Today was the last day of the 2009 ACP/CMA Conference in Austin, TX and this morning the winners of the annual “Best in Show” awards were named. You can view the full list on the ACP website.
We want to extend a very special congratulations to the College Heights Herald, winner of the best Publication Website among large schools.
Max Cutler, Web developer at the Yale Daily News and Courant News, recently started a forum topic about presenting multimedia on a student news site that we’ve been meaning to start a conversation around. The YDN recently launched a new landing page for their multimedia that offers a much more graphic view. What’s your reaction to how the page presents different type of media? Is it better to have content organized by topic or content type? What’s your ideal multimedia browsing experience? Weigh in on the thread!
Lauren Rabaino and I spoke with a few Web staffers from The Chronicle at Duke University for the latest episode of College Media Lab (the renamed This Week in CoPress). Our guests were:
As you might have seen, Alex wrote a blog post for CoPress about their recent switch from College Publisher to Drupal. Here’s a summary of what we discussed in the podcast:
Listen in!
College Media Lab: The Chronicle at Duke switches to Drupal [ 45:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (5637)For years, both The Chronicle’s staff and our readers knew we had a pretty nasty Web site. But like most college newspapers back in 2007, we didn’t have a robust online department and we treated our site with a level of respect even Rodney Dangerfield would have been surprised to witness.
That all changed when we had a few important things happen at around the same time in early 2008. First, our then-editor, David Graham, recognized the need for a new Web presence. Midway through his editorship, I cold-emailed David to tell him that I really wanted to help The Chronicle make a new website. The next year’s editor, Chelsea Allison, immediately went to bat for us financially and logistically, and a task force of sorts was hatched — including a few top editors, some nerdy staff members and several developers we had managed to recruit. Read more →
The Campanil‘s newly redesigned Web site launched this past weekend, and overall we think it’s a great success. It is still a work in progress — as all Web sites should be — but we hope our readers agree it’s a large improvement from our old site. So: what’s new?
After three months of hard work, the Minnesota Daily has a brand new design to improve its layout and usability. Son Huynh gives us his take on theming Drupal, changing a paper’s workflow and reorganizing news content.
In addition, just last March, the Minnesota Daily teamed up with developers from NewsCloud to create a Facebook application as part of a not-for-profit research study sponsored by the Knight Foundation to find new ways of engaging young people in news readership and community engagement. As an incentive, the Minnesota Daily hosts challenges and implemented a point system to reward active readers with prizes for their participation (such as posting on the Facebook page, tweeting, following the paper on Twitter).
Son also talks about the challenges of building an online community around the paper and his plans to revamp the app by adding Facebook Connect, so users can access the paper while being logged on to Facebook, and a selection on the paper’s site to better connect student groups and campus events. The newest version of the Minnesota Daily is set to launch on Sept 8th. Be sure to check out the new multimedia section, which was in part inspired by the Onion.
Have feedback for the Minnesota Daily? Leave a comment or email Son at shuynh [at] mndaily [dot] com.
‘Tis the season for college media makeovers, and this week we’ll be discussing the soon-to-launch redesign of the Minnesota Daily — and getting a sneak peek. Last fall they switched to Drupal for their content management system and now they’re looking to build on that with a fresh coat of paint.
Listen live as Online Manager Son Hunyh and others from the Daily’s staff discuss the redesign and their ideas and plans for this year, including tactics to increase readership engagement. Be sure to join our live text chat below and call in to give feedback.
If you’re not able to listen live, please add your question as a comment.
When: Sunday, Aug. 30 at 5 p.m. ET
Where: BlogTalkRadio (or listen here with the embedded player)
The best links of the past two weeks (yes, I missed last week) that you probably should read over the weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup which you can join and contribute to if you’d like):
On the wiki, we now have a really decent editorial strategy thanks to Megan Taylor. We’ll be building our content there over the next month as well as (hopefully) skinning the wiki in alignment with our website relaunch. The goal for the wiki is to have the community take ownership over editorial quality; we’re looking for page editors for each of the topic tubs. If you think you might fit the bill, let us know!
On the schedule this past week for the Summer Web Design Camp was ideas for radically redesigning homepages. Joey Baker led Jake Paul, Lauren Rabaino, Emily Babay, Ethan Klapper, Ben Leis, and myself participated in a discussion of some varying approaches to homepage design. You can watch a recording of the session over on Blip.
This past Thursday I sat down with Jake Paul and Ethan Klapper of the American University Eagle, Jessica Luthi of City College of San Francisco’s The Guardsman, David Estes of The Daily UW, and Emily Babay of The Daily Pennsylvanian for the first session of the 2009 College Web Design Camp.
The call was largely audio, which is posted at the bottom of the post, and covered introductions to everyone’s sites and summer projects. Below are some highlights:
Also covered was a quick introduction to the role that the Society for News Design will be playing this summer. SND has graciously agreed to have a representative present at as many sessions as possible to give a professional perspective on the weekly subject. They’ll be able to put some of the ideas and techniques presented in the context of what they have seen attempted, and more importantly what has succeeded or failed. SND President Matt Mansfield will be joining us in Thursday’s session and will provide some further information on the role of SND.
Overall, the session was really interesting and it’ll be a lot of fun seeing how all of these projects develop over the summer. The camp also looks like it will be featuring people from a variety of platforms and newsroom sizes so there will be a little of everything. If you’re interested in seeing how some of these ideas may be applied to your newsroom and summer design project(s), come join us!
This week’s session on Thursday at 5 pm PT will be covering navigation techniques. I’ll be showing how to do drop-down menus in WordPress and will also cover some examples and best practices for site-wide navigation. We’ve started a discussion thread on the forum to get the conversation going. A preliminary agenda is posted over on the CoPress Wiki. If you’re interested in participating, you can RSVP on Facebook Event or contact us. Happy designing!
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