CoPress

We hear it over and over again – “Innovate, innovate, innovate!” But what does that really mean in the context of newspapers, and why is it necessary? Let’s start by stepping back to see where newspapers went wrong.

Like we’ve mentioned before, the newspaper industry is a lot like the railroad industry, which essentially stopped growing because it didn’t transform its mindset. Because they failed to see the train as a part of the transportation business, they lost their customers to highways and airlines.

Newspapers are falling into a similar trap, but college media can change course before it’s too late. We should be the ones experimenting and taking risks. The students should be leading the way.

To quote Jason Calacanis, “Innovation is all you have. Once you stop innovating you lose your talent and you lose the race. Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never. Never.”

What is innovation really, though? Innovation is experimenting and taking risks. Innovation is trying what’s radically new.

After you take a look at the video above, be the innovator in your newsroom. Play it at your next staff meeting, e-mail the link to them or even post it to their Facebook walls. We have an entire series of videos coming for you in the following weeks to help your entire newsroom understand how to step ahead.

The background

College news organizations need to move beyond advertising. Now.

Hold that thought.

Some background: The topic of generating revenue to sustain news organizations has begun to consume my thoughts about journalism. There are a number of reasons why, but this mostly came after a little meetup last Saturday in DC called RevenueTwoPointZero (Rev2oh on Twitter).

This isn’t the first time our humble CoPress crew is talking about the business side of journalism. Namely, check out Joey Baker‘s post from December, “But we make all our money from newsprint!”.

But why? Aren’t we just about technology and college news sites?

No. That’s a main theme, but we would be remiss if we left revenue off the table. It’s hard to run a news site without money, unless you’re an exception.

Actually, one of our three main goals directly relates to making money: We want student news organizations to generate more online revenue by having full control over their sites.

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Host: Greg Linch and Daniel Bachhuber

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

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

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The best piece of news this week, in my opinion, is that News Mixer will be working on WordPress integration. That’s right, the sweet piece of commenting goodness originally launched as NewsMixer.us and recently announced to be integrated with the Populous Project will be coming to the world’s most popular blogging platform and overall Swiss Army Knife.

Around the Network

In the forum this week, Greg asked about strategies for making your print edition an online feature. The idea came out of a Twitter conversation between Greg and Dane Beavers at The Oklahoma Daily, and the specific questions were:

• After you complete a print edition, do you put a PDF or other such version of it online? Why or not?
• If you do, is it useful? What kind of traffic does it get?
• If you do, do you upload as a PDF or using a third-party service such as Issuu or Scribd?
• If you do, do you tell advertisers that their ads are viewable online?

Read more →

This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform; and while the Web can do that, the idea of re-purposing news content had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild. It permitted the press to delay the date of migration.

– Migration Point for the Press Tribe, Jay Rosen

Newspapers got it all wrong when the went online—simply shoveling their content from the print product into a template Web site and saying, “There, we’re online.”

They’ve never really been ‘first class citizens’ of the Web, however. Newspapers are still not doing simple things like linking or tagging or using social media. They’re online in that they have a Web site, but they’re still using a print mentality to maintain it. Read more →

WordPress

We’re still actively searching for WordPress themes to use for our hosted Web sites (and of course, to recommend to you). That search has turned up this recent post on Running Design listing some top-notch news themes. We also came across a plugin called Pods that allows you to manage a database of information from the WordPress back end. It’s still a bit rough, but offers a lot of potential to news organizations looking to easily manage and present relational databases.

The Journalism World

The New York Times is running a blog-style debate from some of the top minds in journalism entitled Battle Plans for Newspapers. This seems like a constructive contribution to the debate over the future of newspapers, which has been raging anew since the TIME cover story on the topic last week. Jeff Jarvis has a good summary of all of the arguments so far in a post from earlier this week.

Further, Jim Stoval argues that the death of newspapers will lead to better journalism by giving rise the the digital newsroom—allowing journalists new and better ways of telling their stories. Read more →

Bloggers are the anti-journalist.

Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among “true” journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of… blogging: consistently producing good content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.

The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.

Now, some strategies for getting readers engaged. Read more →

The CoPress community took a big step forward this week on our Google Group.

“What’s that?” you say.  Sign up and check it out.

Until Tuesday, the group was mostly a listserv for keeping members in the know about CoPress. But Alex Klein (@alexklein), editor for new media at the Duke Chronicle, added a new element that we’re very happy to see: member discussion and sharing experiences.

Here is what Alex asked:

The Duke Chronicle is looking to spend some money on our Online Department, because we currently have no office space, no special software, and no hardware of any kind.

I’m looking for a few items from anyone who’s willing to provide them:

1. How much does all your Online Department stuff cost? (hardware, software, even things like tables, chairs, etc.)
2. What do you have? (computers, audio/video equipment, software, gadgets, monitors, etc.)
3. Where can we find the most cost-effective stuff?
4. What are 3 things we MUST have?
5. How many people are in your Online Department?
6. How much space do you get in the office? (as a percentage or in square feet)

Thanks, everyone. Also, anyone who wants to provide strategies for recruitment is welcome to do so! A/V and developers are our main priorities.

If you work for a student news organization, I strongly encourage you to read the full thread. Nevertheless, we’re here to help, so here is a summary of the six responses:

1. Most organizations don’t know exactly how much their online department costs. It could a simple $300 monthly stipend for the Web editor or thousands in different pieces of equipment.
2. Almost everyone had Macs and Adobe CS3. Final Cut Express HD was the most common video editing software, but Adobe Premiere popped up in one.
3. NewEgg dominated for hardware suggestions, with B&H Photo in second.
4. Essentials were hard to pin down, but audio/video equipment, the proper computers/software and good people were the top three answers.
5. Online staffs ranged from two to six people.
6. As for office space (hey, where’s my stapler?), it varied from two desks to two offices.

Want to weigh in? Feel free to answer the question in a comment below. Or, better yet, join the Google Group and responded via e-mail to add to the thread.

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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We’ve got a problem at The Daily Orange: our ad revenue is shrinking.

Sound familiar? A newspaper that’s having trouble making ends meet!?

We were having such difficulty balancing our budget, that we cut our print Friday edition (we still publish online).

The Daily Orange is an independent student newspaper. “Independent” means that we receive no money from the academic institution that we cover (well… they don’t charge us rent; but, that’s the only help we get). We pay a heavy price for the freedom to set our editorial content – we rely on print advertising for nearly all of our income.

This is a problem. As we’re forced to slowly transition toward an online newsroom, we risk abandoning the money making print edition. This scares our business manager to death. It frightens our board. We all know that the internet is the future, but can’t see a way to monetize online content.

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