• 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.

First, an overview

We’ve used Edit Flow’s ability to define custom status to create a 5 step online workflow that, for us, works quite well. Stories go from reporter drafts to pending the review of an editor. From there the editor can send it back to the reporter if the story needs further review or they can send it along to the copy editors. Our two copy editors then each take a look at the article and the article goes from “Copy Edited Once” to “Ready for Web.”

As soon as things are marked as ready for publication, our Web editor uploads any graphics for the piece and makes sure that the article is categorized and tagged properly. Once this is done, things are published online on a rolling basis.

The editorial team is sent an email at each point in this workflow so that everyone is in the loop regarding what is going on.

Making Edit Flow better

The recent update to the plugin has made it exponentially more useful for our student newsroom. While it now encompasses the core functions that the Pioneer needs for an online workflow, there are still some things that would be nice to have:

• User Groups - It would be great to have the ability to categorize reporters and editors into section-specific user groups. This would largely be a way to replicate the existing staff structure but would go along well with…
• Fine-Tuned Email Controls - Right now, every editorial staff member receives the emails for all articles. This can be a bit overwhelming when 20 or 30 articles are going through the editorial process. What would be great would be to define who receives emails for each user group. In other words we could create a “Sports” user group where only members of that group received emails about articles in that section.
• An “At-A-Glance” View - While the standard list of posts in WordPress is great for most needs, it would be wonderful to have a page within the dashboard where one could see more detailed information on where things stand for the week.
• Photography and Illustration Assignments - The one thing that we have not transferred to online with this workflow is story assignments. This is largely because right now we don’t have a great way to track photo and illustration assignments within WordPress. If this were to be incorporated into Edit Flow then we could have a really killer online workflow.

Ultimately, the first 5 weeks with Edit Flow have been a wonderful boon to our online workflow. Whereas last year we were spending anywhere from 3 to 6 hours uploading content every week, we are now spending less than an hour to put together all the photos and illustrations and publish everything online. Quite simply, it has allowed us to direct focus elsewhere. Because of the time saved with Edit Flow we now have some much larger projects in the works that will be coming soon.

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!

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.

The Pleiad

The Pleiad Online

Web Editor’s Name: Holly Setter
How Often Do You Publish (Online): Weekly
How Often Do You Publish (Print): Weekly
What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? A rotating “Caught In Quotes” feature in the sidebar–it lists both humorous and serious quotes from students, faculty and staff that the paper staff overheard on campus.
What is your workflow? Does it involve WordPress? Workflow is based in e-mail currently; next year it will move to WordPress.
Size of Staff: Approximately 12 students
Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: Circulation roughly 2000
What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? Thus far, the site has gotten a few pingbacks and poll activity. Readers are more likely to respond directly to an editor or writer than on the site itself.
What’s the best way to reach your community? Facebook and Twitter.
Contact info of Web Editor: pleiad@albion.edu
Average Number of Weekly Hits: N/A
Hosting Company: Albion College
Server Size: N/A
What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Increase the emphasis on multimedia reporting.

LCTV13

Web Editor’s Name: Daniel Randolph
How Often Do You Publish (Online): Every Wednesday

How Often Do You Publish (Print): We are a student broadcast news channel and we have a news show “From the Boulevard” that airs every other Wednesday and on opposite Wednesdays our sports show “SportsZONE” airs.
What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? We don’t have one feature we think is the best. We try to make our whole site interesting by giving our viewers lots of options, i.e: blogs, comments, twitter, Facebook, text message updates, rss, email alerts, polls, videos, and special features.
What is your workflow? Does it involve WordPress? Our reporters focus on doing their video stories and once those are complete we have them repackage them for the web with links and extra content and then upload them with a still frame from the video along with the video, which we host on YouTube. We use WordPress for all of this and rely on custom fields for our front page. That makes for a little extra work, but the results are worth it. At this time reporters do not post their own stories, they email them to me to be edited and posted. Also, if there is a breaking news we will go straight to the web without video if needed.
Size of Staff: 25 … with two web people
Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: Our potential audience consists of our college and the Tri-States area of Iowa/Wisconsin/Illinois. Our student audience is 1,700 and our potential Tri-States audience is 100,000 people. Our coverage is 60/40 with more stories focusing on the Tri-States area
What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? Our site is only a year old and we are still trying to figure this part out. Right now our audience is pretty unresponsive unless it is a controversial story. Polls seem to be the one place our audience is willing to participate at this time. We are seeing an increased amount of traffic link our stories on Facebook. We do not do any sort of advertising on our site or channel. Our biggest problem has been promoting our work to our audience because our shows air only once a week and we do not have a budget to promote our work. We have relied completely on word of mouth to bring traffic to our site. Word of mouth seems to be working well at the moment but we are working on how to get our news to more people and at a quicker pace.
What’s the best way to reach your community? Our two biggest ways our site has reached our community is through email subscriptions and Facebook. We have a Twitter page but the clicks are not nearly as high as the other two. We have an extremely large audience of alumni that subscribe by email and we have just recently really started promoting our Facebook page to students. We have had one for a year but earlier this month we had the goal of driving traffic through our page and the day we did this our audience numbers for that day tripled above our average and since then Facebook has really helped students see our work.
Contact info of Web Editor: daniel.randolph@loras.edu
Average Number of Weekly Hits: 23,800
Hosting Company: Blue Host – good host (cheap and really fast with lots of options)
Server Size: 1.5 Terabytes
What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? Over the next we would like to redefine our web presence. Right now we have all the tools needed to make a good site, now we just need our audience to catch up to our features. We plan on being more community oriented by asking for audience input for story ideas and interaction through blogs, facebook, twitter, and other web applications. We want to bring more news to our site by updating more than once a week. Also for the more technical aspects, I want to modify our site to make it more customizable to allow for different page layouts for breaking news and large events that occur. I believe that WordPress is the best CMS application for a college who does not have students who can code on staff. The pages function on WP allows for someone with little to no coding knowledge to put together a customized page very quickly if pre-made templates are already constructed i.e. a crime map page, a photo feature page, or even a mash up page if a story is on going and requires a lot of information. The overall goal is to make a functional WP site where reporters and producers can upload creative, customized content with little working knowledge of any coding language and I believe WP is the best CMS to accomplish this goal.

Whitman College Pioneer

Web Editor’s Name: Andrew Spittle
How Often Do You Publish (Online): The vast majority is published once a week on Thursday.
How Often Do You Publish (Print): Once a week (Thursday).
What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? The Publish2 integration.
Size of Staff: About 80 students
Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: The campus community as well as about 19,000 monthly online visitors.
What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? There are a decent number of comments left and we are working on getting forums going for more prolonged discussion of certain topics.
What’s the best way to reach your community? Facebook by far (see the post that I wrote for the CoPress blog about testing Twitter on our campus).
Contact info of Web Editor: spittlaj@whitman.edu or on Twitter @andrewspittle
Average Number of Weekly Hits: ~5,000 resulting in ~9,000 pageviews
Hosting Company: Fused Network
Server Size: 3GB
What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? I’m hoping to redesign the category landing pages this summer as well as the homepage. The goal will be to try and put a greater emphasis on the individual story pages so that more of our visitors make it to those (currently about 60% of visits are to the homepage).

Other WordPress Websites:

Miami Hurricane – Student Newspaper at University of Miami
The Whit – Student Newspaper at Rowan University
Sagebrush – Student Newspaper at University of Nevada
New York City News Project – Multi-media, Web-based outlet run by the students at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
Rebel Yell – Student Newspaper at University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Mustang Daily – Newspaper of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo
Gargoyle – Student Newspaper at Flagler College
Spectator - Independent Student Newspaper of Valdosta State University
The Campus Lantern – Student newspaper at Eastern CT State University
NYU Local - Online-only publication at NYU
The Snapper – Weekly Newspaper of Millersville University
The Collegian – The Collegian is the student-run newspaper that serves the Fresno State Community.

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?”

Holly Setter from The Pleiad offered some sound suggests, “The approach I took for getting Pleiad staffers was simply to work at getting them more involved personally on the Web. Our program has centered entirely on the print publication–we didn’t have anyone producing Web exclusive content nor did we have any training in multimedia packaging–so a lot of them were under the impression that it wasn’t important to know. Most weren’t exploring blogging options or social networking sites beyond Facebook (or if they were, it was not with the idea of using them for journalism). My basic idea was that if I could get them to use the available media for themselves, it’d be less scary to incorporate it into the newsroom.”

Let’s keep the forum flowing with questions, comments and concerns! Don’t be afraid! Feel free to add your two cents!

On the wiki, Emily updated the Ideal CMS Feature List with the CoPress team’s ideas on how to better implement your workflow and improve your overall system. Feel free add your own ideas. The more people who contribute, the more comprehensive the list can become.

In the News

Last but not least, here are some links from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Video and Small College Newspapers – Andrew Spittle of the Whitman Pioneer asks how a one-man tech team can better implement video onto their Web site.
• Top 10 business mistakes that newspapers must avoid as they go online-only – The Online Journalism Review encourages getting customer feedback, searching for alternative advertising solutions, among countless other innovative ideas.
• AP Fighting Last Century’s Battles – Interesting look on how the AP could lead the charge in internet news syndication, rather than holding onto a model that no longer exists.
• Citizen Journalism Publishing Standards – A unique list on citizen journalism editorial standards posted by The Huffington Post.
• About the Pleiad – Holly Setter announces that her college newspaper The Pleiad will now be moving exclusively online

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.

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.

We were also interested in seeing how word spread about the article over Facebook. We didn’t post anything to the site, but it appears that others used it to send the link to friends. Over the 3-day period we received 19 visitors from Facebook (about 2%) without having to do a thing. College students may not be using Twitter to communicate yet, but they definitely use Facebook.

Finally, it seems that the best method for getting people to visit the site was to place a banner on the top of the homepage. This linked directly to the article until we were able to put together full coverage of the event. This method resulted in more than 700 visitors (or, 68%) over the 3 days. Furthermore, this visitors spent far longer (almost 4 minutes) on the page.

Takeaways for Next Time

Overall, the whole experience was very informative. Our new WordPress-powered site really made it all possible because, were it not for having a quick and easy way to push out content digitally, the Pioneer would have had to wait until Thursday to print an issue with articles about the cuts. It was also a bit of a reality check for my expectations of Twitter. Ultimately, if the campus community isn’t using it, then updates sent out via Twitter will largely be irrelevant.

Also, with more than 20 comments left on the main article this really showed the need for the site to have a forum feature (which I’ll be adding over the coming weeks). If we had this in place at the beginning, I think that student and community discussion would have been much more productive.

In the end, this was our first real test of covering breaking news digitally and then covering in print later on. We seem to have done alright, but I know there’s things we could have done better. Anyone else cover a recent breaking news story on their campus? I’d love to hear suggestions, ideas, and solutions.

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.

Our Workflow

We print the Pioneer for distribution every Thursday afternoon. In the past, the website has been updated at some point after this, but this semester we’re working on getting the online content to go live once the papers hit campus. Once we finish the article for print on Wednesday night (or in the wee hours of Thursday morning if it takes that long) the process of uploading then begins. I basically copy and paste the content from the InDesign files that the Production Assistants make and upload the corresponding images. (This is probably not a very efficient way of doing things, and we’re certainly open to hearing how the CoPress Network works through their content).

There is some special formatting that goes into the Featured section articles. These articles span the center pages of the print edition and are generally much more design heavy than the rest of the print layout. Since so much work goes into the layout of these articles, I’ve implemented a way to give the layout people some recognition for their work. If you read one of our featured articles the thumbnails at the top of the article expand to show you how the page looked in print. For now this is the best method that I have been able to come up with, but it’s probably something that will undergo some changes in the future.

The Future

The Pioneer’s site is definitely something that is still a work in progress and probably will be one for a few months. Within the next week we’ll be launching newly designed category pages as well as some design changes that will hopefully help to make the site seem even more professional and fitting for a newspaper. In addition, the Pioneer is currently supported through funds from the Associated Students of Whitman College and we’re hoping that through advertising in the print addition as well as online we’ll be able to become a little more self-sufficient.

Also, with the spread of Twitter I’m personally hoping to move the newsroom through at least a little bit of the stages of Twitter adoption. By doing this I’m hoping that the Pioneer becomes somewhat of a hybrid between a daily paper (which Whitman is just too small of a campus to support) and a weekly paper (which doesn’t do a great job of covering events that pop up). We already have a Twitter account and will be posting updates there as our site advances and as anything significant happens on campus that doesn’t make it into the paper.

Part of what excites me about working with online journalism is the potential for people to come together and really perfect what works and what just doesn’t. With that in mind I’d love to hear about the workflows that you out there go through and what you’ve found has worked. Also, it’d be great to hear from anybody at a paper that has successfully created ad revenue through their site and how they did that.

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.

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.