• The Philadelphia Inquirer has become using Twitter.   They are doing more than just regurgitating headlines, but *gasp* actually responding to followers.  Although this may be labor intensive I think they are doing it right.  Follow them at: http://twitter.com/PhillyInquirer.  Follow me at http://twitter.com/blandanomics
  
• 37 signals has released a case study about a small Chicago volunteer news organization using Basecamp for collaboration.  Stories like this make me think that newspapers are too bloated.
• Mr Greg Linch, does a great job at musing over the equipment options for a newspaper.

Good luck to all of you students out there!

I took to setting up a wiki not only for this purpose, but for a few other collaborative tasks as well. I think most organizations could benefit from an environment like this, especially student newspapers where staff members have varying class schedules and may never all be in the same room at the same time. Oh yeah, and there is that whole turnover thing.

If you also decide to go this route, here are a few things you can include to make your job easier:

• Writer’s guides
• Style Guide
• Common source lists
• Staff contact information
• Staff Class schedules
• Job descriptions and advice to pass down to the next holder of the position.
• Tutorials and guide for technical tasks, like uploading soundslides to your Web site
• Workflow diagrams
• Event calendar (or at least the link to one)
• Common files such as logos, templates, and house ads
• Set up a repository for ads to be dropped in the paper
• Where in the office to find X
• Instructions on how to renew your domain and other tasks that may be forgotten in the transition to a new staff
• Guides on how to edit the actual wiki
• Contact information for your business partners such as printers and common advertisers
• Links to web site statistics
• Links to every login page needed
• Links to useful Web sites
• Store all of your paper’s “greatest hits” for examples for new writers
• Contact info for people you need to know such as advisers, business managers, etc…
• Services used by your paper such as Flickr, Twitter, etc…
• Prominent people in the community and their contact information

Hope that got the juices flowin’! Let me know if I totally missed something.

My adviser John DiCarlo and I have been asked to present on the topic of “getting the most out of your newspaper’s Web site” on Sunday at noon. This is admittedly a very broad topic, but I plan to bombard the attending advisers with practical, not abstract, advice. For example I’ll say “heres a tool to use for slideshows” before something like “embrace multimedia”.

Below is a list of things I have already come up with. I came up with these through my own brainstorming as well as rooting through or recalling blogs I’ve read.

I was wondering what would you add? Are there any resources you and your paper use that I didn’t mention?

• Know ad rates for your competition, this includes blogs
• Your site should enable your staff to easily post video, audio, soundslides, slideshows, pictures, and infographs
• Utilize the Flickr slideshow tool (its free!)
• Start a Facebook page
• Make sure your article page is not a dead end (credit to Ryan for that one)
• Offer an RSS feed for AT LEAST news and sports.
• Use all of your properties to refer each other, i.e. blogs, newspaper, video, the web site etc…
• Make sure your article page title is your headline (and other SEO advice…)
• Publish web comments in the newspaper
• Use the web to promote and make “evergreen” content such as dining guides
• Make sure article pages have a print view
• Take full advantage of tagging systems to lead readers between a columnist’s articles or a series you are running
• Have an “online only” section so readers can see the content they missed
• Have no registration, and have the barriers to comment and interact as low as possible (some may disagree, I know)
• Set up a wiki to add to what my friend Christopher Wink would call “institutional memory”
• Don’t forget that your paper’s Web site is still a Web site and should be crawlable by Google and Google News.
• If you have beats, make them each a section of your site with tags
• Make every byline link to all of the writer’s articles
• Some pictures may be black and white in the paper, put the color version online

This list is evolving as fast as I can write in my notebook.

So what’s missing?

Whenever I travel it’s not so much about the destination, but the people. I always hope to meet an unforgettable character and bring a story home.

Nashville didn’t let me down.

It was there the Center for Innovation in College Media held its 2008 hands on training conference. Most conferences have the students hop from presentation to presentation like sheep, while grabbing pamphlets and paying for overpriced food.

CICM worked differently. On day one, we were given a story topic (or you could choose your own), camera, tripod, iBook, and audio recorder and were sent out into the streets of Nashville to gather the content. The second day we came back and edited. The third day we showed off our work and received awards.

I’m glad the conference took a hands approach, as I hear people talk abstractly about journalism all of the time. It was nice to finally get out there and get our hands dirty.

The Sad Six-Stringer

For our story topic, we were going to do a piece on the fame of Tennessee barbecue. We were going to frame it as three boys from Philly who put down the cheesesteak and tried something new. That was until we spoke to a local, who said BBQ wasn’t really a Nashville thing. This left us searching for a new idea, which we found in Mr. Brent Cunningham.

Cunningham was a street performer who had fallen on hard times. He didn’t have a home, his girlfriend had died, and he seemed to just wander the Nashville streets making friends along the way. In a way, a great story fell into our lap. So Saturday, we took video of him playing as well as conducted an interview. He was a mix of friendly and guarded during the whole process. When I originally approached him to ask for an interview he responded “Man, I’m workin’ here.”

After some cajoling he agreed to speak with us, and slowly opened up. After we were done, my parter, Brian James Kirk, asked him for one more song. He looked straight into the camera and played a seemingly auto-biographical tune about a “Sad Six-Stringer”. We didn’t realize this until we viewed the tape later that night, and it gave me the same chilling feeling I had when Johnny Cash performed “Hurt”. You knew there was an underlying message to the song selection. I regretted not getting more of the story out of him, but brushed it off as Brian and I cleaned up and left to hit the town.

Brian and I eventually settled in at a country bar. We ordered our drinks, talking about our story and how we would approach it. At that moment, I turned to my left, and there sat Brent Cunningham. He recognized us, and began to tell us more stories about how he built the very bar we were drinking on, how he could name every musician and their hometown who was playing that night, and even showed us his autographed picture behind him hanging on the wall.

I had no camera, no tape recorder, and not even a pen. Instead, I asked him questions out of simple curiosity.

The next day Brian and I sat down and put the whole package together. After he made the graphics and wrote the text, I whipped up a Web site and helped edit the video. It took us a few hours, but I present to you our submission. I’m really happy with the way things came out, and I’m glad the CICM gave us the chance to do this.

What did I learn?

I must say the most useful part of the convention is not the tutorials on how to use the equipment or software, but having the industry’s best guide you and critique your work. Seth Gitner, Angela Grant, and Bryan Murley dissected everyone’s videos and offered great advice to everyone. If they can give you a “good job” then it makes you feel a little more confident about taking your skills into the market. They also provided an inside look at some of the more forward thinking papers.

But the key points that were made were:

• You have half a second to get people’s attention in online video, make sure your opening shot is an attention getter
• Cut every 2-4 seconds
• Your equipment WILL mess up, and editing WILL be hard. Deal with it.
• Most videos won’t be longer than two minutes
• We have the opportunity to “take video back” from broadcast
• You must learn to edit quickly
• It’s still about telling stories
• It never snows in Nashville, and when it does, people panic

Another perk was the ability to compare skills with fellow journalists. My favorite videos were:

• Who put the Na in Nashville (a great risk that paid off)
  
• Artsy Cafe picks up diverse crowd
• Sole Man (done by three professors)
• Rocky Top (my pick for best of show)
• Check out all of the rest

There’s something different about being surrounded journalists talking about the state of the business and multimedia. It really got my gears spinning in ways that going to class never did. It also really got me thinking about the economics of a shift to multimedia, but that is another post for another day.

So would I recommend the conference?

Absolutely. To be surrounded by fellow students as well as those in the industry in a working environment was well worth it. I would advise, however, that if you are an adviser, you send students who are just adamantly opposed to the concept of multimedia. This conference forced everyone, regardless of background, to come together and produce a great story.

Many thanks to the CICM and all of the presenters, as well as the students who helped us out. A special thanks to Brent Cunningham who, although will probably never read this, made my trip to Nashville one I won’t soon forget and I wish him all the luck in the world (if you’re bored, listen to one of his songs).

I awoke at 4 in the morning to my cat having is head stuck in a Campbell’s soup can, I had my car broken into (damn you Philadelphia), and our move to WordPress almost exploded. So much for class.

I’ve alluded to it several times, but as of Tuesday February 5th, The Temple News has moved its Web site to its own independent WordPress server from College Publisher. The move was the result of months of planning and work, and hope you all check it out!

I know many colleges who have either thought about switching, or just completed the switch. In fact, the most recent post on the ICM blog is a video of the Miami Hurricane choosing Drupal. So part of the purpose of this post is to shine some light on how and why the Temple News did it.

Why Switch?

I suppose the first question on everyone’s mind is why we switched from CP. I want to state here that it had nothing to do with the quality of service those guys offered. Every time I called they always were extremely helpful and always found a solution. I would recommend CP to anyone else in a heartbeat. It just so happened that CP wasn’t the best for for the current direction of The Temple News.

One of the main reasons was the lack of independence. Because you are essentially getting a free CMS, you lose a bit of your autonomy. You are limited in the placement of your own ads, and even if your paper specifically needs a certain feature, it usually has to be rolled out through the whole system for it to be implemented. For example, we wanted a box that users could check to remove their article comment from print consideration, but such a change would need to be implemented on every site. Obviously it is not in CP’s best interest to work on a paper-to-paper basis as their staff is only so large.

The aforementioned lack of independence also made it hard to keep up technologically with competing Web sites. CP sites are written in CPML, a proprietary coding system that forces Web editors to learn an entire programming language to fiddle with certain aspects of their site. For a college student who will not use this language when they graduate, the motivation is just not there.

And lately, with the move to Viacom, many of CP’s servers became unstable. During one of our biggest stories of the year ( a student was sexually assaulted in a heavily trafficked hall) we had no service.

The Technical Stuff

The new Temple-News.com runs on a Media Temple gridserver and an instillation of WordPress MU (that’s multiple user). We ported our news blog broadandcecil.com over as well to have all of our online properties under one roof. When considering if WordPress could even handle a college newspaper I looked to The Collegian Online as proof of concept.

After the CMS was decided we had to port all of the old archives from CP to WordPress. This was by far the trickiest part, and one I couldn’t do with out the help of my father. CP was kind enough to give us our seven years of archives in a database. My dad and I spent the large part of Winter Break converting the database into a working WordPress table.

We ran into several snags as the WordPress tables have funny links, as well as information required that CP tables didn’t have (such as an article summary). We were able to transfer all of the archives with the exception of the latest semester. However, all of the archives permalinks did not work in WordPress unless we went in manually and assigned them a category (I believe only God knows why…). Also, we were unable to transfer authors. We were lucky enough that we had placed a “Sean Blanda can be contacted at …” so the user can find the author of articles even though there is no “official” author.

Therefore we are currently in the process recategorizing all of our archive links. I advise caution in directly editing the database, however we had no other option. The files did not play nice with the WP import/export feature and manually copy and pasting was out of the question.

After the database was transferred I installed the Premium News Theme from adii. From a quick browse I believe we are the largest publication to use this theme. The main reason we choose this theme was that it featured easy advertising, thumbnail management, and heavily featured multimedia. It was built for the forward thinking blogger crowd, and it was a crowd we wanted to attract and even emulate somewhat as we attempt to push our brand further towards modernity.

As mentioned before, we still had a whole semester gap in the archives so I spent the last week of my winter break manually cutting, pasting, tagging, and importing six months worth of content. It was a good dry run that allowed me to work out many kinks in the system while we still only on our access domain.

The one problem with having your own server is that the space is limited. Therefore we are cautiously using outside services for the hosting of our media. A Flickr Pro account will be our de-facto photo archive system and YouTube will handle videos.

There are several benefits to using these services:

1. Low or no cost
2. Saves server space
3. Flickr allows users to purchase photos (indirectly)
4. They give us a strong presence on two of the largest communities on the Web
5. They teach our staff members Web 2.0 tools

The one downside of course is the very lack of independence we avoided in migrating from CP. What if Flickr and YouTube shut down tomorrow? We felt the rewards were worth the risk. And because Yahoo and Google back these products we felt reasonably secure. However this may be in doubt over as the future ownership of Yahoo! in is question.

After setting up the services, it was time to switch over the DNS to point to the new server.

Then something funny happened.

There was a WordPress rewrite in the database that forwarded all visits to temple-news.com to our access domain. This created a redirecting loop that was only solved by going in the database and editing the table. Funny thing was, I did not overlook this, however when I edited the domains, I left a trailing slash.

Thats right, a trailing slash had me awake until 4 am calling Media Temple, trying to figure out why it didn’t work.

I could honestly write a book on this whole process, but I just wanted to show not only what I have been doing (and why my posting has been sporadic) but to provide a blueprint of sorts to anyone thinking of moving there college newspaper either to or from College Publisher. I also plan on keeping all of you guys posted on the drawbacks and benefits of running a publication on WordPress. As of now, the Temple News is scheduled to speak at the upcoming conference in New York at the College Media Conference about alternatives to College Publisher, and I will most certainly be there to follow up on this.

I will say for the record that at the outset of this operation, WordPress MU seemed like the best choice. However there is a huge lack of community support (especially when you are used to WordPress ) and many Plugins that work for WP don’t work for WPMU. I don’t care what their site says.

As any new site, there are many bugs likely to pop up, but overall I’m proud of what we were able to do and now I can focus on creating content instead of managing it. And I will certainly be posting heavily about the transition in the weeks to come.

SimplyRSS has solved that problem by adding page functionality, and I am currently using SimplyRSS for The Temple News. I suggest adding your paper’s blog and site feeds to get some more pageviews as well as spreading awareness of your content.

Thanks to Scott Stewart of the Gateway for giving me the heads up.

I know what you might be thinking: “If I hear anything more about college and Facebook I’m going to chop my ears off and go into PR.”

Reality is, Facebook is the new beer. Actually that is an understatement. I’m pretty sure that the top two things that would piss my generation off the most would be the reinstitution of the draft and if someone took away our Facebook.

Hyperbole aside, college newspapers have a built in marketing system in place that ALL of their readers are already a part of, so why not take advantage of it? Here is how:

Create a “business” page.

Although currently limited in its use, the “business” page of Facebook allows “fans” to rate and upload media related to your product. Facebook even gives you a discussion board. I recently just created a page for The Temple News, and am fooling around with ways to use it.

How do I do this?

Well, first go to the “create a business page” erm… page. The rest is filling out fields and uploading pictures. The business page as it stands now is currently a crippled version of the personal profile page. You can rearrange boxes and add applications, however not every application works with the business page.

To know whether an application will work when you go to add it you will see these buttons:

Be sure to hit “Add to Page”, otherwise you will do what I did and have a whole bunch of useless apps on your profile page. I am warning you that the search function for the Page applications is terrible. There is an “App for pages” section but when you try to search for anything specific it searches EVERY app making finding the right app a painful process of opening each one and checking if it has the above button.

The holy grail for the College Newspaper would be an RSS import feature like “Notes” which currently doesn’t work with profiles. So for now we are regulated to simply establishing a presence, manually (!) uploading videos, and trying to foster reader discussion. I still believe that the business page on Facebook needs a little bit more work before it is useful to newspapers though. If anything, it is another way to connect to your readers and community, and thats not bad for a few minutes of setup.

Oh and become a fan of the Temple News

Author RSS import

Speaking of RSS feeds, the most useful thing I have used facebook for is the Notes feature. Using Notes, anybody can import an RSS feed to blast their friends. If you can swing an author RSS feed, have reporters enter their author RSS feed as notes and you will start to see the clicks come poring in from their friends. I don’t have to tell you how this can drastically improve your reach as a newspaper. Plus readers can comment on the note as well as on your site so the author can get semi-private direct feedback.

How do I do this?

The following directions are good if you have a WordPress blog, which is the only CMS I can think of on the top of my head that college newspapers would use that has author feeds.

1. Find a post you have written on your blog
2. Click your name
3. Look at the URL and add “/feed” to the end. For example: “ http://domain.com/author/username/feed“
4. Copy that URL into Word/Notepad and hold on to it.
5. Go to “http://yournetwork.facebook.com/editnotes.php “
6. You’ll see a text field. Paste the link you put in word which should look like “http://domain.com/author/YOURNAMEHERE/feed “
7. Click “start importing”
8. In the upper right hand corner click “Confirm import”
9. Set it and forget it.

Advertising

Facebook ads are cheap and they work. We used them to launch our blog Broad and Cecil. But I already told you about that…

There are probably other ways to use Facebook, but for now these are the most obvious. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t do this. The fact that this all takes about 20 minutes of work for such a long term benefit should put this high on your “to do” list tomorrow.

From Thursday to Sunday, Washington D.C. will be play host to all college media types at the National College Media Conference.  Unfortunately, I can only make it Friday.  So right after my Thursday classes I’m going to take the long (and freakin’ expensive) journey down 95 to our nation’s capital.  If any one who reads this blog is going to be there, let me know I’d love to chat.

The reason I made great pains to get down there Friday is that College Publisher is previewing their new CMS.  And if my ears serve me correctly, I’d say many editors believe this is a big moment for them as they have to do a little catch up to other CMS’s.  And, as the Innovation in College Media blog mentioned, knowledge of the upgrade has placed some of our plans on hold.

So, I will definitely be at CP’s presentation on Friday at 12:30 p.m.  And I really would like to catch up with Mr. Curley of the Washington Post (whose contact form never sends me a confirmation e-mail, so I hope this trackback works).

And on a side note: Honestly guys, there are WAY too many acronyms here.   If I have this right, its the ACP/CMA NCMC in DC.  Either way, see you there!

Kudos to Mr. Ben Bleikamp for digging this one up. As quoted in a recent Lantern article about Radiohead:

According to WordPress.com, a leading global market research company, reported that in 2006, “legal digital music downloading was the fastest growing digital music category.”

Does that mean that nobody in the copy editing chain as EVER heard of blogging?

Running on WordPress and the fabulous PressRow, Broad and Cecil is our catch-all our blog where the staff can post on anything Temple (or Philly) related. The reason the topic is so broad is to test the waters. While the whole staff has theories on what would make a good blog, we really won’t know until we check out the traffic and the comments. Most likely at the onset of next semester we will split into a few blogs. Blog content also gives us something to post on the front page of Temple-News.com everyday.

We also need to get a workflow established as well as work out some technical kinks. So we have established a one week dry run where we try to get at least 2-3 posts a day. However not many people will know the blog exists until Tuesday when we feature the blog in our print edition as well as run a heavy Facebook advertising campaign.

The goal is to add a Temple News property that is in the list of a student’s daily visited Web sites. Here at Temple University, we have one of the largest computer labs on the planet and when I stroll through and see what students are viewing, 50% of the time it is Facebook. We want to be on that list of sites that students visit went they sit down to procrastinate from doing work.

Advice for anyone else considering starting a blog for their business/news paper/organization: To keep a blog pumping with content you need the full support of the staff. People need to be engaged and excited to try something new. Otherwise they will simply think you are trying to spread them a little thinner. Luckily with the Temple News if every staff member only writes once a week, we can have a nice well of content.

So take a look!