Present on this week’s call: Greg Linch, Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino, and Emily Kostic.
First thing addressed on this week’s call was Monday’s This Week in CoPress, which is likely to feature Max Cutler and info on his latest project Courant News. Greg said he’s still waiting to hear back from Max but expects that Monday is likely to still work for TWiC.
Daniel suggested that from CoPress have listeners RSVP so they can be invited onto the call, while others suggested that we look for alternative places to host TWiC.
Also on the call, Greg discussed how over the course of the next month he will be lessening his duties to the associate level, which means the position of Community Manager will be open.
Duties of the Community Manager consist of:
- Moderation and responding to comments on the blog
- Posting a question a week in the Forum
- Managing the Facebook and Twitter account (contributing to conversations)
- Linking to conversations on the Forum
- Managing marketing outreach
- Search for possible partner schools
Andrew Spittle will be helping with a virtual design camp that will take over the summer. The camp will likely to include different schools and bring them together in order to teach others about what they do best. The camp will probably take place over Skype or Adobe Connect, as Adobe Connect allows you to switch between screens. Andrew will be writing a blog post outlining his ideas and his plans for the virtual design camp.
I started making a laundry list of things I think we should work on for the month of May. Please feel free to add more in the comments (we’ll discuss this more in-depth on Sunday’s meeting):
- Finish our bylaws (currently in progress)
- Hold the first official board meeting at the end of May
- Write a spec for the WordPress editorial admin that we’ve started talking about
- Figure out the logistics for a website redesign “club” for over the summer (i.e. space for all of the student news organizations working on redesigns over the summer to share ideas and critique)
- Figure out what our staffing needs are going to be over the summer. Do we bring more people on board? How often do we publish the podcast and publish on the blog? What sort of resources are we going to need to get all of our clients up over the summer?
- Establish a transparency policy based on the conversation a couple of days ago that started on the blog and then moved to email. We need to be clear about what information we make public and what we don’t.
What am I missing? Thanks!
I’ll say this right out that I’m short on a lot of college newspapers. Bryan’s email Sunday night reinforced my belief that not all of college media will be able to make the transition to digital successfully. Some schools will be fortunate to have online-only publications or startups after their newspaper implodes, and others will just suffer from a dearth of journalism.
With this being said, I think we need to be more selective on how we choose our clients. I don’t want CoPress to be put into a situation where a really struggling newspaper suddenly puts a lot of demands on our support abilities, is really bad about paying on time, etc. It’s going to affect our ability to work with student news organizations who will be successful with our help Instead, we should be proactive about selecting what we think are the best clients, or ones where we have strong beliefs they can flourish with our support. One way we’ll be able to do this is by having selection criteria for prospective clients. A bit of what I’m thinking:
- Ensure that they have at least one person on staff for the following term that has knowledge of HTML/CSS and some experience with PHP. I know this is a bit ambitious, but we already have a number of clients on board who don’t.
- Have the client submit a one-page document on their goals and strategies for the web for the following year. This might be asking much but, again, if we have clients that are actually thinking proactively about this we should prioritize supporting those clients.
Other thoughts? My opinion is that, once we establish the criteria, this should be effective immediately with all potential clients we haven’t yet signed a contract with.
I think it would be great to video and/or livestream the sessions we take part of at BCNI Philly. How many people are planning on bringing video cameras? I have a Flip MinoHD but that’s about it. I’m also planning on bringing an audio recorder and possibly a dSLR.
Max Cutler, Andrew Spittle, Mo Jangda, Eric Eldon, and Drew Geraets joined me on Skype this morning to discuss different ideas for improving the WordPress admin for newsrooms. The audio has our entire conversation, which had a number of really legit ideas, but I’d like to share some of the core takeaways.
One, there’s big opportunity to build functionality into the WP dashboard that offers a stream, or river rather, of data about the activity going on with the website. This type of information might include data on posts that have new statuses, posts that need editing, authors logging in and out of the CMS, or new comments from the community. The user’s exposure to this river of data would be dependent on the people they’re “following” (i.e. if they’re a sports reporter then they’d be following the section editor and other beat reporters) and their area of expertise (sports vs. A&E vs. environment). A few intermediate steps to getting to this point are building the functionality to aggregate activity within WordPress (which something like Audit Trail already has pieces of), creating an RSS pipe of the information, and then building the interface in the admin that would either live on the dashboard or near it. Eventually, it could even become as complex as the new Friendfeed Beta.
Continue reading ‘Improving WordPress’s admin for newsrooms’
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I sat down (virtually over Skype) with Andrew Spittle this evening to talk about putting together a collaboration group for the summer. There are going to be a number of websites launching or relaunching in the fall. Normally, the design and relaunch process would just be internal; the designers working with the paper’s website would propose changes, those changes would be discussed internally, and then they would be implemented.
Both Andrew and I think there will be value, however, in having CoPress facilitate a space for people to collaborate and share ideas on designs. I think we agreed that this might take the form of communal screen-share sessions where each person attending would have between 10 and 15 minutes to present what they’ve worked on and where they still have questions. These sessions will happen every other week or once a month, depending on how actively people are developing against their websites. We didn’t really discuss on the call, but we might also create a space (chatroom, IRC, or the first stage of the Connection Engine) where people can go 24/7 if they have questions, etc.
Thoughts? I think we might discuss this more this weekend or on Monday’s community call. It would be sweet to have this up and running by the end of May.
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Because the majority of the team will be at BCNI Philly, I figured it doesn’t make any sense for us to have another call on Sunday afternoon. Conference calls will resume the following Sunday, the 2nd of May. For those that aren’t going to be able to make it to Philly, we can patch you in on Saturday evening if we have any sort of discussion at dinner. I think most of it will be pretty minor, however, and what is important will make it onto this blog.
I’m messing around more than anything else (which is a bad thing because I have a draft for a pub’d essay due tomorrow evening that I haven’t started on). Miles and I were talking tonight, and I came up with an idea on how we could use the Connection Engine for client education. Listen to the audio boo.
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A few thoughts after listening in on today’s live podcast. First, we need to do something better than BlogTalkRadio. I really like having it live, but it might be better as a Skype conference call that we stream on our website. Also, the way that call-ins are handled isn’t scaling very well. I like that there’s the ability, but having the caller announce who they are without pre-screening seems a bit amateur. That’s not to say it didn’t work before, but rather that we just need to bump up the professionalism.
Bumping up the professionalism also means preparing an agenda for the call beforehand. It doesn’t necessarily have to be specific questions, but should at least include the broad strokes of what you’re going to talk about and when you’re going to do it. This will be helpful with both keeping the discussion going and making it more conversational (and less interview-y). I would suggest that we have this agenda established by Sunday night at the very latest.
Also, last bit of feedback. To end the awkward pauses, I think questions would be better if they were directed towards specific people.
All and all, great job! This is just a bit of constructive feedback.
First off, last week’s show was a pretty rockin’ job. The content was excellent, production quality good, and just a few silent spots. I’ve got a couple things I’d like to pass along for how we produce it, as well as a couple of things we should do this week. Here we go.
In the introduction, I think we should also include the date that the podcast was recorded. It might be something to the tune of “This edition of This Week in CoPress was recorded live on…” Calling it “TWiC Live” and then listening to it as a recorded version is a bit confusing. Also, I’d like to keep the brand as This Week in CoPress, or TWiC for short, and limit the references to it as TWiC Live. In the introduction, we should also mention that people can send feedback to twic@copress.org. I don’t believe anyone has ever sent email to that address, but there are bound to be people out there with ideas.
An idea on production quality: we might want to find a better method of doing this than Blog Talk Radio. I think the service is great, but phone in doesn’t really produce very good audio. I think it would also be better to be able to screen calls, or at least act like we have a sense of who is calling in at the time.
I have a couple of requests for this week. First, let’s take metrics on the number of people listening at the beginning of the show, the max number of listeners to the live show, and then the number of people listening at the end. We’ll be able to do more with this data later. Secondly, let’s have a section at the bottom of the show notes to track thinks that we think we can improve on for next week.
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