CoPress

Recommended links for the long weekend:

• Make sure your WordPress site is up to date with 2.8.4, the most recent version. Yesterday afternoon, Lorelle, a significant voice in the WordPress community, reported that older versions were under attack. There are two reported signatures of a hacked blog: funky permalinks including the keywords “eval” or “base64_decode,” or an extra administrator in your database that doesn’t show up in the WordPress admin. The exploit that the hacker is using has been patched for a while, and should only affect those who haven’t updated their site recently. Making sure your WordPress site is up to date is one of the best ways of keeping it secure.
• On a related WordPress note, johnl1479 says: FYI: #PodPress 8.8.1 breaks thumbnail capability of #Wordpress MU 2.8.4a.
• An alumni assesses the recently relaunched Eagle at American University and identifies some of the value it’s offering her. Good ideas that you should pay attention to.
• Andrew Robinson found success adding the Facebook Connect plugin to the WKU Herald website. Facebook apparently only allows one connection at a time, and having the Fan Box Widget on the site as well caused issues.
• Through Twitter, I found out about @WiredResearch, a Twitter account that teases the facts of upcoming articles. It would be way cool to see this on a super-local level.
• VentureBeat has an inside scoop on the editorial workflow of The New York Times blogs. Posts that are ready to go are marked “Pending Review”, and notifications are still by email.
• Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – The web is actually reviving literacy and pushing it in “bold new directions.”

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

Recommended links for the weekend:

• The New York Times is leveraging the communication skills of their journalists in an entirely new way: by having them teach. It’s a first-time experiment for the publication that hints at the importance of area expertise for the 21st century journalist. (tks Brian Manzullo)
• Need ideas for reinventing your J school this fall? Suzanne Yada has your back. The best, most pragmatic idea, in my opinion, is hosting a BarCamp. Make it happen.
• In the forum, I’ve released the 0.1 version of a plugin for properly redirecting your old College Publisher URLs to your new WordPress website. It should work with both College Publisher 4 and College Publisher 5 URLs, although the caveat is that I haven’t tested it fully yet, and requires that your old article IDs are stored somewhere in the database (or that they are your new post IDs). Also, Andrew Robinson of the College Heights Herald has done a bit of research into the best plugin for integrating Facebook Connect into your website.
• Rebooting the News, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s podcast loved by everyone (or Joey, Greg, and I at least), had Zach Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab on as a guest this past week. Zach presents a thoughtful, well-informed perspective on the Associated Press’ DRM announcement that caught me completely by surprise, and Jay and Dave conclude the episode with a conversation about the type of information news stories traditionally lack that would actually make the reporting more useful.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

This week, eyes have been on Twitter, as the race to 1,000,000 followers reached fever pitch with Ashton Kutcher reaching 1,000,000 followers on Twitter around 2:30 a.m. ET. On Wednesday, CNN acquired CNNbrk twitter account to further its lead over Ashton Kutcher to further the race between the media and man.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was light this week, with Joey Baker starting a discussion for Web Development ideas, saying:

This is intended to be a place for all you developers and designers to share crazy ideas that you have about newsorg website design. Anything that comes to you, treat this as your open notebook. Chances are good that you’ll find someone around who just might like your idea and try to implement it.

Also on the form, wvanwazer asked asked for advice on advertising rates.

How much does everyone charge for advertising rates? Right now, we (the Tulane Hullabaloo) charge 5 dollars per 1000 impressions. Is this high? Low? We’re in the process of setting our advertising rate for the next year, and I have no idea what a good price is.

On the wiki, Daniel and Miles started the Recruiting Technical Staff page, while Joey updated the Switching from College Publisher page.

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):

• Why top-down syndication is broken – Jackie Hai looks into how the fact that we are all now content producers has changed the top-down syndication model to one which is distributed and bottom-up.
• New York Times Landing Pages: All the Irrelevance That Fits the Pixels – Fascinating analysis by Jonathan Mendez on how the NYTimes’ landing pages present content. Do newspapers just take what is in the print edition and put it online?
• Recruitment -  Max Cutler analyzes solutions to recruiting technical staff for college newspapers.
• MediaShift . College Media Miss Opportunities Covering the Economic Crisis | PBS – A missed opportunity indeed. A look at how college media should be covering the economic crisis.

Host: Greg Linch

Guest: Andrew DeVigal

Summary: Today’s episode of This Week in CoPress is a conversation with New York Times multimedia editor Andrew DeVigal, who previously worked with student media at San Francisco State. DeVigal gives advice to student news organizations regarding how they can improve their multimedia content and therefore their Web site, from video to infographics.

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Have feedback or ideas for an upcoming podcast? Let us know!

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News wikis haven’t make it big yet but, in my opinion, their day is soon.

In a conversation I was having with Joey Baker the other day, we were talking about micropayments, monetization, and how news differs from music, movies, and other forums of content. His argument is that news is “read once, and then file away” while the other forms have “repeat use” value which makes them easier to charge for. This got me thinking. Journalism shouldn’t just be about broadcasting the most recent event of the day, but also providing accurate, vetted, and independent information to educate the community. In fact, news websites are pretty bad with this other side of journalism. If I want to understand the context for an issue’s current situation beyond what’s presented in the article, I’ve got to use an atrocious site search tool to find previous articles on the issue. There has to be a better way to get me to the information I need to know.

Enter: the wiki. Read more →