CoPress

It’s been a couple of weeks since our last link roundup, but that doesn’t mean there’s been any shortage of news.

• Among all of the announcements made by Google this week, Living Stories struck me as by far the most interesting. This has serious implications the near future of news. Why? Because it’s experimenting with a few important concepts: the topic as the base element of journalism, time as a perspective on a topic, filtering to learn more about specific elements of a story, and personalization to tailor the learning experience. Currently there’s no functionality for users to participate in the production of the page, a key component of the news wiki idea I’ve written about before, but what they have is a very cool start. Paul Bradshaw has more. (tks Brian Manzullo!)
• BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly, aka the second annual mecca for innovation in journalism, will be at Temple University on April 24th, 2010.
• On PBS MediaShift, Roland Legrand covers the biggest reasons why young journalists are the most risk-averse in the newsroom. The most astute observation: the younger journalists in a newsroom could have higher opportunity costs in regards to exploration and experimentation because the traditional method of getting ahead in a career is to “acquire the skills and emulate the behaviors displayed by the older leaders within that environment.”
• Google Analytics recently added 8 new features. Analytics intelligence and custom alerts look mighty interesting.
• Andrew Spittle built another at-a-glance visualization for the Whitman Pioneer: Grid View.
• On College Media Matters, Dan Reimold has an exclusive interview with the founders of the College News Network. They’re bootstrapping a content-sharing network to fill the void of UWIRE and hope to eventually partner with a publication in every state.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

Last year, as part of my day job, I helped relaunch the Whitman Pioneer with a new design. This year we wanted to keep innovating and decided to try an online-first workflow at the beginning of this semester. This means that we are now having reporters write all of their posts in WordPress and then copying from the CMS into the InDesign template. While some have gone the route of using spreadsheets to keep track of workflow, we decided to implement Edit Flow, an editorial plugin developed by Mo Jangda, Daniel and others. Read more →

That’s right: we’re rebranding our flagship podcast, This Week in CoPress. Henceforth known as College Media Lab, the new feature will broaden our show’s focus and modify its schedule. (We’ve got a new bump, too!) The synopsis of this week’s episode is as follows:

The rise of Twitter has been the talk of the tech and media world, and today’s show is about utilizing social media platforms to break news. Hosts Greg Linch and Vanessa Bezic are joined by Craig Kanalley, founder of Breaking Tweets and an adjunct professor at DePaul University, and by Kim Sommers, editor-in-chief of the Whitman Pioneer. Kim has used Twitter to break campus stories — including a bomb threat earlier this year. Check out what they have to say about tweeting breaking news and harnessing the power of Twitter.

Give it a listen and let us know what you think. Be sure to chime in if you have ideas for a future episode, too!

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A round-up of the student news organizations running WordPress in April 2009.

Temple News

The Temple News Relaunched in Spring2008

Web Editor’s Name: Dave Isaac
How Often Do You Publish (Online): Daily
How Often Do You Publish (Print): Weekly
What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? We have unique section pages
Size of Staff: 24
Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: International
What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? Comments, e-mails
What’s the best way to reach your community? E-mail edition
Contact info of Web Editor: isaac@temple.edu
Average Number of Weekly Hits: 19,355
Hosting Company: MediaTemple
What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Further implement our 2-d barcode initiative.
Read more →

The big news this week was Google’s Eric Schmidt and his speech to the NAA, where he told newspaper executives a rather radical (to them, at least) business model includes “not pissing off the readers.” Of course, the speech was not well received by many new media leaders who wanted Schmidt to take a more of a stance on the AP and newspaper’s reluctance to accept new media.

Around the Network

Discussion in the forum was pretty good this week, with Joey soliciting questions for its FAQ page.

Some interesting questions that are likely to make the list:

• Will you have control of my site’s design or do I get admin access to the back end?
• How long will the transition take from College Publisher to WordPress?
• Is CoPress building a content management system (CMS)?
• How is CoPress different than a CMS, and why is this necessary?
• How did CoPress get started?

Also on the forum, Greg asked what schools are using for e-mail newsletter and alerts. It seems, at least, from responses in the forum that Feedburner is still a common option.

Mo Jangda said, “From a content delivery standpoint, we haven’t really used subscription or newsletter services. I’ve always relied on the idea that FeedBurner has got us covered since it has email email subscription built-in — though I imagine we’d be better served actually publicizing that by having a subscription box in the sidebar of our home page.”

Lauren Rabiano asked a question that addresses a common problem in newspapers everywhere, “How do you deal with people who think backwards (espeically when they’re the people who control your money)? You can’t just ignore them or hope that they’ll “get it” sometime soon. How can you show them and change their minds? And can you do it alone?”

Read more →

Great news on the college syndication front, as it was announced this week that Palestra.net would be purchasing UWire. Palestra.net pays college journalists to produce video content for their site. The company purchasing UWire will help to bridge the gap between print and multimedia on college newspaper Web sites. It will also help to further emphasize to college journalists the importance of integrating more tools and technology to their Web sites.

Around the Network

On the Wiki:

• Joey Baker posted about using Twitter for your organization
• Andrew Spittle has revised the Whitman Pioneer network page with a lot more information.
• Joey Baker and Emily Ingram added links to the Finding a real job page.

On the Forum, things were light this week, with:

• Lauren Rabiano adding to the discussion on the best practices of social media.
• Daniel Bachhuber and Albert Sun contributing to a discussion on most adding multiple blogs.
• Joey Baker and Daniel Bachhuber starting a discussion on JaikuEngine.

In the News

Here are some links you should check out over the weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• 10 (small) Ways To Reinvent Your Newsroom Right Now – Chris O’Brien’s Powerpoint from his session at the CMA conference earlier this month with really good, concrete suggestions as to what you could be doing in your newsroom right now.
• Want an internship that might actually help you get a journalism job, even in this rotten economy? – Rob Curley is looking for students to apply for 3-9 month paid internships at the Las Vegas Sun.
• Nothing like a punch in the face to focus the mind – Staffers at The Oregonian have been required to take 5-10% pay cuts, four furlough days, and a frozen pension plan.
• Long-Form Multimedia Journalism: Quality Is the Key Ingredient – Brian Storm discusses the importance of teamwork when producing long form content.

Last week, the Whitman Pioneer broke out of its weekly publication mold a bit to cover a story about the administration’s decision to cut varsity sports funding to the Alpine and Nordic ski teams. The same day the announcement was made we had an article written by one of the Editors-in-Chief posted, and started spreading the word around campus for students to visit the site and weigh in. As I posted earlier here at CoPress, one of the major goals we wanted to accomplish with our new site was to use it as a forum for student discussion about heated topics; we saw this as a great chance to test it out.

Breaking the News

Once the story was posted and the official announcement by the President’s Office was made we started to spread the word through a variety of means: posting on Twitter, sending emails to the student list-serve, and good old word of mouth. Our goal was to get students and community members onto the site to read about the decision and comment on it. The results showed some interesting information concerning the roles these different modes of communication played.

First, Whitman is far from a “Twitter-heavy” campus. I know of a few dozen students and staff who use it, and most of those don’t post too frequently. Thus, I was definitely interested in what type of traffic our posts on Twitter would drive to the site. The results aren’t so encouraging though. Out of over 1,200 visitors over a 3-day period only 9 (less than 1%) came from Twitter. Furthermore, these visitors only spent an average of 2 seconds on the site. Not very heartening to someone trying to use Twitter to increase traffic to our site.

While the community may not be awake to the power of Twitter, Whitman is definitely fond of email list-servs. Over the course of a couple days we posted multiple announcements to the general student list-serve about the article. This drove over 100 visitors (more than 10% of our traffic). Also, these visitors were much more likely to spend time reading the article as most spent over 2 minutes on the page.
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 →

We’re starting a new regular Friday feature here at CoPress called We Clicked On. It’s going to be a round-up of activity on the website, news from the Network, and other links of interest in the past week. If you’re interested in contributing, join our Newsgroup on Publish2, save links with “for:copress” in delicious, or email us with the link and your take (we’ll be using that to craft the crafty commentary). The round-up will evolve as time goes on and, as always, we’d enjoy your feedback on what works and what needs to be improved.

In the Community

We launched our first forum this week, asking about what is needed for student news organizations to collaborate. As of writing, Emily Ingram has been the only one to respond, but she offers good tips for what a collaborative platform might need: a place to crowdsource a solution for a particularly difficult problem, a source for tips and tricks that have worked for other young journalists, and a source of inspiration so we can stay innovative amid all the doom-and-gloom talk.

Our new wiki also saw the light of day this week with a number of excellent contributions, including two profile pages for student news organizations I hadn’t heard from before: The Snapper (running WordPress) and The Maneater (running Django). We’re very excited to have them in the community. There’s also a bunch of new WordPress themes listed if you’re looking for something to build from.

Around the Network

Jackie Hai, of the Amherst Wire, reports on a first-ever student media summit at UMass. The goal was to “have people from each group meet face-to-face and open up channels of communication, paving the way for a collaborative workflow in delivering a more unified news experience to readers and viewers” and it appears as though they’ve already found several ways to come together.

Bryan Murley at the Center for Innovation in College Media (CICM) has announced a pretty darn comprehensive college media contest. It’s all about online media, and he’s looking for the best examples of multimedia, use of data in reporting, and overall web presence, among other criteria.

Andrew Dunn has proposed a syllabus for studying news business models, and it has been pretty well received in the community. There’s talk of doing this completely online, which would be very cool.

The Whitman Pioneer, a weekly newspaper at Whitman College, has relaunched with a new WordPress theme for its website. Andrew Spittle, the new Web Manager, has more details on his blog.

Shameless plug. In response to a growing chorus of discontent about the Daily Emerald, I wrote a post about the steps they should take to regain trust and learn how to innovate. It’s all about transparency, and I think such transparency could lead to better buy-in from the community.

Or maybe it’s 2.5. We haven’t really been keeping track of version numbers around here.

After over two hard weeks of work from Adam, Miles, and the rest of the team, CoPress has a new look. It’s actually been live since Thursday, but we’ve been tweaking things and squashing bugs since then and we’re finally ready to for new visitors. If you find something that needs fixing, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Along with a new, gorgeous theme generously donated by Woo Themes, we’ve got two new places to interact:

A brand new wiki to collaborate on knowledge around WordPress, Django, or even College Publisher. We’ve got the following areas ready to go, and would love your contributions:

• The Network. We’re creating a directory of student news organizations and the software they use so that if you want to find some help, you’ll know where to look. Add your news organization to our directory, and use your page to describe how your website works, who maintains it, and how it fits into the operation of the news organization. Check out the Miami Hurricane, the Whitman Pioneer, and the Daily Gazette as examples of what we’re looking for.
• The resources. Please add your favorite WordPress plugins, themes, or links to Django applications, and educate your community on what works best.

If you have suggestions as to how we should improve the wiki, we’d love the feedback.

We’ve also launched a forum for general discussion amongst the community. You’re more than welcome to propose your own questions, but every week we’ll propose a question of our own. Our plan is to also have topic-specific forums (i.e. WordPress or Django) that you can subscribe to via RSS. To kick things off, we’re asking:

• What are ways in which student news organizations can collaborate to succeed online? More specifically, what type of resources, support, or knowledge is your news organization lacking, and how can cooperation change this?

Weigh in by signing up for an account. As a caveat, we ask that you please be transparent in who you are and who you represent. Thanks!

Last, but not least, our RSS feed has been broken the last few days (thanks Feedburner). We’ll hopefully get that back up tonight. In the meantime, though, there’s an audio version of our presentation to BarCamp Mizzou online now and Miles Skorpen has written an excellent post about online workflow at the Daily Gazette. I encourage you to check both out.