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

Rich and Mindy on ‘the state of college media’ online

Mindy said the biggest problem facing college media is that students mirror the professional industry with their “abysmal” handling of revenue:

“They don’t understand Web advertising. They don’t understand placement of advertising. They don’t understand how to communicate about that advertising with the people who buy it, their advertisers.”

Rich looked more at content than business in his analysis of the state of college media. He said to look for strong examples of multimedia at big news orgs like MSNBC and The New York Times:

“[Students] scoff at that and say, ‘Well we don’t have those kind of budgets and we don’t have those kinds of skills.’ And my answer was simply, ‘Well, they (The New York Times and MSNBC) don’t have the kind of time that you have. And they don’t have the ability to work in teams like you have and they don’t have the ability to get feedback like you have from your professors.”

Listen to the full podcast here:

There’s a lot student media can learn from the web-centric setup of the Texas Tribune newsroom, from its use of open source software, to its strong development team, to its depth and excess of useful content.

Yesterday I spoke with Brandon Taylor, the lead developer for the Texas Tribune. He said the Texas Tribune development team built the entire site in four weeks, during which time Brandon pulled a few all-nighters in the newsroom and even broke a keyboard because he was typing incessantly — in other words, it was an intense turnaround.

Here’s what Brandon had to say about their development logistics (the audio of the interview is posted below):

Texas Tribune in numbers:

25: Percentage of the staff that are web developers

4: Number of weeks it took to build the entire front-end of the site

80: Percentage of desired features that were complete by the launch date

400: Hours of work Brandon put into the site in a single month

On the development workflow

Brandon Taylor

Because the site launched a week ago, there haven’t been too many new projects to plan. Brandon referred to the current state of development as the “bug-squashing” phase. But in general, specific steps of the workflow process are assigned based on skillset and priority. Brandon said the general categories are “get it done now,” “like to haves,” and “maybe someday” projects.

On hiring a development team

Brandon’s advice for hiring web staff is to choose the person best fit for the job, even if that means choosing someone outside of the journalism department. Taylor’s personal background is in graphic design, meaning a lot of his work was done in ad agencies. But switching to news has been equally as high-pressured and fast-paced.

“The most important thing to keep in mind when you’re hiring  is, ‘Do I have the personnel that has the skills to pull off this project?’” he said.

On the editorial/development relationship

Brandon said projects dealing with site functionality are primarily lead by the development team. But because he’s new the news world, editors lend a guiding hand on editorial features that should be built into the site, and he figures out a way to make it happen.

What College Media can learn from it

Brandon encourages the use of open source software. He’s a strong advocate of Django, which the Texas Tribune is built on:

“Because it’s open source, it’s free basically, it’s extremely cheap to host — you can host a Django site for $10/month — it’s fast, it’s flexible. . . it’s got a very low barrier to entry,” he said.

For students thinking about learning Django, he recommends a few key steps:

• DjangoProject.com
• Learn about semantic HTML
• Read Practical Django Projects
• And read Pro Django

As an easier but less flexible starting point, Brandon recommends students should get started with WordPress (which CoPress is a huge advocate of) because it’ll give you a fully functional “blog on steroids” that is themeable and will get you started on the basics of a CMS.

“There’s really nothing stopping somebody from learning this stuff,” he said. “Frankly, if it wasn’t easy, I couldn’t do it.”

If anyone has specific technical or workflow questions about the Texas Tribune, feel free to e-mail Brandon at btaylor@texastribune.org.

Hosts:

Guests: Jake Paul, Melinda Bardon, and David Estes

Summary: Tuesday’s conversation was all about summer projects. We heard about The Eagle Online‘s plans to move to Expression Engine, Melinda Bardon’s community news website startup based on Dot Net Nuke, and David Estes’ thoughts on a possibly open source iPhone application for the Daily UW. Check out the wiki show notes for more information.

Related forum discussion: Redesigning or redoing your site this summer?

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

The Maneater

Your name (or the Web Editor’s name): We have two online editors. Currently, I [Justin Myers] am the online development editor and Esten Hurtle is the online content editor; after Tuesday’s issue comes out, though, we’ll be handing those jobs over to James Vestal and Erin Kaplan, respectively.

How Often Do You Publish (Online): Continuously, though mainly with our print issue (see below)

How Often Do You Publish (Print): Twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays)

In your opinion, what’s the most unique feature or piece of functionality on your website? We spent a fair amount of time this past summer working on our campus guide, which we intend to be a resource for students to be able to find useful contact information for various departments and administrative offices; filterable maps of residence halls, computing sites and other kinds of places on campus; and upcoming events taking place on campus and around Columbia. That said, it could still use quite a bit of work; this year was definitely one of transitioning for us from being a simple shovelware site to one with a bit more content and utility to it.

What does your editorial workflow look like? Does it involve the Django admin? Our print workflow actually consists of a well-established directory structure of text files until they reach our design staff, which places the text and other content into InDesign. (Not at all elegant–but it works, it’s cheap and we can work on it from anywhere.) Our online workflow then consists of copying the same text and other content into the Django admin.

Size of Staff: Hard to tell, really. Mizzou’s J-school is huge, so we’ve got people coming and going all the time. As a whole, the paper’s really dedicated, regular staff is probably a few dozen; our regular online staff is probably around 6 or 7.

Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: This past month, we had almost 45,000 visitors. Only about a quarter of our visits are from Columbia, which probably has to do with being the main UM system campus, having some great sports teams (especially football and basketball lately) and our generally wide array of coverage. Actually, one of our most widely read articles ever online was a review of a The Cure album, which somehow got picked up by a major fan blog of theirs. Sometimes you never know where your audience will come from next, I suppose.

What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? (i.e. do your readers leave comments, forum topics, classified ads?) Right now, we’ve simply got comments on blog entries. We had an experiment early last fall called “Ask The Maneater” in which we’d answer questions people sent in and posted those answers to a blog, but we didn’t get that many questions.

What’s the best way to reach your community? (RSS vs. email vs. Facebook vs. Twitter) Virtually all of our editors are avid users of Google Reader, so we’ve made sure our RSS feeds cover all the bases. (Django’s syndication framework makes this wonderfully easy.) That said, we’re also on Facebook and Twitter (including support for tweeting article links from within the Django admin), but we’re still looking into the best ways to make use of those tools.

Hosting Company: WebFaction

Server Size: Shared 1 (10 GB storage, 80 MB RAM for long-running processes)

What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Since I’m not going to be in this position much longer, I’m probably not the best person to ask–but I’ll see what I can do.

There are a couple of things that come to my mind at the moment (said moment being just after midnight on the eve of my last week of classes): There’s been some discussion about completely redoing our classifieds system so it isn’t just a copy of the ads that ran in print, and we’re trying to figure out what we should do about MOVE, our Arts and Entertainment magazine. MOVE’s print edition is being folded back into The Maneater’s regular A&E section, and we’re trying to see where the MOVE website fits into the larger picture.

As I said earlier, this year’s been a bit of a transition year, and we’ve come a long way in building up themaneater.com into a better publication; while I’m sad to be leaving the staff, I’m excited to see what the next year will bring.

The Daily of the University of Washington

Your Name (or your Web Editor’s Name): David Estes

How Often Do You Publish (Online): Every weekday, plus occasional breaking news.

How Often Do You Publish (Print): Every weekday.

In your opinion, what’s the most unique feature or piece of functionality on your website? I started an experimental project last week that will eventually allow full direct modification of the site from the frontend, rather than the Django admin. Currently, only image/article reordering via drag and drop is implemented, but the user response has been good so far.

What does your editorial workflow look like? Does it involve the Django admin? The subeditor of each section copies their articles from the InCopy documents into the Django admin, and uploads the relevant images/videos/etc.

Size of Staff: Between editorial, advertising, marketing, and design, I’d guess around 50 people, not including writers.

Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: Quantcast says 68.6K people per month.

What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? (i.e. do your readers leave comments, forum topics, classified ads?) We used to receive around 50+ comments per day, but requiring registration cut that down to ~10-20 per day.

What’s the best way to reach your community? (RSS vs. email vs. Facebook vs. Twitter) We have 440 RSS subscribers, 172 daily email subscribers, 538 Twitter followers and 146 Facebook fans. Twitter has so far been the best method for direct conversations.

Hosting Company: We keep a small Debian box in the closet.

Server Size: P4 3.0Ghz, 1.5GB RAM

What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Over the summer, I’m planning on building an iPhone app and an editorial workflow/story assignment system. I’m also hoping to add more community-focused features.

Daily Gazette at Swarthmore

Your Name (or your Web Editor’s Name): Miles Skorpen (EIC), Dougal Sutherland (incoming EIC, formerly Tech Editor)

How Often Do You Publish (Online): Frequently, but with email ‘issues’ every work day.

How Often Do You Publish (Print): Never.

What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? We’ve got a workflow through Django, which is nifty. Our reviews website needs a facelift, but is also pretty nice.

What is your workflow? Does it involve Django? I wrote a blog post about our editorial workflow on the CoPress blog.

Size of Staff: 20-25

Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: 6k uniques/week, 2,500 email subscribers (student body of 1,400)

What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? (i.e. do your readers leave comments, forum topics, classified ads?) Enormous numbers of comments, we have a very popular announcements website, housing guide, reviews site, etc.—interactivity is heavily on the way up.

What’s the best way to reach your community? (RSS vs. email vs. Facebook vs. Twitter) Email—since we publish a daily announcements email, we get into people’s inbox at least twice a day. Dashboard links to our stories which drives content.

Hosting Company: Webfaction

Server Size: Shared, with heavily boosted RAM.

What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? We’ll be doing a visual overhaul of the whole website. Again. This summer.

The Chimes at Biola

Your Name (or your Web Editor’s Name): Dave Lowe is our Web Developer (he programmed the site); Michelle Rindels is Editor-in-Chief, Kelli Shiroma is Web Content Editor and Kelsey Heng is Web Multimedia Editor.

How Often Do You Publish (Online): We add new content daily and have web exclusive stories, photo galleries and videos.

How Often Do You Publish (Print): One a week.

In your opinion, what’s the most unique feature or piece of functionality on your website? Our redesign, launched April 15 of this year, focused on raising the prominence of video content. Video is central on the home page, and the new admin makes it easier to add – we simply enter the Vimeo ID number to simultaneously attach a video to a story, publish it on the front page and multimedia tab, and assign it to a section.

What does your editorial workflow look like? Does it involve the Django admin? Editors assign stories with deadlines staggered throughout the week so time-sensitive stories are published within 24 hours of an event. Our two web staffers are responsible for uploading the stories and multimedia through the Django admin.

Size of Staff: 22 people work on the holistic Chimes operation; the Web staff includes two editors and two videographers.

Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: About 5,000 unique visitors per month.

What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? (i.e. do your readers leave comments, forum topics, classified ads?) Our readers were involved via commenting before the redesign — we’re having to re-teach them to comment via the Facebook Connect system, but it’s only been about two weeks so we’ll see how quickly they catch on! Readers also participate through polls, reader-submitted photos and a weekly video called “Campus Talk,” a man-on-the-street style Q&A.

What’s the best way to reach your community? (RSS vs. email vs. Facebook vs. Twitter) Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming our primary mode of reader communication. We use it to communicate news updates and promote new videos.

Hosting Company: WebFaction

Server Size: It’s a dedicated server (which hosts a number of Biola sites): Celeron 2.4Ghz, 1GB RAM, 250GB disk space

What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Since Biola has a strong film program, we want to harness that talent and increase our video content so new material is up daily. This semester, we’ve been partnering with our campus broadcast journalism program, which provides some of the content you see on the site. But we also hope to experiment more with Flash design and do more showcase projects.

Another big goal is to take advantage of the blog capabilities, both to cover breaking news faster and to increase reader interaction with niche Chimes blogs.

Guests: Max Cutler and Robert Baskin

Summary: A question and answer session with Courant News, an open source Django CMS for student news organizations. The idea to build a Django CMS specifically for student newspapers came from discussion at an Ivy League news conference last April when people saw that no one had a CMS with the feature set they needed. Max and Robert, along with Paul O’Shannessy, decided they needed to fill the void. The conversation covers a bit of the history, and then goes into the specifics of the CMS. For more information, please check out or add to the wiki show notes.

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern (Tuesday, May 5th) Emily and I will record a new episode of This Week in CoPress with Max Cutler and Robert Baskin, discussing their Courant News CMS project. Courant is an open-source Django CMS that Max has blogged about extensively on his site. We’ll talk about main features, the installation process, theme capabilities, and what their vision for the future is.

We’ll be hosting the call on Skype. If you wish to call in, please contact me with your Skype name or phone number at greg [at] copress [dot] org. You will be added to the call and be able to ask questions.

We’re trying this as a higher quality alternative to BlogTalkRadio. Let us know what you think. We’re also still looking at ways to stream it live, so please leave ideas in the comments. Thanks!

As always, the full podcast will be available here on the blog on Wednesday.

Guests: Lauren Rabaino, Web Editor and Marlize van Romburgh, Editor in Chief of The Mustang Daily

Summary: Lauren Rabaino and Marlize Van Romburgh swap stories with Greg and Emily as the four discuss each of their college newspapers transitions to WordPress.

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

We’ll be talking to New York Times reporter and former TVNewser blogger and Towerlight Editor in Chief Brian Stelter about what college newspapers can do to become more innovative online, in the newsroom and with readers.

Howard Owens, former Director of Digital Publishing at Gatehouse Media and now Publisher of The Batavian, is also planning on joining the conversation.

Want to get tips from these pros about how to take your paper’s website to the next level in the upcoming school year? Tune in or participate by joining our chat or call-in.

The conversation will take place at 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern. If you miss it, we’ll publish the recorded version on Wednesday.

We might also have some other professionals stop by, so be sure to tune in and get a fresh perspective on what you need to do both for your publication and yourself to improve.

In 140 characters, what is BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly?

BCNI is a journalism conference in Philly where there is no set schedule. 100s of news people will present on whatever topic they want.

Why a BarCamp, and how is this going to help reinvent the industry?

The industry has tried professional conferences, CEO meetings, and expensive expos with little to show. The open schedule that a BarCamp provides lowers the barrier of entry so that anyone interested in thinking differently can attend with other like minded people and help hash out a vision for news in the 21st century.

There won’t be a silver bullet. But we can put aside the usual negativity and canned arguments and opinions for something new and fresh.

Who is the one person that everyone should try to get a conversation in with on Saturday?

If the event is successful, it will be somebody that isn’t particularity well-known that ends up making a splash with their presentation. Everybody is on an even level, so talk to everybody!

What topics do you expect to be covered? Will there a track for revenue, website design, or citizen journalism?

There will be no tracks. I’m a firm believer that the stodginess of traditional conferences is a detriment. Some wonderful things have come out of previous Barcamps on other topics. Creating tracks would be a mistake. The only requirement is that your presentation topic deal with news.

Are there any presentations in particular that you’re looking forward to?

There are no planned presentation although some people have given me a hint about what they are presenting. I, personally, would like to see any idea involving revenue and money.

Why did SPJ decide to move venues for their conference, and how do you think this will change their event?

I had been in contact with Phil Beck, the organizer of the SPJ conference, for a few weeks now and I couldn’t be happier. Phil told me that dozens of attendees had approached him about attending BarCamp. After the number started to climb, he figured it would be in SPJ’s best interest to move the event a few blocks north to Temple.

I had feared that the event would be too centered on online journalism and was in the process of reaching out to print and broadcast media members. The addition of SPJ makes that process much easier.

If you can’t get to Philly, how can someone follow along with BCNI?

The hashtag is #BCNIPhilly. I’d like to think that with 200+ tech savvy journalists that a lot of live-blogging, tweeting, and streaming will be taking place. However, there is no official plan to record every presentation as it would require six separate people recording each hour. However with more sponsorship money or volunteers, it’s something I have not ruled out.

Host:

Guest: Steve Buttry, Information Content Conductor for Gazette Communications

Summary: Greg and Daniel talk with Steve about the radical organization restructuring at Gazette Communications, what the specific changes will be and how it will affect operations, and how some of the lessons learned thus far might apply to student media.

Related: Weekly Forum Discussion – Restructuring your organization

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