CoPress

We’re a day late on this because of everyone’s travel, but the show must go on!

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The discussion of advertising rates continued this week. Brad Arendt approaches the issue of click-throughs and identifies two issues: finding the proper tool to accurately count click-throughs and take down the ad when the limit had been reached, as well as educating your local business owner on the concept so that it doesn’t discount the “value in brand awareness.” In fact, Bryan Murley argues that costs per clicks are a “horrible idea for college media sites, akin to allowing advertisers to only pay for print ads per the number of coupons that are brought in from an ad.” He’s more interested in looking into selling against user engagement with the site, based on such metrics as the amount of time spent on the site.

Also, Mo Jangda reported in the forum that he’s published a better version of the Co-Authors WordPress Plugin.
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This week has been a big one for journalism around the Web, with Monday morning’s bombshell being the introduction of InDenver Times. The announcement—specifically, their ambitious subscription-based revenue model—has reignited heated discussion of how news will be paid for. (It also led me to question the group’s online positioning.) Meanwhile, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last issue and will remain as a much smaller online-only publication. With these events, we’re that much closer to a complete reinvention of journalism as we know it. In other words, there’s no better (or more important) time to get involved.

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Discussion in the forum was light this week, with Greg posting the ever-relevant question(s):

If you could completely restructure your news organization to better to adapt to the new world of journalism, how would you do it?

• What would the process be?
• How would individual roles change?
• What would physically change in your newsroom?
• Would your CMS change?
• Would your business model change?

While there has been but one respondent thus far, it was the venerable Pat Thornton who argued that newsrooms need not be physical. Do you have thoughts? Drop by.

On the blog, we had three great posts with ten insightful comments (to date). The most recent content, a missive from Andrew Spittle about the Whitman Pioneer‘s efforts to push Twitter, prompted a detailed response from Joe Moore about his use last night of CoverItLive:

I think CoverItLive would also be good for breaking news that’s unexpected- it allows for multiple “producers” to post. This could be used in a lockdown-type of situation where journalists are located all over, and each have a different story to tell.

If you haven’t already, go check that out.

Finally, we’ve made some good progress this week on our still-fledgling wiki. Will Van Wazer, online editor at the Tulane Hillabaloo, added the story of their WordPress-powered site (with some very good plugin recommendations); Jackie Hai of Amherst Wire added a number of WordPress themes to the directory; and our own Joey Baker did some work to the WordPress plugins page.

As with any wiki, your contributions to ours would be very much appreciated and of use to the whole community. Share the love!

In the News

Last but not least, here are some links from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Web site wish list? Here’s a start – Mark Briggs outlined something very similar to what we’ve done previously. (If you’re feeling ambitious, start porting features to our space for it on the wiki.)
• The Bad, Good And Ugly Advice Given To Journalists On SEO – Rachelle Money’s look at the journalist-aimed cries of “SEO!”
• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable – A long but oh-so-worthwhile piece from Clay Shirky.
• Old Growth Media and the Future of News – Steven Johnson’s speech from SXWXi, which ended Tuesday.

Lastly, a quick one:

• Chicago Tribune masthead, Thursday, March 19

Have a great weekend!