CoPress

News wikis haven’t make it big yet but, in my opinion, their day is soon.

In a conversation I was having with Joey Baker the other day, we were talking about micropayments, monetization, and how news differs from music, movies, and other forums of content. His argument is that news is “read once, and then file away” while the other forms have “repeat use” value which makes them easier to charge for. This got me thinking. Journalism shouldn’t just be about broadcasting the most recent event of the day, but also providing accurate, vetted, and independent information to educate the community. In fact, news websites are pretty bad with this other side of journalism. If I want to understand the context for an issue’s current situation beyond what’s presented in the article, I’ve got to use an atrocious site search tool to find previous articles on the issue. There has to be a better way to get me to the information I need to know.

Enter: the wiki. Read more →

Although the Whitman Pioneer has had a web presence since 2007 when it launched a self-hosted version of WordPress by Daniel Bachhuber and Andrew Witherspoon, we wanted to launch this semester with a redesign from the ground up. The result of this process launched last week with our first print issue of the semester.

The Design Process

When thinking about how to redesign the site, we wanted to create something that could be used as the homepage for Whitman students. Essentially, we wanted a site that would incorporate information about a lot more of what happens on campus. By getting a fresh WordPress design we were able to do this by creating a place for photo galleries, a campus calendar, student forums, featured videos, and the potential for student and/or athlete blogs. Some of these features went live with the launch of the site, and others will be rolled out in the coming months.

One of the other main goals with this redesign was creating a site that encouraged student, community, and general participation. To this end we changed how the website displays comments as well as creating the potential for the occasional online forum. In the past comments were just listed one after the other in the sidebar of the article and there was no real way to promote a discussion. Now comments appear at the bottom of the article and people are able to reply to each other. With this, as well as maybe adding forums in the future, we’re hoping that the site serves as a place for students to read about and discuss events and issues on campus. Whitman is a campus that is full of too much email and occasionally there are some pretty heated debates that occur on list servs. With this new site part of what we’re hoping to do is give the campus a more central place to come together to calmly discuss these issues as they come up. Read more →

Bloggers are the anti-journalist.

Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among “true” journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of… blogging: consistently producing good content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.

The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.

Now, some strategies for getting readers engaged. Read more →