CoPress

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.

This last Thursday’s session of the Summer Web Design Camp was all about what goes into creating, designing, and coding a news wiki. Daniel and Will led Lauren Rabaino, Max Cutler, Mo Jangda, Greg Linch, and myself through a discussion of how to set up and effectively deploy a news wiki.

Like last week the session started off with Daniel and Will leading us through a presentation that they put together covering examples, code, and options. The slideshow’s embedded above and is also available on Slideshare. Some of the main points that came out of the presentation were:

• Examples are hard to come by – The best source of examples are news organizations topical landing pages. While not “wikified” topical landing pages from The New York Times and The Guardian are good examples of what could be included on a page that the community has access to.
• Integration is key – For a news wiki to truly be effective it needs to be more than just a sidebar to the main news site. Information from the wiki must be integrated into the content of the “regular” site. For an example of this integration check out what Will’s doing with The Maine Campus.
• Experiment! – The field for news wikis is wide open. It can become whatever your news organization wants or needs it to be. Using a news wiki for topical landing pages, a restaurant section, or even as a way to review professors are all options that could be experimented with.
• Give the community ownership – A lot of concern over who will maintain and edit a wiki comes up when they’re discussed. One approach to this that was discussed during the session was to be upfront with your news community about what you think they can add to the wiki. Show that you value their input, knowledge, and perspective and perhaps they will in turn show an appreciation for the content on the wiki. People generally care about things that they have stake in.
• There’s many options – Creating a news wiki does not mean that you have to dive into setting up MediaWiki. There’s other options out there that have their own advantages and disadvantages. The end of Daniel and Will’s presentation covers a few of these alternative tools.

There were also a couple WordPress plugins discussed that could prove to be quite handy to those of you interested in creating a news wiki for your news organization. Will mentioned  the WP mobile edition as a way to create a mobile version of your site that won’t cause long page load times.

Also discussed was the Automatic Tag Link plugin which will automate the process of linking to tag pages. If you’re using tags as topical landing pages with a wiki this could be a good way to drive traffic to them and promote them.

We’ll be taking a break from the design camp sessions this week so that everyone can enjoy the 4th of July weekend and we’ll resume sessions on July 9th. The working plan for that session is to cover designing featured pages like how the Amherst Wire covered the Economic Stimulus. If you’re interested in participating stay tuned to this space or send us an email.

On the slate for this week’s session of the summer web design camp was article pages and different approaches to designing them. Thursday I sat down with Daniel, Jake Paul, and Ethan Klapper to talk over some of our favorite practices. Rick Martinez also joined us mid-way to add a fifth voice to the conversation.

To start things off Jake lead us all through a presentation, which we’ve posted on Slideshare, he had made that hit on some of the main points about article pages. A couple of the main points of that presentation were:

• Hierarchy – it’s important to create a clearly distinguishable hierarchy of elements on the page. This needs to be more than just the headline and body text though, it applies to all page elements. Even after scrolling most of the way down a page a reader should still be able to clearly pick out the body text as the defining page element.
• Minimize distractions – the whole point of visiting an article page is to read: don’t make this difficult for your readers. Ads, comments, sharing buttons, etc. are all great to have on an article page, but they should by no means detract from the content that you publish. If it’s too hard to read articles on your site then users will resort to either reading your articles through RSS or not reading them at all.
• Large fonts – 11 point Helvetica may work great for some sites but for long form reading it’s just not ideal. Keep the fonts large and you won’t strain the eyes of your readers.

From there the discussion proceeded to cover some of our favourite and not so favourite article designs. The slideshow linked above contains screenshots of all the sites discussed so that you can follow along with what we were talking about. There’s some good information in there and some of the sites critiqued are The Mustang Daily, The Daily Pennsylvanian, Seed Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, and more.

This week we’ll be covering a topic that has been discussed quite a bit: integrating a wiki into your news organization website. Daniel and Will Davis will be leading the session and will be giving us some ideas and tips about how to set up and integrate a wiki. If you’re interested in participating you can RSVP to the Facebook event, read more at the wiki and get started drafting a “wiki wish list” in the Forum.

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 →