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.

Also, on the forum, we have our first discussion in the WordPress section:

• Users: How to deal with them year-to-year?

Wiki-tastic

Not much to report here, so let’s change that for next week! We want you to help add to our knowledge, which is also YOUR knowledge base.

A couple quick notes:

• After discovering mass quantities of spam, we’ve decided to require a basic registration to edit the wiki – just so we can make sure everything is kosher.
• We’ve added the Simple Press plugin (which we use for our forum) to the appropriate page.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• San Francisco Post-Chronicle wiki – @alexismadrigal and @sarahrose have started planning for the new SF Chronicle.
• How college media uses Twitter – this follows a list of student media in the Twittersphere compiled by CICM. No surprise with the results: 40 percent of student media on Twitter has “mostly or entirely RSS feeds.” On the plus side, at least they know about RSS.
• Bring a professor chat wrap-up – from our good friends at CollegeJourn. Congrats on a successful event!
• Interview with Marc Andreessen on Charlie Rose - Marc says that newspapers should shut down their presses today. The whole video is worth watching.

And a bonus link:

• CSS presentation for online journalism – from the Amherst Wire, which is offering a series of workshops for staff.

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.

We’re in beta

CoPress should have emphasized that our hosting plans our in a beta stage right now. We do have the server capacity to host three to five college news organizations and we will be capping our initial service there.

Yes, part of the reason we are doing that is because we don’t think that server can handle much more. Yes, it is possible that our server might not be able to handle even the relatively small number of organizations.

That’s why we’re in beta. That’s why we’re going with LiquidWeb, which will allow us to expand our server capacity almost instantly to deal with problems if/when they appear.

With all due respect to Dean’s dorm computer, LiquidWeb servers offer enough bandwidth to allow roughly 1.2 million visitors a month to a newspaper website. We think that’s plenty to start with.

CoPress isn’t trying to host the world, but we’re going to give a solid start to a few folks who sign up with us. If we become popular, we’ll be expanding our plans to more news organizations and thus increasing our server capacity.

We are equal opportunity CMS users

CoPress is currently focusing on WordPress-based solutions, but we’re not exclusive. As a matter of fact, we’re not in anyway convinced that WordPress is the long-term solution. It is, however, the best solution that we’ve seen that can be deployed now, and that is valuable for those who want a more dynamic site.

We’ve taken on a long-term project to evaluate many different CMS solutions available (there are several we’re excited about), but our priority to help organizations using College Publisher or other less-than-desireable platforms as soon as possible. WordPress offers a good, workable solution that does much of what we’d like.

If you’d rather host a Drupal, Django, Ruby on Rails, CakePHP or any other sort of site on our servers, please let us know! We’re not making any money off of our hosting — we just want to help you host your own site. It’s up to you what CMS you want to use.

CoPress = easy

Alex Klein, The Chronicle’s editor for new media, and the gentleman who forwarded Dean’s e-mail, said he’s a little disappointed with their progress developing a Drupal-based CMS.

Their project has a lot of support from the school, including a $100,000 budget (there’s politics associated with that number, but according to Alex it’s probably still there). Yet, despite the large budget and institutional support, and a working mockup of their new site, Duke’s nine-month project still hasn’t launched.

This is where CoPress can help!

We’re here to help you avoid these problems. We’ve designed our hosting to be about getting your paper online as quickly as possible on a platform that works.

We’re as transparent as Windows isn’t

(Pardon the geek humor in the subhead.) Here’s the point: we don’t want to make money. Our motivation is based on the idea that the more college media outlets that keep pace with the “new media” evolution, the better off we’ll all be.

Our hosting plan is just an extension of this philosophy. It seems to us CoPress folks that many schools have not been able to adapt to the Internet quickly due to a range of technical barriers.

We’re here to remove those hurdles.

Now.

Keep it coming

We really, really appreciate any and all feedback. The more honest the better. Keep it coming and we’ll keep using it.

What Dean’s criticisms pointed out to us it that

• We need to make it clear that we’re going to be taking just a few schools on our servers to start. We’re not trying to host the world (yet) but we think speed and reliability are critical, so rest assured, we’ll do our best to keep the servers at full speed.
• We think WordPres is a pretty darn good solution, but we know there are others out there. We’ll continue to look at them as they are developed. But if you want a site up quickly, WordPress is a great solution that is ready now.
• We need to step up our efforts to prove to college media that there is a solution to your technical difficulties. We’ve got it ready to go and are more than willing to help you out. Mostly because we’re hoping that you’ll jump far enough ahead to help us with the next big problem we all face.

CoPress is here to advocate for college media. One of the ways that we can do that is offering cheap, well supported, easy hosting. We’re still working on other avenues of support. Look to us to be the community that supports college media.

edited by Greg Linch

Update

Jan 1 14:36 PST — Link to The Chronicle test site removed per their request. Apparently, there was some miscommunication on that link being made public.

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!

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