Around the Network

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.

On the wiki, there’s now excellent information and background on the Tulane Hullabaloo website, Miles started a new page on editing WordPress themes, and Daniel started a page on tools for measuring engagement

In the News

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

• A reputation economy is a good model for comments – Mark Briggs thinks you should tie a reputation system to commenting. If you take it one step further and assign semantic data to the comments, you could come up with a very interesting database of information.
• Rebooting the News podcast for April 19 – Excellent discussion between Dave Winer and Jay Rosen on the future of news. Of particular interest is Dave’s observation that the newspaper industry is going through the first revolution that the tech industry has already gone through more than a dozen times. Jay also introduces an idea for open news assignments that I think has legs.
• Measuring user engagement: Lessons from BusinessWeek – Great post by Eric Ulken on how BusinessWeek measures user engagement on their website. It’s time to understand traffic better than uniques and pageviews.
• Sesh Ideas for BCNI Philly – A couple of ideas for what to discuss at BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly.

Around the Network

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!