Over the two days, we heard from speakers working in the media and marketing industries. But the most valuable part of the conference was the roundtable discussions and workshops discussing the common problems and solutions that college newspapers face. Far too little communication happens between different college newspapers, and that means that the practices and strategies that work well at one place aren’t passed on to other papers.

That’s why conferences that bring together people from different publications are so valuable, and that’s part of what CoPress is trying to do by connecting people from different schools to share their questions and solutions.

As it turns out, we all face a lot of similar problems.

Ideas and topics discussed at Yale

Chief among the topics of discussion was how to make more money and how to make more money online. In the sessions I went to we explored alternative sources of revenue, ways of improving local advertising and website projects.

Among the alternative sources of revenue, many schools explored raising funds from alumni donations and selling subscriptions to parents and alumni of students. This allows many of them to maintain an endowment which can provide steady funding even when the advertising market suffers. Several were exploring a store selling branded merchandise and prints of photos and the paper. Another popular feature is graduation announcements, where parents can buy something similar to a yearbook announcement in the final issue of the paper.

But of course, advertising is still the core source of funding for any newspaper. Roger Lee, a co-founder of PaperG, gave a presentation on how to engage local advertisers. One of the key points of his presentation was to bundle print and online ads together. Since print ads still command higher rates, this prevents online advertising from cannibalizing print revenue.

Online, papers are looking to expand in several ways. Many want to move beyond news and multimedia to providing more types of information to students. Among those ideas include:

• Creating guides to local restaurants and businesses
• Listings of campus events
• Professor ratings
• Selling prints and licenses of photos (with this though, it’s careful to avoid running afoul of NCAA rules for photos.)

What other ideas do you have to make your student publication more profitable and more successful? Or what do you want to know about how other student papers operate? Let us know in the comments!

Nando

First up Max gave us an update on where development on Nando stands. As Lauren mentioned last week, Nando is the administrative side of the Courant News CMS. Max and Rob Baskin will be developing the templates for the interface and I’ll be working with them on designing the user interface and experience. The project is in the early stages right now but wireframes for the interface will be released soon so stay tuned to the Google Group for updates.

Edit Flow

Daniel also recapped what will be happening with Edit Flow over break. Work will be ramping up on version 0.3 of the plugin which will include more granular control over email notifications and user groups. Other features include some bug fixes as well as visualizing posts through a calendar-like interface.

Courier

Will Davis also filled us in on some of the work that will be done on Courier, his plugin for better email notifications. Courier already has support for custom templates and will be gaining further subscription options. The plugin update should be released before the end of break so stay tuned for updates.

Tar Heel iPhone app

Finally, Andrew Dunn talked a bit about The Daily Tar Heel’s iPhone app that he announced on Thursday. The app includes their Housing Guide as well as all the news, classifieds, and radio that you’d expect. It also has a feature that Andrew talked about on the call: a drink specials mini-app.

To hear more about all of the above projects listen to the full audio below.

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!

Chronology

After being a missing persons case for almost 5 days, Annie Le’s body was found and suddenly it became a homicide investigation. When we published the breaking news at 8:51 p.m., our server was immediately slammed by an unusually large swell in traffic; in the few hours remaining in that Sunday night, we had twice as many visitors as we typically get in an entire weekday. As the night wore on, I kept updating our editorial staff on the impressive numbers: 6,000; 8,000; 13,000 hits in 70 minutes. I eventually went to bed proud that we had survived the spike without any problems, but I was in for a surprise.

Out of curiosity before heading to breakfast on Monday morning, I decided to check on the server’s health. Server utilization was at 100%, and the server was really straining. I immediately went to the Drudge Report and found that they had placed a link to us at the top of their front page. Out of all the national coverage available, the editor(s) at the Drudge Report had decided linked to us, and the flood gates were opened.

For the first six hours after Drudge posting the link, we received over 70,000 pageviews per hour before traffic slowly declined to “only” 30,000 pageviews per hour by the end of the day. In the 48 hours following, we handled a total of 1.1 million pageviews; in the 10 day period starting when she went missing, we saw over 2 million pageviews. At peak traffic, we were serving 30Mbps in data from our server, which continued for several hours. Despite the 3000% increase in traffic, we had zero downtime and our site was fully operational the entire time.

Courant News’ Role

In the last week of August, the YDN Editor-in-Chief and I decided to make the switch to Courant News for our first issue instead of waiting a bit longer to refine it a bit more. One of the aspects of Courant that had not yet been properly tested was performance; Courant News was designed with the lessons learned from operating a high traffic site and surviving Drudges in the past, but no special effort had been made to optimize performance yet. Fortunately, the few steps that we had taken in the spring were sufficient, and the system performed like an absolute champ throughout the spikes.

Hourly traffic during Drudge Report coverage (blue); Typical weekday traffic (green)

One of the tricks that Courant employs is a full-page cache for anonymous (non-logged-in) users: when an anonymous user attempts to access a page, our load balancer (nginx) serves them a cached version directly from RAM using memcached. Nginx is amazing, and can handle enormous amounts of traffic with minimal server resource usage; however, Django (served by an Apache server instance), is more resource intensive, and would quickly be bogged down by too many simultaneous requests. Having nginx serve the full page caches to the swarms of anonymous Drudge Report referrals meant that very few requests were being passed through to Courant (mostly our EIC and MEs who were adding new content as the day went on).

Nginx log during Drudge Report spike (requests/second)

No downtime is great, but ultimately it’s all about the content, and our editors and reporters did an outstanding job covering the Annie Le case. Unlike many mainstream media outlets that published unsubstantiated rumors, the Yale Daily News supplied top notch coverage and provided unique angles that only Yale students can provide (such as photos from inside the basement before it was identified as the scene of the crime).

One of the new features that Courant News brought to the YDN site was the ability to post multiple media elements in a given article. We made judicious use of this capability, including upwards of three or four items on many articles. Our old system only allowed a single photo on each article, which would have crippled our ability to cover this story.

Another key capability was the ability to use multiple templates for articles and the homepage. We created a new “Big Photo” article template to highlight the top media item on many of our stories. We also created a number of new homepage templates to highlight our breaking news coverage. (Note: because we only archive one version of the homepage per day, I cannot show  some of the additional templates we used.)

To support the amount of content we were publishing, Courant News allowed us to give limited access of the administrative interface to our Photo Editors and some Production & Design staffers, who helped the EIC and MEs upload content and publish new information in a timely manner. This distribution of work is something that we would like to continue going forward, eliminating the excuse of publishing extra content online being too much work at the end of the night.

Finally, Courant News included new email and analytics tracking systems, which allowed us to push breaking news updates to our email subscribers and track engagement from emails and our Twitter updates. Such data nicely complements our Google Analytics reports regarding readership engagement and has provided insight into ways we can improve our coverage in the future.

Conclusion

Moving to a new CMS and publishing platform can be a risky endeavor, but Courant News has pulled its weight and played a critical supporting role in our ability to cover this story and survive the massive influx of traffic it brought us. With a promising future ahead of it, including the digital newsroom and other exciting new features, Courant News will help us at the Yale Daily News innovate and experiment with our website in the coming years. I see many interesting projects in our future this year, and I look forward to helping other news organizations take the next step and join us in developing the Courant News platform for the betterment of all college news organizations.

Max Cutler is a junior at Yale University where he is Online Devleopment Manager at the Yale Daily News. He can be contacted on Twitter, via email or through his Web site (from where this piece was cross-posted).

Guests: Max Cutler and Robert Baskin

Summary: A question and answer session with Courant News, an open source Django CMS for student news organizations. The idea to build a Django CMS specifically for student newspapers came from discussion at an Ivy League news conference last April when people saw that no one had a CMS with the feature set they needed. Max and Robert, along with Paul O’Shannessy, decided they needed to fill the void. The conversation covers a bit of the history, and then goes into the specifics of the CMS. For more information, please check out or add to the wiki show notes.

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I’ve often been asked by my colleagues at the YDN what we can do to recruit more people to the web team. There are clearly people with the requisite skills on campus, but running house ads, putting up posters, and sending campus-wide email blasts have been completely unsuccessful this year.

Many college news orgs pay their student staff, which is one way to incentivize work, but the YDN is a volunteer-only organization. No one gets paid, and that’s really not even an option, no matter how desperate we may be. So if you won’t get paid, why would you work for us?

I’ve struggled with this question over the past year or so. There are a number of intangible advantages of working for a news org, especially one with a powerful list of alumni like the YDN, but it is hard to convince people on the basis of intangibles alone, especially when it is so easy to get paying jobs elsewhere on campus or online.

There aren’t any sure fire answers at the moment, but I’ve got one idea: we generate a big ol’ list of possibilities on the wiki, the community adds to the list over the next several months, and then each news organization runs experiments to determine recruitment campaigns work best in which scenarios.

Courant will not really be ready for actual use or consumption upon its open-source-ing. The core set of functionality is essentially complete, which means you can build a news website which functions well for the visitors. However, we still haven’t had time to implement our vision for the admin interface, which is really the whole point of doing a specialized “news CMS.” It’s currently just a more-or-less stock Django admin, which, while functional, is far from ideal and really only marginally better than using Drupal with CCK or similar options.

As I’ve said publicly and privately in the past few days, the acronym “CMS” stands for Content Management System. That implies that the purpose of the system is actual management of content, which for a website would be through an admin interface. So I claim that the most important part of a CMS is the admin interface, and thus I can’t consider Courant ready for an actual site until we’ve taken at least our first pass at a news administrative interface.

Needless to say, we’ve very excited to see a nearly final product of what Max and company have been working on for 9+ months. There should be a spec out for community review later this week.

Guests: Brad Arendt, Boise State Arbiter; Kevin Schwartz, Daily Tar Heel; Max Cutler, Yale Daily News; Joey Baker, Daily Orange

Summary: A comprehensive introduction to the current state of online newspaper monetization. Most student newspapers make less than 10% of their overall revenue from online, and the limitations seem to be a lack of infrastructure and inventory. The Daily Tar Heel has had success with Heels Housing, an interactive student housing guide, and Max Cutler recommends Google Ad Manager over OpenX because of its relative ease of use.

Related: Forum discussing strategies for monetizing online

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