joey Baker‘s post from December, “But we make all our money from newsprint!”.

But why? Aren’t we just about technology and college news sites?

No. That’s a main theme, but we would be remiss if we left revenue off the table. It’s hard to run a news site without money, unless you’re an exception.

Actually, one of our three main goals directly relates to making money: We want student news organizations to generate more online revenue by having full control over their sites.

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