CoPress

Courier, my open source e-mail newsletter plugin for WordPress, is now an official product of CoPress. Although this change won’t mean much to the everyday user, for CoPress clients, it means guaranteed support for any technical issues related to the plugin.

The everyday user will notice improvements to the latest version of the plugin. A few weeks ago I pushed out Courier 0.3, and in the intervening few weeks have pushed out minor updates to add a few new functionalities and fix a few typos and errors.

Courier 0.3 includes major improvements to both stability and functionality. The biggest and most important improvement is queuing support. Instead of sending all e-mails at once when you click the send, the plugin instead queues the e-mails and sends them at a rate you determine. Not only does this protect you in the case the script hangs up when you’re sending e-mails (such as when you have thousands of subscribers), but it also makes sure the e-mail script doesn’t take down the entire server.

This new feature uses WP Cron to minimize setup time. You can schedule a test e-mail in the Courier dashboard to make sure WP Cron works. If it doesn’t you have a few options: you can disable queuing in the dashboard, which I don’t recommend if you have a number of subscribers, or you can set up Crontab to visit wp-cron.php every minute. I would recommend finding the root cause of why WP Cron doesn’t fire, though — otherwise you might have bigger problems than Courier not working correctly.

Courier 0.3 integrates with WordPress users, allowing you to manage subscriptions within the WordPress profile. It still supports users outside of WordPress, and I have no plans to phase out that support.

Courier 0.3.5 includes a sidebar widget, so you can now add the registration form to your sidebar.

I should note that if you upgrade Courier outside of WordPress (i.e. through FTP) you will need to deactivate and reactivate Courier before many of the new features will takeeffect.

If you’re testing Courier and run into any problems, please feel free to e-mail me (will@copress.org), and I will be glad to help. I am hoping to have a major (1.0) release out within two weeks, and if you encounter any errors or anomalies it’s important they be fixed before then.

Finally, Courier now has a new website, wpcourier.com, where you can stay attuned to all Courier news and updates. The site will include best practices for create e-mail editions and curating users. You can also follow Courier’s updates on Twitter @wpcourier.

Last Thursday a few of us gathered to talk about the development projects that will be seeing heavy work over the winter break. Max Cutler, Andrew Dunn, Will, Daniel, and Lauren joined me for a half hour conversation covering the various projects that we are all working on. The full audio is attached at the bottom of the post and here are some highlights of what we talked about.

Nando

First up Max gave us an update on where development on Nando stands. As Lauren mentioned last week, Nando is the administrative side of the Courant News CMS. Max and Rob Baskin will be developing the templates for the interface and I’ll be working with them on designing the user interface and experience. The project is in the early stages right now but wireframes for the interface will be released soon so stay tuned to the Google Group for updates.

Edit Flow

Daniel also recapped what will be happening with Edit Flow over break. Work will be ramping up on version 0.3 of the plugin which will include more granular control over email notifications and user groups. Other features include some bug fixes as well as visualizing posts through a calendar-like interface.

Courier

Will Davis also filled us in on some of the work that will be done on Courier, his plugin for better email notifications. Courier already has support for custom templates and will be gaining further subscription options. The plugin update should be released before the end of break so stay tuned for updates.

Tar Heel iPhone app

Finally, Andrew Dunn talked a bit about The Daily Tar Heel’s iPhone app that he announced on Thursday. The app includes their Housing Guide as well as all the news, classifieds, and radio that you’d expect. It also has a feature that Andrew talked about on the call: a drink specials mini-app.

To hear more about all of the above projects listen to the full audio below.

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Many newspapers are now transitioning to a Web-first workflow; among other things, this means that weekly papers can break stories online long before they’re printed in the newspaper. At The Maine Campus, we’ve faced problems deciding how to handle new developments in such stories — whether older versions of the story get a write-through or we create a new post for the development, and whether we should write a separate version of the story for our print edition.

An example of a situation when The Maine Campus had to adapt to appeal to both Web and print audiences.

One factor is whether you view your paper as a daily news organization with a print newspaper once or twice a week, or as a weekly newspaper with a Web-first workflow. At The Campus, we’re fairly new to Web-first reporting, so we’ve made a decision to continue to tailor our print edition to our print readers. Sometimes this means taking the latest story we’ve posted to the Web and adding additional context grafs from earlier stories so readers who haven’t been following the story online aren’t lost. As we get more used to writing for the Web first, I expect we’ll get used to treating every day like a new issue of the paper, even if we don’t have a print edition coming out that day, and we’ll expect readers to check our Web site every day for new stories and updates.

Other papers have already embraced the latter. The Washington Square News, the student newspaper at New York University, bills itself as a daily even though it only publishes four days a week in print. On Fridays it publishes online and expects readers to stay tuned to the Web site one day a week, at least.

The WSN doesn’t publish any of Friday’s stories in Monday’s paper unless new information breaks, making it one of the most Web-reliant college papers out there. Only once in the year or so since WSN moved to Web-only on Friday has the paper put out a special issue — when members of a radical student group called Take Back NYU barricaded themselves inside one of the student centers for more than 24 hours.

Here are a few basic things to consider when deciding how to handle articles that are published on the Web long before print:

1. If there is any change in the news — any sort of breaking detail — it should probably get its own post. Not only will Google News not re-index the article after it’s been initially published but this also enables readers to easily identify when there have been major developments.
2. Be sure you know your audience. Use Google Analytics to find out who’s visiting your site, when and what they read.
3. If you go Web-first, be sure to stress to both your Web and print readers that you post articles online every day. Truly Web-first newspapers should have a steady stream of readers on their Web sites, not a giant spike of traffic the day the newspaper comes out. Convince your readers the Web site is more than just a carbon copy of your paper edition.

If you can build up your online readership by building up expectations of what will be offered, as WSN has done by cutting out a day of the print edition, papers can effectively use their Web sites as extensions of their print editions. Smaller papers will have to build a bridge between their print and online audience before readers will come to expect multiple updates online.

The most important thing is to make sure you don’t leave your readers confused. A final idea is to refer to your Web site in print with something like, “For more information on such and such, visit mainecampus.com.”

In terms of scale and scope, Election Day is consistently one of the biggest stories of the year. Generally presidential election years receive the most attention, and most newspapers depend on wire services to provide the results.

This year, Maine’s ballot contained a referendum to overturn a law allowing same-sex marriage. The turnout was immense (60 percent, more than double the usual turnout in an off year) and we wanted to make sure we had our own, unique coverage. The Maine Campus had been following the run-up to the election closely, and we were committed to providing up-to-the-moment coverage. We were able to avoid wire reports using easily acquired tools larger news orgs haven’t adopted yet.

We used a plugin for WordPress called Live Blogging to quickly and easily add updates to a single page. The plugin allowed two reporters to collaborate at different locations without worrying about overwriting posts and gave readers a single page to come back to to receive updates. It also tweeted (and re-tweeted) our updates so our Twitter readers could follow along.

Our updates went out faster and more frequently than larger news organizations updated their Web sites. One news organization even used our reporting to decide whether or not to call the close election.

When WordPress really showed its true colors, though, was when one of the organizations decided to declare victory. Within minutes we had written and posted a brief to the Web site. It was only a matter of seconds to reconfigure the front page and send out a breaking news e-mail. Other proprietary content management systems would not have allowed us to report with the ease and speed at which we did.

Larger news organizations have advantages of money and larger staffs, but The Maine Campus had an advantage that allowed us to scoop them on one of the biggest stories of the year: WordPress.

Greg, Vanessa and Joey talk with Sara Gregory, Managing Editor for Online at the Daily Tar Heel, who helped to launch a new site on Drupal on Saturday and Will Davis, Editor in Chief at The Maine Campus, who brings light to their switch at the beginning of the summer from College Publisher to WordPress MU.

The Daily Tar Heel switched to Drupal, Sara Gregory says, because is more compatible with paper’s existing structure, size and content. She’s making online publication simpler by eliminating copy editors and desk editors from the process. Now only one desk level and one management editor read each online story before publication. Thanks to the redesign, readers can now subscribe to two different newsletters (regular and breaking news) and choose from numerous RSS feed options. The paper’s staff also added a new Community Manager position that is responsible for both of the paper’s regular and breaking news Twitter accounts as well as its Facebook account. Gregory’s upcoming projects include incorporating major linking within stories.

Will Davis made the transition to WordPress MU because he wanted The Maine Campus to have a variety of plug-ins and the potential to build a blog community. He set up custom-user permissions so writers post drafts to the Web site as well as a plug-in that emails staff when a draft is posted, cutting down the workflow to just two steps. The site also has a RSS feed for the entire site and newsletter for subscribers. Davis is in the works of launching “Campus Currents,” a user-generated wiki-based community site, and a user-generated restaurant guide. He hopes to integrate more multimedia production and interactivity online in the near future.

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There are oh so many wondrous things for you to click on this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism? – Crowdfunding may or may not be the future of journalism, but crowdlinking is one way of determining which stories are hot. Everyone who’s anyone linked to this story on Twitter. The story covers some of the successes and challenges of projects such as Spot.us and Chi-town Daily News. It will be interesting to see who in the college market follows suit.
• DjangoCon is coming to town. My town, at least. DjangoCon will be in Portland this September 8th through 12th. The first three days will be conference days, and the last two will be code sprint days. If you can make it to Portland, student tickets are only $135.00 for all five days. We might even be able to put together a small, college-media specific component.
• Announcing the Publish2 WordPress plugin: Do more with your links – Full disclosure: this was my baby that we finally released officially into the wild. With a feature called Link Assist, It makes it much simpler to access your Publish2 links while writing a story. The plugin also makes it simple to add your links to your sidebar or create a “What We’re Reading” page for your readers. /shameless self-promotion
• How Useful (and Usable) is Your Site? – A simple set of exercises to tell whether your newspaper website is actually worth using or not. See if yours passes the test; if not, you probably have work to do.

On the note of WordPress, you should upgrade your Google Analyticator plugin. Among a new set of features released with version 5.0, the plugin now offers one-click authentication with Google and makes it super easy to access your analytics on the WordPress dashboard.

This morning, I started a thread on commenting policy best practices based on a question we received. The success stories I’ve heard in the past year have been coming from the Daily Gazette at Swarthmore and NYU Local. Both have actively engaged communities. The Daily Gazette keeps things civil by recording the location of the commenter (whether they’re on campus or off), encouraging them to sign up for an account, and allowing fellow commenters to vote on the quality of comments. NYU Local requires all commenters to use both first and last names. Depending on the amount of participation on the thread, I might roll the results into a blog post.

On the wiki, The College Voice has started maintaining a list of their current projects which include “designing a new icon and masthead to go along with its new website, all launching in September 2009 as part of its online development project” and also “developing a pdf archive of its issues, from the 1990s, and hopefully scanning its editions from its premiere in 1977.” For anyone else interested, if you include this section on your organization’s profile then it’s an easy way for us to keep up to date on what you’re working on.

At The Maine Campus, Will Davis is finishing up a classifieds system he built in PHP from scratch. One advantage? If you want to add a feature, you just build it. There’s a new feature on Will’s project every time I look at it (most recently, an RSS feed of all items posted). I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it this fall.

Yes, we missed last week. Here are the top links for the last two weeks that you should check out over the holiday weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Two Knight News Challenge projects have been open-sourced: EveryBlock and ReportingOn. With the right developers and the right ideas, both of these code bases could be the foundation for something really cool at a student newspaper. Andrew Dunn is already thinking about a “Ask the Reporter”-style website.
• Gazette Communications is looking for an Online News Editor with a keen eye for innovation. My prediction: they are going to have a number of applications from highly-qualified recent graduates. This is one of those companies you’d want to start a 21st century career with.
• We’ve all heard a number of theses on why industries fail but most put fault with the leadership. Michael Nielsen’s essay on scientific publishing posits another hypothesis: the leading companies are too good at what they do in their industry, are highly geared towards being too good, and are nearly impossible to reorient when the industry evolves or no longer matters.
• Mark Briggs covers all of the metrics you might want to consider as benchmarks for your newsroom. Watch his blog for a series of posts from his upcoming textbook, to be published this fall.

I’m considering changing the format of this weekly post to be a more informal synthesis of the things that have happened in the past week. If you have an opinion on the matter, let me know.

Around the network, Sean Sullivan is looking for opinions on the best wiki for putting together a history of a school budget crisis (I assume he’s looking for both the best software and approach). If the project is big enough to merit the investment, I’d say MediaWiki would be the tool of choice. It’s themeable and has a plugin architecture that lets you extend it. Will Davis and I are going to be playing with the Semantic MediaWiki extension so that you can indicate some information as structured data and do cool things with the aggregate of it (related: check out the information Will added to the profile of The Maine Campus; this is going to be really cool when we have this type of information on a number of newspapers).

Rick Martinez had the first meeting for FIUSM developers earlier today. I’ll see if I can get him to give us some clues on what they’ll be working on this year. Developers plural must mean that FIUSM is going to be doing more than basic website maintenance this coming year.

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.

Another two great milestones over the weekend for student newspapers moving from College Publisher to WordPress. William P. Davis of The Maine Campus published an epic tome on how he migrated their CP 4 archives to WordPress MU:

The database they gave us contained almost 12,000 entries and was much to big to be handled by a program like Excel or even Access. I’m telling you right now: don’t even try. What you should do is dump the entire CSV into a MySQL database. I found the easiest way to do it was with Navicat MySQL. They offer a free trial. If you have problems, make sure you have enabled database access for your IP address. The easiest way to drop data in is to convert the CSV to an Excel file and then it will go right in using Navicat. Otherwise you might have serious problems with special characters and such. Also, I had a problem with a few spam entries (from where, I wonder?) that broke the database, but I took those out in Excel.

If manual steps aren’t your thing, then the CP Import plugin released by John Luetke could be the ticket. If you convert your College Publisher export files from CSV to XLS, it will import each entry into WordPress through the WordPress API. He reported that it took about 30 minutes to import about 50 MB of pure text for The Marquette Tribune‘s coming website. It will also reportedly add your related media as galleries attached to a post. CoPress is currently converting databases with a Python script but, if it turns out to work well, this might compel us to switch.