CoPress

Social media has the unique ability to turn interpersonal spats into broader points of public debate. A recent “Twitterfight” between the current editor of The Independent Florida Alligator and one of its former editors neatly served to demonstrate that point. The Alligator, it seems, is facing a crisis: Nobody wants to lead it in the spring semester.

I’m not a gossip columnist and I’ve no wish to rehash the gory details of their argument. What I am interested in is the distilled substance of the dispute: What can we, as college newsroom leaders, do to create an environment that attracts, retains and encourages student journalists to invest their time and energy into putting out a product? All the great ideas and all the hot new technology are for naught if we don’t have people willing to create content, because ultimately the content is what matters.

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Links of interest to the team in the past couple of weeks:

Why not writing a story is innovation – Publishing 2.0
Daniel: Down with rewriting and publishing press releases (and other such nonsense)!

MediaShift Idea Lab: Mistakes I made with the Next Newsroom Project | PBS

Joey: Regarding the KNC grant:

• include enough money to hire a few people
• recognize that the project is going to take time; a lot of it
• don’t overcomplicate your life. use free software to make things move quickly. It’s all about the version 1!

Knight Digital Media Center: Leadership: Leadership Report 2008: Action Steps

Joey:  Here are some of the actions editors at the 2008 KDMC leadership conference decided to take:

• Put someone in charge of analyzing and understanding Web metrics
• Hold editors accountable for Web traffic to their pages and sites
• Develop a strategy for mobile news and information delivery
• Break down an all-encompassing plan for a new portal into small bites or iterations that can launch successively
• Reduce a long priority list to a few most important items and focus on them
• Develop a strategy for social networking
• Launch different affinity networks with frequency; keep the ones that work, scrap those that don’t.
• Train staff about key audiences for the Web and print products
• Treat the daily newspaper as a niche product and focus resources accordingly
• Wholesale video packages to local television outlets.

Why CoPress Matters – Journalism 3.0
Daniel: Emily writes a pretty convincing case for CoPress.

Link Journalism Drives Page Views and Engagement – Publishing 2.0

Not Dead: The Paid-for Online Model | Monday Note

Joey: He never says ‘freemium,’ but that’s what he means. The idea: charge people that have excess page views

The market and the internet don’t care if you make money – Publishing 2.0

Joey: There must be a business model for news.

Check out this post on our wiki.

Since launching our new site in late August, The Miami Hurricane has not only used WordPress for our online content management but also to revamp our story workflow process.

It didn’t happen overnight but, by late September, all story editing was being done in the CMS. It’s a process I conceptualized with Editor in Chief Matthew Bunch and Webmaster Brian Schlansky (I advise The Hurricane as editor at large for online and multimedia).

What follows is a breakdown of our system. Enjoy!

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News and articles of interest in the past couple of weeks

A scenario for news – BuzzMachine

Jarvis covers how he thinks news will evolve as we move from analog to digital. Important to note the parallels to community organizing, and rethink the core value of journalism.

6 Newspaper sections rendered obsolete by the web – 10,000 Words

Argues that there are at least 6 sections “rendered obsolete” by the web, which I think opens an interesting discussion about the newspaper itself. One conclusion is that, if newspapers tank, all we really lose is the local hardball news. Both the post and the comment thread are worth reading.

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs – The New York Times

The good news: there are online-only news organizations springing up to take on the responsibility of investigative journalism. The semi-bad news: there isn’t enough advertising revenue to make them financially sustainable (many are non-profit and foundation-supported).

via the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2