CoPress

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.

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.

Kristin Millis (University of Washington) and Jason Manning (Arizona State) shared ways to market your newspaper both online and offline.

A few things they’re doing to market themselves and make money:

• Build a full multimedia company and sell campaigns. Example: University of Washington charges to do “chalk on the ground” campaigns for $30/chalk
• UW Gave away 10k condoms when releasing their sex edition a week before Valentine’s Day
• Live tweeting, live video updates from sports events
• House ads in print product to promote their social media products
• Univ. of Washington charges thousands to do viral marketing videos (see example below)

Social media

Undoubtedly, social media is one of the strongest and easiest forms of marketing a college newsorg can do. A few tips:

• Don’t need official “Twitter staff,” but when posting to social media it’s important to be organized about it in breaking news situations
• Be personal about it. For example, if your newsroom holds a “pie week,” tweet, “What’s your favorite pie?” to loop your readers into newsroom happenings
• Do Facebook advertisements. They can be as cheap as $25 and give you the opportunity to bring more people in (plus, you can target it specifically at people from your university)
• Be on their minds all day, no shotgun effect
• Congratulate staff members who have won awards
• Don’t just put it on your newsorg newsfeed, but double post to your own newsfeed
• Ethical standards that apply to jour apply to social media realm

Andy Dehnart from Reality Blurred demoed Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, and Google Voice among other things at the ACP/CMA 2009 conference. He started with a recap of how Facebook fan pages can benefit your news organization. Among other things the insights that Facebook offers could prove useful to figuring out how effective campaigns are.

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.

That’s right: we’re rebranding our flagship podcast, This Week in CoPress. Henceforth known as College Media Lab, the new feature will broaden our show’s focus and modify its schedule. (We’ve got a new bump, too!) The synopsis of this week’s episode is as follows:

The rise of Twitter has been the talk of the tech and media world, and today’s show is about utilizing social media platforms to break news. Hosts Greg Linch and Vanessa Bezic are joined by Craig Kanalley, founder of Breaking Tweets and an adjunct professor at DePaul University, and by Kim Sommers, editor-in-chief of the Whitman Pioneer. Kim has used Twitter to break campus stories — including a bomb threat earlier this year. Check out what they have to say about tweeting breaking news and harnessing the power of Twitter.

Give it a listen and let us know what you think. Be sure to chime in if you have ideas for a future episode, too!

 

 Standard Podcast [36:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (170)

Recommended links for the long weekend:

• Make sure your WordPress site is up to date with 2.8.4, the most recent version. Yesterday afternoon, Lorelle, a significant voice in the WordPress community, reported that older versions were under attack. There are two reported signatures of a hacked blog: funky permalinks including the keywords “eval” or “base64_decode,” or an extra administrator in your database that doesn’t show up in the WordPress admin. The exploit that the hacker is using has been patched for a while, and should only affect those who haven’t updated their site recently. Making sure your WordPress site is up to date is one of the best ways of keeping it secure.
• On a related WordPress note, johnl1479 says: FYI: #PodPress 8.8.1 breaks thumbnail capability of #Wordpress MU 2.8.4a.
• An alumni assesses the recently relaunched Eagle at American University and identifies some of the value it’s offering her. Good ideas that you should pay attention to.
• Andrew Robinson found success adding the Facebook Connect plugin to the WKU Herald website. Facebook apparently only allows one connection at a time, and having the Fan Box Widget on the site as well caused issues.
• Through Twitter, I found out about @WiredResearch, a Twitter account that teases the facts of upcoming articles. It would be way cool to see this on a super-local level.
• VentureBeat has an inside scoop on the editorial workflow of The New York Times blogs. Posts that are ready to go are marked “Pending Review”, and notifications are still by email.
• Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – The web is actually reviving literacy and pushing it in “bold new directions.”

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

The big news this week was BarCamp Philly on April 25, which a majority of CoPress attended. The day was a great success – filled with insightful conversations and great networking. Where else will find new media thinkers all in the same room trying to solve the problems in the industry? If you missed out on all the fun, check out the media from the day’s events.

Around the Network

This past week Greg Linch started an interesting conversation on the Forum by asking, “Do you plan to redesign or in any other way redo your college news site this summer? If so, please explain.”
Read more →

This week, eyes have been on Twitter, as the race to 1,000,000 followers reached fever pitch with Ashton Kutcher reaching 1,000,000 followers on Twitter around 2:30 a.m. ET. On Wednesday, CNN acquired CNNbrk twitter account to further its lead over Ashton Kutcher to further the race between the media and man.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was light this week, with Joey Baker starting a discussion for Web Development ideas, saying:

This is intended to be a place for all you developers and designers to share crazy ideas that you have about newsorg website design. Anything that comes to you, treat this as your open notebook. Chances are good that you’ll find someone around who just might like your idea and try to implement it.

Also on the form, wvanwazer asked asked for advice on advertising rates.

How much does everyone charge for advertising rates? Right now, we (the Tulane Hullabaloo) charge 5 dollars per 1000 impressions. Is this high? Low? We’re in the process of setting our advertising rate for the next year, and I have no idea what a good price is.

On the wiki, Daniel and Miles started the Recruiting Technical Staff page, while Joey updated the Switching from College Publisher page.

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):

• Why top-down syndication is broken – Jackie Hai looks into how the fact that we are all now content producers has changed the top-down syndication model to one which is distributed and bottom-up.
• New York Times Landing Pages: All the Irrelevance That Fits the Pixels – Fascinating analysis by Jonathan Mendez on how the NYTimes’ landing pages present content. Do newspapers just take what is in the print edition and put it online?
• Recruitment -  Max Cutler analyzes solutions to recruiting technical staff for college newspapers.
• MediaShift . College Media Miss Opportunities Covering the Economic Crisis | PBS – A missed opportunity indeed. A look at how college media should be covering the economic crisis.

We have a new core team member: Emily Kostic!

Emily, whose title will be editorial associate, will work on the CoPress blog and This Week in CoPress podcast.

One of her ideas is to the make the podcast more participatory, possibly by using BlogTalkRadio, recording live shows and allowing listeners to “call in” with questions and comments. This idea goes along nicely with Daniel’s goal of making the podcasts more like a discussion than an interview.

Some background on Emily:

Emily is a junior studying journalism at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. She currently serves as the managing editor and Web editor for The Whit. In her role, Emily led the staff in incorporating more multimedia tools after The Whit transitioned to WordPress as CoPress’s first client. Outside of journalism, Emily enjoys traveling and listening to music.

From her experience at The Whit to her awesome blog, we’ve known for awhile that Emily would make a great addition to the team and we’re thrilled to have her on board.

And, just to leave a teaser, we’re looking to add another new team member in the next couple months. Stay tuned…

E-mail Emily at emily [at] copress [dot] org or follow her on Twitter: @emilykostic.

Last week, the Whitman Pioneer broke out of its weekly publication mold a bit to cover a story about the administration’s decision to cut varsity sports funding to the Alpine and Nordic ski teams. The same day the announcement was made we had an article written by one of the Editors-in-Chief posted, and started spreading the word around campus for students to visit the site and weigh in. As I posted earlier here at CoPress, one of the major goals we wanted to accomplish with our new site was to use it as a forum for student discussion about heated topics; we saw this as a great chance to test it out.

Breaking the News

Once the story was posted and the official announcement by the President’s Office was made we started to spread the word through a variety of means: posting on Twitter, sending emails to the student list-serve, and good old word of mouth. Our goal was to get students and community members onto the site to read about the decision and comment on it. The results showed some interesting information concerning the roles these different modes of communication played.

First, Whitman is far from a “Twitter-heavy” campus. I know of a few dozen students and staff who use it, and most of those don’t post too frequently. Thus, I was definitely interested in what type of traffic our posts on Twitter would drive to the site. The results aren’t so encouraging though. Out of over 1,200 visitors over a 3-day period only 9 (less than 1%) came from Twitter. Furthermore, these visitors only spent an average of 2 seconds on the site. Not very heartening to someone trying to use Twitter to increase traffic to our site.

While the community may not be awake to the power of Twitter, Whitman is definitely fond of email list-servs. Over the course of a couple days we posted multiple announcements to the general student list-serve about the article. This drove over 100 visitors (more than 10% of our traffic). Also, these visitors were much more likely to spend time reading the article as most spent over 2 minutes on the page.
Read more →

Words of warning. The following post is hotly contested internally among us CoPress folk. Very likely this is controversial to the greater community as well. But at the risk of having people with pitchforks or angry twitterers show up at my door, I’ll go ahead and share my opinion.

I’d like to propose a simple rule:

Tags should never contain a proper noun.

This is a maxim is intended to avoid frustration from both users and content creators by implementing tags in a useful way.

Tags are the darling child of the social networking, web 2.0 community. The concept is simple really: words or short phrases that, as metadata, can be attached to anything on the web to enable easier searching, better SEO, and greater user ease of use. But, when misused they become overwhelming, hard to use and irrelevant.

Here’s the logic behind the rule to never put a proper noun in a tag: the term you’re entering is likely already in the article and therefore searchable. If it’s already there, then putting it into the tags is not only a repeated, wasted effort, but it is going to confuse the reader by culttering up the tag cloud.

• Wasted effort. If you’ve already put the proper noun in the article than the information is already there. Likewise for photos, the information should already be in the caption. Why would you spend the extra time trying to get the information in two places?
• You’re giving the reader too much info to sort through. A ton of information is good for computers, but if you want tags to be user-friendly (often the argument for putting proper nouns into the tag cloud), you need to limit what you choose to use.
• The whole post is already searchable. If you’ve got the person’s name or the place in the article, caption, description, whatever it is you’re writing, the data is searchable. Tags are there to add additional information that you couldn’t writing directly into the post.
• There’s no way you’re going to be able to remember every single proper noun that could possibly be affected. Let the semantic web (when it finally comes about) take care of that for you.

What should be tagged

Tags are meant to be used for conceptual information that you would never write in the post, but you’d like to attach to your data. Read more →