This week’s guests:

Mindy McAdams (@macloo) is the Knight Chair for Journalism Technologies and the Democratic Process at the University of Florida and the author of Flash Journalism. Mindy is known for online journalism, by way of her blog (Teaching Online Journalism) and her open-source teaching style.

Rich Beckman (@richbeckman) is the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile. Rich is known for multimedia projects and for training students with high-end skills.

A few of the topics from this week’s podcast are:

• How college media organizations can innovate and improve their Web sites
• Comments on college media
• What each professor would do if they were the editor of a college news organization today
• Increasing online and in-person engagement
• Pros and cons of high staff turnover
• Changing and sustaining newsroom cultures

Rich and Mindy on ‘the state of college media’ online

Mindy said the biggest problem facing college media is that students mirror the professional industry with their “abysmal” handling of revenue:

“They don’t understand Web advertising. They don’t understand placement of advertising. They don’t understand how to communicate about that advertising with the people who buy it, their advertisers.”

Rich looked more at content than business in his analysis of the state of college media. He said to look for strong examples of multimedia at big news orgs like MSNBC and The New York Times:

“[Students] scoff at that and say, ‘Well we don’t have those kind of budgets and we don’t have those kinds of skills.’ And my answer was simply, ‘Well, they (The New York Times and MSNBC) don’t have the kind of time that you have. And they don’t have the ability to work in teams like you have and they don’t have the ability to get feedback like you have from your professors.”

Listen to the full podcast here:

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

In the “Townsquare” session, led by Arvil Ward and Anthony Pesce, the Populous Project was demoed. The Populous Project is a Knight News Challenge funded project that is working to build a content management system for student news publications based on Django.

Among the technologies demoed were the Digital Newsroom, which is a system of tracking story assignments that is currently implemented by the UCLA Daily Bruin. As Arvil said, “this provides a communication tool with the ability to manage the newsroom online.” It has threaded commenting for story ideas and notifications for when an assignment changes. Interestingly, it is not yet integrated with the content management system and how closely it will be able to manage content is to be determined.

Also demoed was Campuswalk, UCLA’s project to create a unified, cohesive, and searchable campus gateway. The current system is not up to the task in the eyes of Arvil and they’re working hard at building something better. It will make professor reviews, housing reviews, and swapping books more social.

The final piece of the demo was Localresearch.com. Arvil described this as focused marketing to small local businesses that seeks to reinvent the decreasing value of print advertising. They provide a database of local business listings and for $45 a month they work with companies to create more full-featured listings that include links to social media, reviews, and more.

He said that while a few years ago Google was the main traffic source for his site it has now become Twitter and Facebook. He says that “you need to speak to people where they already are” and that the top “neighborhoods” for online activity are now those sites.

Next up was Twitter and a quick introduction to how it works and how to use it. Andy mentioned that you need a solid vision of what you’ll be using Twitter for before you just start posting tweets. There needs to be a purpose in order for it to be effective for your news organization.

Quote URL was mentioned and looks like an interesting tool for aggregating conversations or reactions to a specific topic. You’re able to enter in links to various tweets and then Quote URL aggregates them into a central list.

Toward the end the subject moved to general site comments. Andy said that if you don’t yet have comments “it’s worth having a conversation about whether you want and/or need comments.” He cited the concerns over turning the comments list into a string of irrelevant posts. The takeaway: make sure that people will be using the comments and that you have a clear purpose for wanting them.

Much of the general conversation centered around how to make all of these tools as frictionless as possible. For both Facebook and Twitter tools that turned your stream into an automatic RSS list dump were brought up as great and efficient solutions.

After the demo some asked how much standard English conventions matter on Twitter. Andy’s response was that it really depends on your audience and purpose. If they won’t be bothered then it won’t be as large of a concern. However, there need to be some parameters and guidelines set beforehand so that everyone is clear going into the tool.

• Alex Klein (@alexklein), online editor
• Dean Chen (@deanchen), lead developer
• Chase Olivieri (@chasefoto), multimedia editor

As you might have seen, Alex wrote a blog post for CoPress about their recent switch from College Publisher to Drupal. Here’s a summary of what we discussed in the podcast:

• Why they chose Drupal
• How the switch went
• How they’re building a Web staff
• Multimedia
• New commenting policy and their comment system

Listen in!

Why a sandbox?

The advantage to having a sandbox is that these sites can be a great way to test out those ideas that you’re not sure quite how to implement or design. They provide a great test environment where you can experiment with ideas and code without having to worry about breaking things. Your Web staff and any others that are interested in learning about WordPress can use it to teach themselves some great new skills.

Thursday’s session is open to everyone, and we’ll be leading you through from start to finish on how to set up a demo instance of WordPress. We’ll show you how to create a subdomain on which to install WordPress plus lead you through each step of configuring the software. From creating the database to installing themes and plugins or getting some dummy content in there, we’ll cover it all.

If there’s time left over, we’ll also be open to discussing any and all questions you may have.

This is a great opportunity if you’ve ever wanted someone to show you how to start hacking a WordPress theme. CoPress team members will be there to answer your questions in real time — no more clogging up your inbox!

Sound interesting? Head on over to the Facebook event to RSVP and we’ll get the details out to you. Let’s start hacking!

Earlier this summer, Student Life, the independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis, relaunched its Web site using WordPress µ. The new site is the culmination of several months of conversations within Student Life’s Web team and a summer of intense design and programming. More importantly, the July launch was the first time that Student Life’s Web site was completely student-run since joining College Publisher in 2001 (long before it became the College Media Network).

Our decision to leave CMN and College Publisher 5.0 stemmed from a desire to gain finer control over users’ experience in interacting with our Web site and to open to door for future Web development projects. We had been having discussions for several years about the possibility of building our own site, but the final decision to leave CMN was made last spring after a rocky experience with CP5 and the growth of our Web staff to a size that we thought could sustain the design and development of a new site into the future.

The Process

As we started to look for a content management system to power our new site, we evaluated three basic options: using WordPress (WordPress µ), Drupal or building our own content management system in Django. At the end of the day, we chose to go with the WP option because several members of our interactive staff had worked with it in the past and because the system offered an easy way of running our main site and all of our blogs within one installation. Although Drupal is also extremely powerful, we found that WordPress’s interface was better suited to a workflow that would begin to allow non-technical reporters and editors to work within our CMS. We haven’t dropped the long-term plan of moving to a Django-powered system, but the development cycle for creating a system that would completely suit our needs would have taken far longer than the time we allotted for our Web transition.

From the beginning of the development process, our online staff was committed to designing its own theme (rather than using one freely or commercially available from an external source) because we wanted to avoid the trap of looking exactly like a lot of other papers. Although many of the themes available on the Internet are smooth and user-friendly, we wanted to avoid fading into a sea of similarly designed Web sites (one of the biggest drawbacks with CP4) and we wanted the opportunity to highlight the talents of our staff members. Our design process started with a conversation about what kind of information we wanted to highlight on the front page and how we envisioned our online workflow. We worked from there.

The Challenges

Although there was a good sense of how the Web site would look when we launched, a lot of the most important work on the site has happened since then. Just this week, a project spearheaded by our online editor Scott Bressler went live, allowing us to easily drag and drop articles within our eight above-the-fold story slots (in the JavaScript-based carousel element and the latest news rail). We have gone through countless revisions of our style sheet based on feedback from our staff and readers. Every day, we spend time going through server resource reports to find modules that load slowly so we can reduce server demand and speed up the load time of our site. One of the biggest challenges of running our own site is that the development is never done — we always have new projects to complete. That is also the greatest upside to our new site (and why we decided to switch in the first place): our online presence is now dynamic and constantly changing. With enough time spent writing, testing and debugging code, we can accomplish whatever we want without any external limitations.

One of the biggest challenges that we faced was trying to find an effective method for distributing our e-mail edition. A significant percentage of our traffic (especially among parents and alumni) is driven by the e-mail edition, so one of our highest priorities for the site was finding a service that would allow us to reliably place messages in users’ inboxes. After researching a number of options including using some kind of script run off our servers and a number of paid services, we decided to go with MadMimi.com which seemed to have the best balance of price and features. In the weeks that we’ve been using MadMimi, we have yet to encounter a problem, having been able to take advantage of their top-notch support staff (which responds to questions by e-mail at all hours). Most importantly, we can finally track readership statistics for clickthrough and open rates. It has been very helpful to map out what stories cause readers to open the e-mail edition most frequently and what types of headlines get the highest number of clicks.

The Takeaways

Looking back on the process of leaving College Publisher, the best advice I can give to other papers is think big and think early. Use as many resources as are at your disposal; your online staff and Google are great places to start, but contacting students in your local computer science department and support networks like CoPress and the Center for Innovation in College Media can really make a difference. Brainstorming is an important part of the development process, but don’t let brainstorming interfere with your ability to get stuff done. In other words, your Web site will always be a work in progress, so launch it and go from there. Finally, if you are leaving College Publisher, leave plenty of time for getting your archives from them and don’t be afraid to call every day until you get what you want. The single biggest frustration of coordinating Student Life’s web development was finalizing our departure from CMN and obtaining our content exports and, more importantly, our user exports. That data belongs to you and there is no reason you should need to wait for it.

Above all else, don’t be scared off by the sea of computer programming acronyms and matrix-like walls of code — trust the news judgment that gets the print edition out every day and the technical side of Web development will follow.

A Rundown of the New Site

• CMS: WordPress µ
• Theme: Designed in-house
• Hosting: MediaTemple, (gs) plan
• E-mail edition: Powered by MadMimi
• Favorite plugins: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and WP-Stats
• Ad rotation: Google AdManager, sold by student staff with remnants sold by Google AdSense

Sam Guzik is currently the Director of New Media and a former Editor in Chief of Student Life Newspaper at Washington University in St. Louis. He can be reached at sam.guzik@studlife.com and is happy to answer any questions about the process of transition to a new Web site.

Now that we’ve shared a few our our ideas, let’s see yours! With the above video in mind, put the information into action. In the upcoming weeks:

Week 1: Plan a brainstorming session. It can be in your newsroom or on a camping trip or at an editor’s house. Make it fun and have lots of food. Make a list of all of the best ideas for how you can better implement the Web in your newsroom. It’s important that everyone is involved in the process.

Specifically, figure out how to (1) Start a Web-first workflow for all articles to be posted in a 24-hour news cycle, and (2) Generate Web-specific content like videos, slideshows and Twitter/Facebook/SMS updates. You can start a staff blog this week and write your first post about the ideas you brainstormed.

Week 2: Help every editor and reporter set up Google alerts for their section or beat as well as create a Twitter account to reach out to readers. At every budget meeting, require an aspect of every article pitch be based on feedback from readers on the Web. Start to build a strong community with your audience online and make sure it’s a two-way dialogue.

If you already have a Twitter account, this can be the week when you set up a system for publishing your editorial calendar for public feedback.

Weeks 3-6: Get out of the habit of updating your site once a day after the newspaper is printing. This is a huge step, so you’ll have to start slow. During this week, try not to post your articles online at 10 p.m. See how early you can post everything (and subsequently tweet the headlines), then figure out how your staff needs to shift roles to have a continuous flow of news throughout the day. This could mean changing the hours of your copy editors, changing deadlines for reporters and training everyone how to use the CMS.

Week 6-9: Really take control of live and breaking coverage. This can be as simple as posting event recaps (e.g. sports games, debates, concerts) online within a few hours after they’re over, because that’s when people will be looking. During those same events, post pictures and tweets that your readers will be interested in, and make sure to keep an eye on feedback from your users too.

Do they have questions? “Is #46 on the bench?” “How many people are at the concert?” Answer those questions. For breaking news like fires, robberies or protests, post as much information as you can as soon as you can. If it’s incomplete, that’s OK — but be accurate. Post updates as you go. Be sure to tweet the information too.

Week 9-12: After your staff starts to get comfortable with the Web, take on a big project like creating a system for an open editorial calendar, a continually updated news wiki or an iPhone app for readers on the go. All of your projects will feed on the other skills you’ve acquired: covering breaking news, thinking Web-first and encouraging community involvement.

Last but not least, report back! Let your peers know how your experiment went and what lessons you learned.

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.

• Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared – Joey Baker: Video sharing sites treat your copyright differently. Summary: the best sites are the most restrictive.
• 4 productive summer projects for j-students – Daniel Bachhuber: Proactive summer J project ideas from @laurenmichell. It would be sweet to see experimentation with the news wiki.
• 10 Ideas I Want to Try at the Newspaper Where I Work – Daniel Bachhuber: I dig the ideas Will has for community relationship management, as well as using data and APIs well.
• Steve Ballmer, Microsoft – The Future of Microsoft, The Future of Technology – Daniel Bachhuber: Steve Balmer makes a case for entrepreneurship in the economic downturn.

The most notable news of the week, however, is that Greg taught me the stylistic considerations of headlines and subheads.

Activity around the network

In the forum this week, Joey asked the crowd about their editorial workflows within WordPress. Lauren Rabaino left the lengthiest answer, explaining in detail how the Mustang Daily is currently operating their web-first workflow. Writers upload their documents into WordPress, and then the editing happens within the CMS. The information about these interactions is managed in a Google Spreadsheet.

The wiki is where the real party was happening this week. Related to the Mustang Daily’s workflow, a few of us have been sketching out a spec to build functionality into WordPress to enhance editorial workflows, and enable newspapers like the Mustang Daily to conduct their entire operation within the CMS instead of having to add a Google Spreadsheet on top. These ideas have materialized in the form of the Edit Flow Project. Look for a more detail post on the project’s goals next week.

Also on the wiki, Lauren Rabaino has been doing a stellar job adding more student news organizations to the Network directory. Late last night I had an “aha!” moment when I figured out you could apply meta data of a sort to these directory pages. The result? Sorting by CMS, location, or type of publication. As we add more information to the system, hopefully with your help, this will become an increasingly useful database of what student news organizations across the nation are doing with their web technology. If your organization is missing, please feel free to add it by following the criteria at the top of the Network page.

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. 

As Andrew said in the forum:

The web editor will be attending story meetings and will be functioning in a similar fashion to a section editor. This position is not requiring web skills. Knowledge is a bonus, but not a requirement.

Max Cutler has a similar take:

In my mind, the Online Editor should be someone with editorial and multimedia experience, who can direct editorial initiatives and help produce good multimedia content for the website. It’s my job as the developer to build out any infrastructure and code to support the Online Editor’s plans. Of course, that process is a give-and-take one, but it certainly helps to have that division of responsibilities.

By splitting the job into a distinct content-based position and a developer position, both aspects can flourish together. The editor can train reporters and editors in multimedia skills and help produce multimedia and web content. The developer can work on long-term features and site functionality. Together, the two can produce long-term, multimedia-based projects. 

Requirements for the web editor position:

• Copy editing experience
• Reporting experince (especially on a deadline for breaking news situations)
• Multimedia: video, audio slideshows, basic Flash, podcasting
• Basic HTML
• Writing for the web (links, keywords)
• Familiarity with Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.

Requirements for the web developer position:

• Experience with your respective CMS (and the related language)
• HTML/CSS
• Video/audio editing
• Flash
• A portfolio of Web sites to prove he/she has all these skills

Additional skills that would be preffered but certainly not required (since they’re easily learned) are:  live streaming, blogging, Google maps, and live chats.

Going beyond basic skills

Both the Web Editor and Developer should have a vision for the future of the site and an understanding of a newspaper’s needs during a time of immense change in the journalism industry.

Staying on top of trends in the journalism world will mean reading blogs, following innovators online, going to conferences, actively browsing through news sites — and then using all that information to brainstorm new ideas.

A few questions to put on the application to gague the potential editor on the aforementioned topics would be:

• What would you improve on the current Web site?
• What are your thoughts on the use of social media in a news organization?
• Which new media blogs do you read regularly?
• What’s your vision for the Web site?
• How does your background prepare you for a job as online editor/developer?
• What are three projects you could start working on immediately? (via Daniel Bachhuber)
• What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the newspaper & how do you plan to address it? (via Andrew Spittle)

An online editor needs to be patient and open-minded above all else. Even at the college level, there is still a lot of resistance to the web. Your team of webbies needs to be able to combat the nay-sayers in the newsroom with optimimism. 

Training reporters will also require a large dose of patience. Despite the supposed tech-savviness of Generation Y, I’ve learned that just because you’re born after 1982 doesn’t mean you’re programmed with Final Cut skills. Repetition, hands-on learning and positive encouragement will keep everyone else on their toes. 

The ability to learn and teach is also important; most of what the online editor teaches other reporters and editors will be self-learned. Thus, teamwork is a must.

The next steps

If  your news organization already has a functioning web editor/developer team, or a solid balance between well-trained reporters and a talented web producer, then this is all old news for you. It’s time to consider expanding your web team.

Web Advertising Manager - This person’s job would be solely dedicated to finding ways to generate revenue online. This position would be highly experimental and, again, based on keeping up with trends, reading a lot of blog posts and generating new ideas. This person would not merely post regurgitated print ads onto the site.

Community Manager - This person could promote content and connection with your readers over social media. Andrew Dunn from the Daily Tar Heel has already implemented this idea by hiring a community manager (see the application).

A concept I like from the Tar Heel’s job description is an aggregated news source:

He or she (the community manager) will maintain a site hosted on dailytarheel.com that aggregates and highlights local online content, from blogs, Twitter feeds and other news sites.

More responsibilities could include: responding to all at-replies on Twitter, keeping the Twitter conversation relevant and fresh, promoting content on Facebook by linking to articles with the newspaper’s Facebook Page, posting albums to Flickr and encouraging user-generated photo groups, and looking for new online outlets to reach out to the community.