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For today and Friday, I’m hanging out at the 2nd annual ICONN conference in Knoxville. ICONN is a “set of individuals, academic programs and professional organizations dedicated connecting student web journalists and campus news websites and to advancing education in web and online journalism” and, from what I know, has a very similar set of goals as CoPress. The first talk at ICONN this year was Mark Johnson on failing faster.

“We have to accept the fact that what we have done as journalists and journalism educators for the last fifty years doesn’t work anymore.” Mark is currently working on completely rebuilding his program from the ground up. During his career, he’s failed at certain things including college (twice), 1st job (fired 3 weeks in), freelancing, the last job before coming to academia, and changing college curriculum.

For college, his dream out of high school was to go to Northwestern University. He did everything he thought he needed to do to get in. When he was rejected, he ended up going to Syracuse instead. There he realized that, instead of writing for a career, he wanted to be a photojournalist.

At the university, Mark teaches three courses a semester and his boss gives him the freedom to do whatever he wants. He failed at getting the entire curriculum changed, but that failure led to this opportunity and inspired some of his colleagues to do radically new things in their courses as well. “If you’re doing the same thing as you did last year, you’re doing it wrong. You need to try something new.”

Embrace failure, Mark says. The standard career ladder for a journalist is completely broken. The New York Times is a billion dollars in debt. Innovation, however, is “how new ideas address issues.” What this means for reporting is to look at the essence of the story, and figure out the best way to tell the story. That’s what’s more important right now. Sometimes you need articles in column inches, but other times you may need maps or infographics.

Norm Larson was a chemist in the 1950′s. The air force needed a chemical to repel water on pipes in their rockets. He failed 39 times before he got it right. On the 40th try, he had a working product that eventually became WD-40.

There’s a difference between innovating and creating. Innovating is trying new things. Instead of covering the council meeting and writing about it, bring an audio recorder, a couple of microphones, and try to tell the whole story without using your own voice. That’s innovating. Creating, however, is about developing a routine that makes you prepared to produce.

Technique isn’t creativity. The people who know all of the ins and outs of Photoshop, but can only produce within the scope of the assignment aren’t creative enough.

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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This guest post is both an update on our previous coverage of Connect2Mason and the first in our new series about innovative models of interest to college media sites.

George Mason University has an interesting community; with many of the students living off-campus or attending classes at one of the four satellite campuses, finding a way to reach out to and work with them can be difficult. We are always looking at what’s going on online to figure out which tools can help us best.

With that in mind, we’ve launched two websites, Mason Votes and onMason, in the past year and a half. We’re also in the midst of a second redesign of Connect2Mason, our convergence website which pulls content from all of our other student media outlets. We’ve also been pretty serious about expanding our social media presence to cover the needs of our diverse community.

onMason

At the beginning of this semester we launched a new site called onMason. During the last two years, we’ve noticed that a lot of students are out there, blogging, sending pictures from their phones to the web and creating websites. We felt that we were missing a serious opportunity to bring student-created media to the forefront because, even though we run searches, there’s always going to be a huge amount of stuff we’re going to miss.

Read more →

Update (Nov. 18, 2009 at 2 p.m.): I’ve added Connect2Mason, another site we’ve previously covered, to the list of examples and included a link to a podcast with their founder.

From linking out and social media to video and liveblogging, student journalists often hear advice about steps their individual news organizations should take to succeed today. But we often neglect to take a step back and consider different models from which college media can draw inspiration.

So, we’d like to examine those with some depth in a new series, offering a different twist on the usual coverage. Specifically, focusing on news sites that began online. There’s a ton of great work being done online by print publications across the country, which we often cover, and this series is intended to help everyone.

Why this approach? Because good things can come when your news organization thinks like a startup. Also, these sites are unencumbered by legacy costs or structures related to a long-standing print publication.

We already know of a few good examples within college media:

• NYU Local — an independent site at New York University
• Amherst Wire — a magazine-style site at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• Connect2Mason — a convergence site that partners with existing college media on campus
• The Bwog — a blog run by the undergraduate magazine staff at Columbia University
• Onward State — a blog covering the Penn State community
• Daily Colonial — online daily news site for George Washington University and the surrounding areas

Read more →

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.

In the “Townsquare” session, led by Arvil Ward and Anthony Pesce, the Populous Project was demoed. The Populous Project is a Knight News Challenge funded project that is working to build a content management system for student news publications based on Django.

Among the technologies demoed were the Digital Newsroom, which is a system of tracking story assignments that is currently implemented by the UCLA Daily Bruin. As Arvil said, “this provides a communication tool with the ability to manage the newsroom online.” It has threaded commenting for story ideas and notifications for when an assignment changes. Interestingly, it is not yet integrated with the content management system and how closely it will be able to manage content is to be determined.

Also demoed was Campuswalk, UCLA’s project to create a unified, cohesive, and searchable campus gateway. The current system is not up to the task in the eyes of Arvil and they’re working hard at building something better. It will make professor reviews, housing reviews, and swapping books more social.

The final piece of the demo was Localresearch.com. Arvil described this as focused marketing to small local businesses that seeks to reinvent the decreasing value of print advertising. They provide a database of local business listings and for $45 a month they work with companies to create more full-featured listings that include links to social media, reviews, and more.

When hacking the student newsroom, you need a safe sandbox with which to experiment. That’s why this Thursday — at 4 PM Pacific/7 PM Eastern — we’re going to show you how to set up a WordPress instance solely for development purposes. If interested, you should RSVP to the Facebook Event as space will be limited.

Why a sandbox?

The advantage to having a sandbox is that these sites can be a great way to test out those ideas that you’re not sure quite how to implement or design. They provide a great test environment where you can experiment with ideas and code without having to worry about breaking things. Your Web staff and any others that are interested in learning about WordPress can use it to teach themselves some great new skills.

Thursday’s session is open to everyone, and we’ll be leading you through from start to finish on how to set up a demo instance of WordPress. We’ll show you how to create a subdomain on which to install WordPress plus lead you through each step of configuring the software. From creating the database to installing themes and plugins or getting some dummy content in there, we’ll cover it all.

If there’s time left over, we’ll also be open to discussing any and all questions you may have.

This is a great opportunity if you’ve ever wanted someone to show you how to start hacking a WordPress theme. CoPress team members will be there to answer your questions in real time — no more clogging up your inbox!

Sound interesting? Head on over to the Facebook event to RSVP and we’ll get the details out to you. Let’s start hacking!

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.

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.

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.