CoPress

As the school year winds down to an end, many news organizations are searching for the next online editor. If you already have your next online editor, then the summer is a perfect time for him or her to brush up on necessary skills that will make your news website flourish.

Finding the balance

Ideally, an online editor will have both the tech-smarts and the journalism abilities to present news content in web-friendly way. You can teach someone how to embed a video from YouTube or add a new article to a CMS, but teaching someone how to write a lead can’t be done through an hour-long training session. 

Splitting the job

Increasingly, the responsiblity of maintaining the website is more than a one-man show.

As Andrew Spittle suggested in the CoPress forum, the best way to balance the job is to split the web position into a web developer and web editorial position.  Editing articles in addition to training the staff for multimedia year-round leaves little time to focus on developing new features. 

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This week has been a big one for journalism around the Web, with Monday morning’s bombshell being the introduction of InDenver Times. The announcement—specifically, their ambitious subscription-based revenue model—has reignited heated discussion of how news will be paid for. (It also led me to question the group’s online positioning.) Meanwhile, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last issue and will remain as a much smaller online-only publication. With these events, we’re that much closer to a complete reinvention of journalism as we know it. In other words, there’s no better (or more important) time to get involved.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was light this week, with Greg posting the ever-relevant question(s):

If you could completely restructure your news organization to better to adapt to the new world of journalism, how would you do it?

• What would the process be?
• How would individual roles change?
• What would physically change in your newsroom?
• Would your CMS change?
• Would your business model change?

While there has been but one respondent thus far, it was the venerable Pat Thornton who argued that newsrooms need not be physical. Do you have thoughts? Drop by.

On the blog, we had three great posts with ten insightful comments (to date). The most recent content, a missive from Andrew Spittle about the Whitman Pioneer‘s efforts to push Twitter, prompted a detailed response from Joe Moore about his use last night of CoverItLive:

I think CoverItLive would also be good for breaking news that’s unexpected- it allows for multiple “producers” to post. This could be used in a lockdown-type of situation where journalists are located all over, and each have a different story to tell.

If you haven’t already, go check that out.

Finally, we’ve made some good progress this week on our still-fledgling wiki. Will Van Wazer, online editor at the Tulane Hillabaloo, added the story of their WordPress-powered site (with some very good plugin recommendations); Jackie Hai of Amherst Wire added a number of WordPress themes to the directory; and our own Joey Baker did some work to the WordPress plugins page.

As with any wiki, your contributions to ours would be very much appreciated and of use to the whole community. Share the love!

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):

• Web site wish list? Here’s a start – Mark Briggs outlined something very similar to what we’ve done previously. (If you’re feeling ambitious, start porting features to our space for it on the wiki.)
• The Bad, Good And Ugly Advice Given To Journalists On SEO – Rachelle Money’s look at the journalist-aimed cries of “SEO!”
• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable – A long but oh-so-worthwhile piece from Clay Shirky.
• Old Growth Media and the Future of News – Steven Johnson’s speech from SXWXi, which ended Tuesday.

Lastly, a quick one:

• Chicago Tribune masthead, Thursday, March 19

Have a great weekend!