Tag Archive for 'CoPress Blog'

November 8, 2009: NCMC09 recap

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Daniel
on November 9, 2009
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Another Sunday night, another team conference call. We skipped the week prior because some of the team was still traveling back from ACP/CMA. Joining me on the call were Greg, Miles, Sam, Andrew, and Lauren.

First at bat was a recap of ACP/CMA, what worked well, and what we want to do better next time. Andrew remarked that, for CoPress, the conference went as well as we could’ve hoped for. It would’ve been sweet if we had a booth, though. We learned from Logan while at the conference that the booths were only $650 and included four conference registrations. Originally, we thought that vendors were required to sponsor a part of the conference and that fee ran into the thousands of dollars (i.e. outside of our budget). The informal way we were there, though, was good for networking and being on panels was a plus. Andrew also remarked that at one of the panels he was at in the audience another audience member, unprompted, asked a question about us. Lauren thinks that, for next time, we should do more branding, have rack cards, etc. I’d personally like to be more “network-y” and talk with more people. In addition, I think it would be really cool to expand our coverage of the panels and make sure we have people covering each tech-related one. Last but not least, it would be really sweet to bring the entire team to the next conference we attend.

On the organizational side of things, I spent several hours on Sunday entering line items for invoices, receipts, etc. Our ledger should be completely up to date and, thanks to Albert’s efforts, we’ll be able to do up to date reporting on our revenues and expenses.

For the blog this week, Greg is putting together a post about how the Texas Tribune can be a model for student news organizations and Lauren will be writing one about transitioning your web staff from year to year. Lauren and I will also talk about the wiki, as we hope to start developing the content again.

 
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Website v3 Some mockups

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Joey
on August 7, 2009
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Just wanted to share some mockups of our site design and get some feedback. The following are two potential landing pages for the blog. Note: the header has been changed significantly since these mockups were created.

Blog Av2Blog Bv1

Posts for the next three weeks

Published
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Emily
on June 12, 2009
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June 18th: Minn Daily App & How to Take Your Facebook Presense to the Next Level

  • This is huge. We really need to be talking more about this. I’m thinking someone can get in contact with someone at the Minn Daily and get details on the whole process from beginning to end. Because the project is open source, we can expect a lot more college media outlets to be doing this. Maybe the Minn can offer up some advice?

June 24th: Best of Student Media Podcasts

  • An in-depth look on what college newspapers are doing well. Are they daily? Weekly? Do the best podcasts include conversations between staffers on recent news? Are they interviews with staff members or news makers? On the tech side, what equipment do they use to record and edit?

July 1: Analytics – When to Know if You’re Falling Behind

  • Every industry has their standard (found out this summer 4 minutes is the average time visitors spend on cable news’ Web sites). What is it for college newspapers? How many pages does the average reader visit? How do you know when your site is falling behind?

Recategorizing the Blogs

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Daniel
on March 24, 2009
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One of the things Id like to accomplish this week is creating a formal categorization protocol for our two blogs: the CoPress Blog and Inside CoPress. At the moment, categories for both are haphazard and not very useful. The CoPress Blog has a couple of named categories, We Clicked On for instance, one called Commentary that Ive been filing most blog posts under, and several other miscellanous ones that are relics from our previous website. The categories for Inside CoPress are ones Ive made up as weve gone along, and Ive tried to stick with the type of post it was (i.e. an idea vs. a question vs. research).

My goal is to clean these up. Inside CoPress should be easy enough. What I propose is that we categorize based on priority; there will be three categories, high, medium, and low, which will dictate the timeliness of the post. This post will be filed under Low Priority, for instance. Well then use the tags to indicate the topics within the post. This post will be tagged CoPress Blog, Inside CoPress, logistics, etc.

I tag my email within Google Apps in a similar fashion. What will be really cool about this, if we adopt the team blog better, is that it will become almost like a shared email account. I really envision Inside CoPress to be the place where we have non-sensitive discussions (i.e. nearly all) in an open, indexed manner so that we can easily go back to and build upon previous conversations (instead of having them over and over). More on that later.

Categories for the CoPress Blog will be trickier. We have three defined ones already: We Clicked On, This Week in CoPress, and Annoucements (which will become Team Announcements). I think we should start Reports from the Field or From the Network, and a few others that will be like the sections in a paper. Im open to ideas as to what those will be, however. Thoughts? Emily, it would be great to hear your opinion.

March 19 2008: Away for the Weekend

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Daniel
on March 19, 2009
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I’m headed out of town, and completely away from the web, from Friday through late night Tuesday. Adam and I had a short call Thursday morning to cover what should be done while I’m done, and we’re attaching the audio so you can listen to it as well. I’ll synthesize the major points.

rss-in-nav-barOver the last couple of days, I’ve put a lot of work into tweaking the website to the way we need it. There’s a RSS icon in the navigation bar that is currently linked to our main RSS feed, but will soon be linked to our new subscribe page. We haven’t had any subscribe buttons on the site yet, so I’m hoping this will affect our numbers. Greg, it would be sweet if you could track that for the next few weeks. For everyone, if you could take a half hour this weekend to go through our website with a comb and identify all of the changes you still think need to be made. I’ve created a project in Basecamp that everyone should have access to, and what I’d like you to do is add the changes you think need to be made to the lists titled “Minor functionality tweaks“, “Minor content tweaks” or “Minor styling tweaks.” When I get back, I’ll then go through the list, see what needs to be done, and then divvy up accordingly.

I haven’t made any progress on the strategic goals spreadsheet, but I still intend on doing that next week for completion by next weekend. That conference call will be the first review of our strategic goals, and such a call will happen every three months.

We also discussed editorial stuff briefly. Adam is going to write the link round up for tomorrow which I hope to roughly outline later today. I will also (hopefully) be putting together a subscribe page announcement post for Monday, although I may have to pass that off to someone else. Greg will be writing a #rev2oh post on Tuesday, and I’ll work with Emily on getting Steve Buttry’s podcast up Wednesday.

Feb 15 2009: CRM, fundraising via The Point, and hosting affiliates

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Daniel
on February 17, 2009
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On Sunday evening, Adam, Joey, Greg, Miles, Bryan, and Kevin joined me for the Sunday night conference call. We were quite successful is keeping it brief, especially because we were plagued with a series of Skype difficulties in the middle of the call.

For operations, Miles installed SugarCRM in the past week. It’s pretty darn powerful, but we should be able to grow with it.

On editorial, we talked about producing content the preceding week. For one reason or another we didn’t publish on Thursday, but I though it was alright if we miss occasionally. In the upcoming week, we’re going to run a post on topical wikis for student news (which I still have to write) and an opinion piece on why reporters should be allowed to comment on their articles (Joey). We also have two stellar ideas for This Week in CoPress including a discussion of monetizing online and also bridging the gap between print and digital. In the forum, we’re going to kick off discussion on tips and tricks to bridge that gap.

Financially speaking, we didn’t apply for the J-Lab grant that was due last week because we didn’t feel as though we fit the criteria. Signed contracts are now going to live in Project Pier. Our initiative to fundraise via The Point isn’t working so well, and Bryan suggests that we just ask for money in general instead of specifically for hosting.

We also covered community, hosting, and organizational stuff Sunday evening. Earlier we were interested in having the first CoPress Unconference associated with NewsInnovation Philly, but there are now concerns that it would be too close to finals and graduation for some people. A few people in the CoPress Network have suggested they would be interested in doing website critiques. We might schedule the first of these in the next couple of weeks.

For hosting, we now have 6 to 8 schools set to come on board in the next several months (I’m not entirely sure of the timeline). We’re also looking to set up a program where, if hosting isn’t really your thing, you can still support us by buying your theme with an affiliate program, etc.

 
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Things to do regarding the website this week

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Daniel
on February 11, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 1 Comment

From our agenda at the last conference call, I think there are several things it would be sweet if we could add to the website this week. They’re open to whomever wants to take a crack at them, and I’ll probably take the leftovers when I’m done traveling. Speaking of, I’ve got an overnight bus ride tonight to Lima, and then a red-eye flight to Portland tomorrow night. I’m hoping that the airport in Lima has free wifi, but no certainties.

Here’s what we’ve got:

  • Metadata in the header is configured incorrectly. I tried sharing a link on Facebook and it doesn’t pull a summary, the title tag, or any images. This might be a problem with our theme or with the SEO plugin we use.
  • Switching out PodPress (if possible). I think PodPress is breaking with the theme too, and it might just be simpler to embed the MP3 file as an enclosure and use an audio player.
  • Make the blog headlines more prominent on the home page. I’m open to ideas as to how this might be done.
  • Revising the about page. I’m going to do some work on the bus on the copy, but we still need team bios and photos.
  • Adding to the blog sidebar. It would be sweet to have a list of our most recent links, and a player with the most recent version of This Week in CoPress. There might be a plugin that does this, or it might be a little bit more difficult.

I’m also thinking that we should change the URI structure of the website a bit (so that our blog lives at copress.org/blog and we remove the “category” slug). We can wait until Sunday for this tho.

Anything I’m missing?