Hey college news, it’s your older brother: hyperlocal.

We’re not so different, you and I. We’re both industries dominated by the inexperienced. We both have to cover a specific community. In fact, it could be argued that collegiate journalism is a subset of hyperlocal.

Fortunately for you this means that we all share the same problems. Both college newspapers and hyperlocal sites are figuring out the best ways to monetize a geographic area of like-minded people, often through the Web.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis and the folks at CUNY, we know that some hyperlocal sites are pulling in $200,000 a year. We also know of some college newspapers that are self-sustaining. There are successful companies in both our spaces, yet many of us struggle to grasp the fundamentals of the business.

That is why the team behind Technically Philly has proposed News Inkubator, a shared office spaces and business services hub for hyperlocal news sites in Philadelphia. Picture a shared office space and a shared sales staff that help hyperlocals generate revenue ideas together, while still maintaining their editorial and business independence.

News Inkubator is also about bridging the entrepreneurial and media communities in Philadelphia to help foster a working relationship were each side learns from the other. All of these concepts can translate to benefit your college publication. In fact, here are three of our ideas that I hope you steal:

Use the existing bureaucracy

Universities have already separated students by interest. The computer science students often belong to a different school than the business students that belong to a different school than the journalism students. Why not bring all three of these sides together?

Each can have a project for the semester and learn from the other students. To survive in 2010, journalism grads are going to need to know how businesses work. Business grads are going to have to understand new media and computer science students need client work to showcase when they graduate.

If time becomes an issue, lobby to create a new class. Department heads love to show each other how innovative they are, so ask them to help.

The space is cheap

Many college newspapers rent (or are given) office space from the university negating one of the biggest hurdles in legitimizing an online hyperlocal entity. Use this to your advantage. Host speakers that are business leaders from local companies. You could even spring for some pizza and host a hackathon or barcamp open to all majors and career paths to build products for the paper.

Spoke, meet hub

Many college have student-run blogs or organization websites. Aggregate and create content partnerships with everyone who also covers what you cover. There is no need for overlap in your college’s media market.

As the college newspaper, you have an established editorial process and revenue streams, so offer to be the hub for your local sites and maybe even work out a revenue sharing plan. It will be good training for covering any niche after you graduate and can free up your paper’s already limited resources to pursue more in-depth journalism and even work on new revenue models together.

The three founders of Technically Philly met at the Temple News, and we use the skills we learned there everyday. Use your time at a college newspaper to not only flex your reporting muscles but also see if you can start a side project that makes a little more money for the paper. Your wallet will thank you when you graduate.

Be sure to give our application a read and offer any criticism. The harsher, the better.

Contact Sean Blanda at sean@technicallyphilly.com or follow him on Twitter, @seanblanda.

Temple News

The Temple News Relaunched in Spring2008

Web Editor’s Name: Dave Isaac
How Often Do You Publish (Online): Daily
How Often Do You Publish (Print): Weekly
What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? We have unique section pages
Size of Staff: 24
Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: International
What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? Comments, e-mails
What’s the best way to reach your community? E-mail edition
Contact info of Web Editor: isaac@temple.edu
Average Number of Weekly Hits: 19,355
Hosting Company: MediaTemple
What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Further implement our 2-d barcode initiative.

The Pleiad

The Pleiad Online

Web Editor’s Name: Holly Setter
How Often Do You Publish (Online): Weekly
How Often Do You Publish (Print): Weekly
What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? A rotating “Caught In Quotes” feature in the sidebar–it lists both humorous and serious quotes from students, faculty and staff that the paper staff overheard on campus.
What is your workflow? Does it involve WordPress? Workflow is based in e-mail currently; next year it will move to WordPress.
Size of Staff: Approximately 12 students
Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: Circulation roughly 2000
What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? Thus far, the site has gotten a few pingbacks and poll activity. Readers are more likely to respond directly to an editor or writer than on the site itself.
What’s the best way to reach your community? Facebook and Twitter.
Contact info of Web Editor: pleiad@albion.edu
Average Number of Weekly Hits: N/A
Hosting Company: Albion College
Server Size: N/A
What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Increase the emphasis on multimedia reporting.

LCTV13

Web Editor’s Name: Daniel Randolph
How Often Do You Publish (Online): Every Wednesday

How Often Do You Publish (Print): We are a student broadcast news channel and we have a news show “From the Boulevard” that airs every other Wednesday and on opposite Wednesdays our sports show “SportsZONE” airs.
What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? We don’t have one feature we think is the best. We try to make our whole site interesting by giving our viewers lots of options, i.e: blogs, comments, twitter, Facebook, text message updates, rss, email alerts, polls, videos, and special features.
What is your workflow? Does it involve WordPress? Our reporters focus on doing their video stories and once those are complete we have them repackage them for the web with links and extra content and then upload them with a still frame from the video along with the video, which we host on YouTube. We use WordPress for all of this and rely on custom fields for our front page. That makes for a little extra work, but the results are worth it. At this time reporters do not post their own stories, they email them to me to be edited and posted. Also, if there is a breaking news we will go straight to the web without video if needed.
Size of Staff: 25 … with two web people
Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: Our potential audience consists of our college and the Tri-States area of Iowa/Wisconsin/Illinois. Our student audience is 1,700 and our potential Tri-States audience is 100,000 people. Our coverage is 60/40 with more stories focusing on the Tri-States area
What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? Our site is only a year old and we are still trying to figure this part out. Right now our audience is pretty unresponsive unless it is a controversial story. Polls seem to be the one place our audience is willing to participate at this time. We are seeing an increased amount of traffic link our stories on Facebook. We do not do any sort of advertising on our site or channel. Our biggest problem has been promoting our work to our audience because our shows air only once a week and we do not have a budget to promote our work. We have relied completely on word of mouth to bring traffic to our site. Word of mouth seems to be working well at the moment but we are working on how to get our news to more people and at a quicker pace.
What’s the best way to reach your community? Our two biggest ways our site has reached our community is through email subscriptions and Facebook. We have a Twitter page but the clicks are not nearly as high as the other two. We have an extremely large audience of alumni that subscribe by email and we have just recently really started promoting our Facebook page to students. We have had one for a year but earlier this month we had the goal of driving traffic through our page and the day we did this our audience numbers for that day tripled above our average and since then Facebook has really helped students see our work.
Contact info of Web Editor: daniel.randolph@loras.edu
Average Number of Weekly Hits: 23,800
Hosting Company: Blue Host – good host (cheap and really fast with lots of options)
Server Size: 1.5 Terabytes
What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Over the next we would like to redefine our web presence. Right now we have all the tools needed to make a good site, now we just need our audience to catch up to our features. We plan on being more community oriented by asking for audience input for story ideas and interaction through blogs, facebook, twitter, and other web applications. We want to bring more news to our site by updating more than once a week. Also for the more technical aspects, I want to modify our site to make it more customizable to allow for different page layouts for breaking news and large events that occur. I believe that WordPress is the best CMS application for a college who does not have students who can code on staff. The pages function on WP allows for someone with little to no coding knowledge to put together a customized page very quickly if pre-made templates are already constructed i.e. a crime map page, a photo feature page, or even a mash up page if a story is on going and requires a lot of information. The overall goal is to make a functional WP site where reporters and producers can upload creative, customized content with little working knowledge of any coding language and I believe WP is the best CMS to accomplish this goal.

Whitman College Pioneer

Web Editor’s Name: Andrew Spittle
How Often Do You Publish (Online): The vast majority is published once a week on Thursday.
How Often Do You Publish (Print): Once a week (Thursday).
What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? The Publish2 integration.
Size of Staff: About 80 students
Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: The campus community as well as about 19,000 monthly online visitors.
What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? There are a decent number of comments left and we are working on getting forums going for more prolonged discussion of certain topics.
What’s the best way to reach your community? Facebook by far (see the post that I wrote for the CoPress blog about testing Twitter on our campus).
Contact info of Web Editor: spittlaj@whitman.edu or on Twitter @andrewspittle
Average Number of Weekly Hits: ~5,000 resulting in ~9,000 pageviews
Hosting Company: Fused Network
Server Size: 3GB
What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? I’m hoping to redesign the category landing pages this summer as well as the homepage. The goal will be to try and put a greater emphasis on the individual story pages so that more of our visitors make it to those (currently about 60% of visits are to the homepage).

Other WordPress Websites:

Miami Hurricane – Student Newspaper at University of Miami
The Whit – Student Newspaper at Rowan University
Sagebrush – Student Newspaper at University of Nevada
New York City News Project – Multi-media, Web-based outlet run by the students at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
Rebel Yell – Student Newspaper at University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Mustang Daily – Newspaper of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo
Gargoyle – Student Newspaper at Flagler College
Spectator - Independent Student Newspaper of Valdosta State University
The Campus Lantern – Student newspaper at Eastern CT State University
NYU Local - Online-only publication at NYU
The Snapper – Weekly Newspaper of Millersville University
The Collegian – The Collegian is the student-run newspaper that serves the Fresno State Community.

Most of the country’s collegiate publications use the service — more than 550, according to the MTV-owned company. It offers a content management system, prefab design templates and hosting, all free of charge. The other big selling point: It’s simplistic enough that no technical expertise is required.

It’s a good set-it-and-forget-it product. However, it’s not without its costs.

How do we dislike CP? Let me count the ways…
Large banners from national advertisers dominate the top and side of every page. Revenue sharing with papers for this ranges from nil to minuscule, if you’re lucky. Local ads can be added too, but the prime real estate belongs to CP.

Customization is a challenge, to put it mildly. That’s why CP sites look very similar in style and structure. Unfortunately, the standard isn’t a very good one — cluttered, outdated, clunky, often slow and hardly user-friendly.

If your publication is lucky enough to have a geek on staff, he or she will be limited in attempts to redesign, add new media or create outside-the-box features. Such efforts are either rendered impossible or made  tedious. Though College Publisher is attempting to address this problem with a new version of its CMS, they’ve been behind the curve for years now.

It hasn’t been an open, adaptable system that allows students to truly innovate. You can’t open up the hood and fiddle around, or even replace the tires, because you don’t own the car. CP just lets you borrow it, in exchange for taking the profits from those gargantuan ads. That’s their business model, not necessarily a bad one for all customers, but inherently limiting.

So online college media lags behind, with sites staid and shallow, standing in stark contrast to the ever-evolving, ever more dynamic Web at large.

The WordPress alternative
These complaints have been oft-repeated. Yet the few other options that do exist are daunting to most editors, those poor souls already short on time, money, and internet know-how. So they make do with CP for now.

However, several adventurous papers have recently turned to WordPress as an alternative. The popular open-source blogging software runs millions of blogs, including this one. It is endlessly customizable through a large number of themes and plugins offered by third parties.

Though not initially designed to be a full-fledged CMS, WordPress can be used as one with a little hacking. Both the Temple News and Miami Hurricane bought professional “premium” themes to do much of that work for them. You can read a report from Temple’s Sean Blanda on the process and get greater technical detail from Miami’s Brian Schlansky.

We’ll have more info on using WordPress for a college newspaper CMS in the days ahead.

What now?
WordPress is not alone. In the last few years, open-source CMSs have taken great leaps, making more power attainable and affordable to more people. Other quality tools we’re looking at include ExpressionEngine, Drupal and Django, the last of which is a Python-based framework more than a CMS.

Yet, to varying extents, all require coders and Web designers to build a site, including WordPress. That’s something few college publications have, or at least have much of. CoPress is trying to bridge that gap.

But how? What do you think? What are your priorities for your Web site? What must a viable College Publisher alternative offer? Take our brief first survey or let us know in the comments.