CoPress

I’m a day late on this post, but there were some epic developments this week that I feel I have to share.

Around the Network

We kicked off a lively discussion in the forum on Monday asking, “What are your website goals for the rest of the semester?” A number of great ideas have surfaced from the community. Some highlights from Josh Halliday’s response:

• Work on cross-promotion of our student-run University radio station – perhaps an app on the homepage, or even its own separate page?
• Print more posters for on-campus advertising/recruiting
• Greater attention to our online community – MORE CONVERSATION, perhaps recruit a ‘community manager’ to maintain Facebook page, Twitter account etc.

There were dozens of other goals posted, so be sure to take a look. Read more →

The CoPress hosting plan is doomed to failure according to Dean Chen, lead developer at The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper.

In an e-mail forwarded to the CoPress Googe Group, Dean wrote: (emphasis added)

I don’t like the idea of sharing a server with other papers, the primary reason being that if another site receives record traffic the response time of our site will suffer as an result. The specifications for the server hosting all the virtual servers is actually lower than what I was planning for our site only. To put it in perspective, the desktop in my dorm is much better configured than that server.

Their hosting plan also seems to be geared towards wordpress, which i much less demanding resource wise than drupal.

After receiving so much good press lately, it sure is refreshing to have someone take us to task on a technical issue — something that we’re supposed to be teaching other people about.

Dean makes some good points and got the CoPress team talking on New Year’s Eve. We’ve realized that there are several things that our organization, which strives for transparency, hasn’t made entirely clear. Read more →

I’d like to share a little about what’s going on behind the doors of CoPress. It may not seem like it from the state of our Web site in the past month, but there is a lot going on. We’re excited to see this project continuing to move forward.

First off, and possibly most notably, CoPress has made it into round 2 of the Knight News Challenge. Several of us were up to the wee hours of the morning putting the finishing touches on our application. As it turns out, though, round 2 isn’t due until Dec. 5. We’re quite happy that this will give us more time to hone our selling points. If you’re so inclined, please read through our application and send feedback. We’d be more than happy to hear what you think.

On the editorial side, we’re finally going to start blogging about technological innovation in student news on a more regular basis. This week will also see the launch of our podcast, yet to be named but already including some pretty content. We’ve launched a wiki to be soon filled with wonderful tutorials, lists, and links to amazing videos on how to pimp your Wordpress install.

On the technology side, Miles is putting together a plan to offer hosting at affordable rates. To bring this to reality, we’ll need between four and six student news organizations to launch with us. Like to learn more? Please contact us.

If you’re on FriendFeed, you can join the discussion in our room. And from the RSS burp I received today, I can see our feed is now working again. Onward!

The past couple of weeks have been very exciting for CoPress. The conference calls, the audio from which is on our wiki, have been productive and we have made some notable steps forward.

One of the big steps is our survey for online editors across the country, which we hope to use to gauge where other college newspapers are with their sites, what kind of talent they have and what their ideal content management system would include.

In looking to further spread the word about CoPress, Kevin Koehler (@kev097) and I (@greglinch) spoke with several people about the group at the Online News Association conference in Washington, D.C. from Sept. 11-13. Out of the people we spoke with, we now have two more people in our core CoPress team:

Patrick Beeson (@patrickbeeson) and Major Highfield (@majorh)

Patrick and Major, who both have past experience working in online college media, have already provided important feedback and ideas to help move the group forward. We are very glad to have them on board.

Looking forward, Kevin will be working on podcasts for the group, so be sure to subscribe when those become available — a link will be posted everywhere fine CoPress material is sold.

Also, Daniel Bachhuber (@danielbachhuber) will be looking into Basecamp as a new means for us to manage tasks and other aspects of the project.

If you’re interested in learning more about CoPress and becoming involved, take a look though the links below.

Where to find more about CoPress:

• Google Group
• Wiki
• Conference calls
• Twitter
• Facebook group
• Del.icio.us
• Knight News Challenge Garage

People who have written about CoPress:

• Daniel Bachhuber – Introducing CoPress
• Adam Hemphill – CoPress’ new digs and CoPress logo draft
• Jared Silfies – CoPress: Changing college journalism
• Dan Reimold – “We’re trying to fix the ‘CMS Problem’”
• College Rag – CoPress project launches Web site and CoPress refines its mission