This past Thursday we ran the first of what will become a bi-weekly series. We’re calling it “Hacking the Student Newsroom.” Each session will lead you through a specific skill related to WordPress and college news that you can implement immediately. We’ll also do our best to record the workshops for those who can’t make the scheduled date. This week’s session was on setting up a sandbox in WordPress.

A sandbox provides a great test environment where you can experiment with both ideas and code without having to worry about breaking things. Your Web staff and any others that are interested in learning about WordPress can also use a sandbox to teach themselves some great new skills.

We covered everything from creating a subdomain for a sandbox to the proper way to configure your development version of WordPress. For those who want a test site to test edits that will be made to the production site, we went over how to transfer your theme and plugin files so that everything is as similar as possible.

On the wiki, we started a cheat sheet of how to set up your own sandbox. We’ll be adding to it, and you’re more than welcome to contribute as well.

Innovation can’t happen without a knowledgeable staff, but a knowledgeable staff isn’t born into existence — it takes training and education on everyone’s part.

That’s what this video is all about: invest in your staff and make sure they’re properly educated for the Web. Furthermore, make sure that their education is a continual process. You can do this by encouraging the knowledgeable people in your newsroom to lead lessons over pizza lunches or by teaming up staff to compete on specific projects.

Investing in your staff isn’t only a matter of training, but of hiring the right people. Newsrooms should have at least one or two Web developers who are proficient in HTML/CSS, PHP, and/or Python to continue developing your website. Be resourceful about it; look to your college’s computer science department for budding programmers who have the skills and the passion.

You’ll be surprised at how many good ideas will come when you all sit down together and brainstorm. Don’t underestimate the power of team planning with your staff. Figuring out how your newsroom is going to work and grow together is the foundation for innovation. If you need conversation starters, we have plenty of ideas to get you started and even more on the way.

Now that we’ve shared a few our our ideas, let’s see yours! With the above video in mind, put the information into action. In the upcoming weeks:

Week 1: Plan a brainstorming session. It can be in your newsroom or on a camping trip or at an editor’s house. Make it fun and have lots of food. Make a list of all of the best ideas for how you can better implement the Web in your newsroom. It’s important that everyone is involved in the process.

Specifically, figure out how to (1) Start a Web-first workflow for all articles to be posted in a 24-hour news cycle, and (2) Generate Web-specific content like videos, slideshows and Twitter/Facebook/SMS updates. You can start a staff blog this week and write your first post about the ideas you brainstormed.

Week 2: Help every editor and reporter set up Google alerts for their section or beat as well as create a Twitter account to reach out to readers. At every budget meeting, require an aspect of every article pitch be based on feedback from readers on the Web. Start to build a strong community with your audience online and make sure it’s a two-way dialogue.

If you already have a Twitter account, this can be the week when you set up a system for publishing your editorial calendar for public feedback.

Weeks 3-6: Get out of the habit of updating your site once a day after the newspaper is printing. This is a huge step, so you’ll have to start slow. During this week, try not to post your articles online at 10 p.m. See how early you can post everything (and subsequently tweet the headlines), then figure out how your staff needs to shift roles to have a continuous flow of news throughout the day. This could mean changing the hours of your copy editors, changing deadlines for reporters and training everyone how to use the CMS.

Week 6-9: Really take control of live and breaking coverage. This can be as simple as posting event recaps (e.g. sports games, debates, concerts) online within a few hours after they’re over, because that’s when people will be looking. During those same events, post pictures and tweets that your readers will be interested in, and make sure to keep an eye on feedback from your users too.

Do they have questions? “Is #46 on the bench?” “How many people are at the concert?” Answer those questions. For breaking news like fires, robberies or protests, post as much information as you can as soon as you can. If it’s incomplete, that’s OK — but be accurate. Post updates as you go. Be sure to tweet the information too.

Week 9-12: After your staff starts to get comfortable with the Web, take on a big project like creating a system for an open editorial calendar, a continually updated news wiki or an iPhone app for readers on the go. All of your projects will feed on the other skills you’ve acquired: covering breaking news, thinking Web-first and encouraging community involvement.

Last but not least, report back! Let your peers know how your experiment went and what lessons you learned.

We hear it over and over again – “Innovate, innovate, innovate!” But what does that really mean in the context of newspapers, and why is it necessary? Let’s start by stepping back to see where newspapers went wrong.

Like we’ve mentioned before, the newspaper industry is a lot like the railroad industry, which essentially stopped growing because it didn’t transform its mindset. Because they failed to see the train as a part of the transportation business, they lost their customers to highways and airlines.

Newspapers are falling into a similar trap, but college media can change course before it’s too late. We should be the ones experimenting and taking risks. The students should be leading the way.

To quote Jason Calacanis, “Innovation is all you have. Once you stop innovating you lose your talent and you lose the race. Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never. Never.”

What is innovation really, though? Innovation is experimenting and taking risks. Innovation is trying what’s radically new.

After you take a look at the video above, be the innovator in your newsroom. Play it at your next staff meeting, e-mail the link to them or even post it to their Facebook walls. We have an entire series of videos coming for you in the following weeks to help your entire newsroom understand how to step ahead.

>Why deep-information journalism?

The Internet is awash with information that is, too frequently, miles wide and only inches deep. News organizations add to the problem when they bombard readers with commodity news (only the “facts and updates,” says the AP’s 2008 study on news consumption, as opposed to depth and breadth).

Deep-information journalism is one way to balance out shallow coverage by providing context, background and analysis for topical issues. BBC’s Special Reports accomplishes this with a clean design that encourages exploration. News wikis are another promising development that would achieve a similar goal if implemented well.

Economic Stimulus 101: The project

At the Amherst Wire, we wanted to turn an analytical lens on the federal economic stimulus bill that passed last month and capture various aspects of the questions and debates surrounding it. We also hoped to frame the topic in a broader context including historical parallels and general economic theory distilled into simple terms.

To do so, we interviewed six professors (five in economics and one in entrepreneurship) from UMass Amherst and Mt. Holyoke College, edited the videos into short clips, and arranged them by subject in an online guide.

1. Preparation

We did extensive research and planning before setting up the interviews so that we would know the right questions to ask. This was particularly important when tackling a topic as complex as the U.S. economy — we had a lot of ground to cover, but at the same time, didn’t want to stray too far afield.

During the preparatory stages, we compiled a FAQ about the stimulus package from students blogging for a journalism class. This gave us an idea of what college students were wondering about the bill and shaped some general themes that ended up in the final project.

2. In-person interviews

To land interviews with professors, we simply scanned department contact lists and sent e-mails to faculty whose areas of expertise lined up with our topic. Out of maybe twenty professors contacted, six replied saying they were interested. We sent our questions in advance to give them time to prepare, and then conducted the interviews in their offices over the course of two weeks.

Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes and covered areas the professor was most familiar with. We didn’t follow a strict Q&A format or ask the questions in any particular order, but let the interview unfold more like a discussion. We would be reorganizing everything in the editing room later, anyway.

3. Video editing

This was the most time-consuming part of the entire project. After capturing about 3.5 hours of raw footage in Final Cut Pro, it took approximately three all-night sessions between three people to cut the interviews into short clips for the web. The average length of each clip was 1-2 minutes, with no clip longer than 5 minutes. We intentionally kept the clips short and to the point, catering to the attention span of most web users.

Once exported, the clips were uploaded to Vimeo along with some basic metadata (professor and subject in the title, pull quote in the description). We chose Vimeo for their high video playback quality and because they have one of the cleanest embedded players around.

Around the same time we were cranking out video clips, I got started with designing the page layout.

4. Layout and design

I always begin my web design process with some sketches on paper. My first thought was to build something like a mindmap, grouping clips by topic and sub-topic in a nonlinear format.

But the information might be too hard to find that way. So we came up with a dashboard of sorts at the top of the page that would let users jump to the sections they’re interested in, using simple anchor links.

At this point, I usually open up Photoshop and start playing around with graphics, because once I have a banner in place, the rest of the page’s design and color scheme tends to fall into place.

The layout itself was hand-coded in CSS and HTML, using a single-column WordPress page template as the base. All editing was done from the WordPress admin panel, with copious amounts of page previews and refreshing to test the design before it went live.

5. Putting it all together

The final stage of the project was to plug all the videos into the page layout. This turned out to be easier said than done, as we ended up with more video clips than we knew what to do with.

Ultimately, we came up with a decidedly low-tech solution to organizing the 70+ clips into the proper categories and questions: cutting up little strips of paper, writing a clip’s title on each one, and moving them around on a table until every clip had a home in the final presentation.

From there, it was simply a matter of going from section to section, copying the embed codes from Vimeo into the source code and adding thumbnails and pull quotes.

We used the Shadowbox JS plugin, which supports multiple types of media, to achieve the lightbox effect for launching videos.

A note on usability

In the project’s initial release, the thumbnails were actually embedded videos that could be played on the page without needing to launch a full-size version. Vimeo’s elegantly designed video embed options made this possible, and we all agreed that this was a very cool thing to include.

Unfortunately, within hours after launch, we received reports that our feature was causing browsers to freeze up on slower computers. Loading dozens of embedded videos on one page was too resource-intensive for a large percentage of our audience, so we had to scale back to simple image thumbnails.

Lesson learned: usability and accessibility always trumps coolness factor. It’s a good thing to keep in mind for any multimedia journalism project on the web.

Around the Network

In the forum this week, Greg asked about strategies for making your print edition an online feature. The idea came out of a Twitter conversation between Greg and Dane Beavers at The Oklahoma Daily, and the specific questions were:

• After you complete a print edition, do you put a PDF or other such version of it online? Why or not?
• If you do, is it useful? What kind of traffic does it get?
• If you do, do you upload as a PDF or using a third-party service such as Issuu or Scribd?
• If you do, do you tell advertisers that their ads are viewable online?

The most common tool for putting PDFs online mentioned in the conversation was Issuu. Although Lauren doesn’t like the idea because she feels it “defeats the purpose of the web site”, Mo argues that it’s “absolutely important to post the print edition online. Biggest reason: archiving.” He gets requests from all number of people for past issues and having “digital copies of the paper makes it a lot easier, and plus, it’s searchable through Google (even copies as old as 50 years, with proper digital scanning and OCR).” Another good point from Mo for using Issuu instead of hosting on your own site: “you save on bandwidth costs, because the PDFs tend to add up and swallow your monthly usage (lately we’ve been looking at ~50MB per 36-page issue).”

On the wiki, Joey added a bunch of information about the Daily Orange’s brand-new blog network, including setup (they’re using WordPress MU) and plugins. I’m personally looking forward to reading a blog post about the WordPress MU configuration process, and their strategies for expanding engagement.

Congratulations to Jon Schleuss for being hired to the Web Developer position at the Arkansas Traveler.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week and should instead read, watch or listen to this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• TWiT 184: Hard Times for Hard Copy – The tech pundit take on the newspaper industry. Want perspective? This is perspective.
• GooseGrade Brings Citizen Editing to WordPress Blogs – Plugin released that allows your community to submit copy edits for your review. We’ve installed it on this blog if you’d like to try it out; the widget should be located in the lower right. 30 second review: I really like the idea, but you shouldn’t be required to authenticate in my opinion.
• Five ideas for display ads – Pretty decent ideas for improving online engagement with display advertising. The best one, in my opinion, is to make the advertisement a part of a CAPTCHA so that the reader is required to read it.
• Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger – Erik Hersman (AKA White African) interviews Alfred Sirleaf, an “analog blogger.” Mainstream news organizations could learn a lot from this guy (read the article for the full deal):

Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.