Friday afternoon, Andrew Spittle, Drew Geraets, Mo Jangda, Lauren Rabaino Tom Altman, and Jason Kristufek joined me on a Skype conference call to start wrapping the ideas we’ve generated for a better editorial workflow for WordPress into more concrete deliverables that can be used to draft a spec.
This was the first time Tom and Jason had been able to join the discussion, so we kicked the conference call off by discussing their use of WordPress with Gazette Communications. Tom has more of the code expertise, while Jason has a lot of experience with WordPress. At the moment, Gazette Communications is running twelve to thirteen websites with WordPress. Most of them are niche websites with one to two people interacting with the admin, but they have a few where more people are involved (Iowa.com as an example). In the near future, their flagship Gazette Online website will be moving to WordPress and will have 12 to 15 people working within the admin.
Continue reading ‘Discussing WordPress Editorial Admin Features’
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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’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.
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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What do you think about these ideas? Please add others in the comments.
- What do you need to have a successful college news org online? (inspired by Alex Klein, Duke Chronicle)
- How do you change the collective mindset from that of a primarily print-centric organization to Web-centric organization?
- How do you staff your paper to work in 24-hours news environment? Who’s in and at what hours? (asked by Emily Ingram, Daily Nebraskan)
- Building an online staff, including bringing programmers/computer science students into the mix
- Regardless of my CMS, what are some free tools I can use to improve my college news site?
While going through my harddrive on the long bus ride, I came across this text from the first splash page that Megan Taylor and I put together:
The coPress vision is to synthesize an open source, college and/or local news consortium around an online platform (or CMS) that easy to deploy, simple to use, and allows for varying degrees of customization. As crucial as the software is an eco-system of developers and innovators from our sector (i.e. student newspapers and possibly small local papers) that help to continually evolve the platform. One side effect of putting this together digitally would be to also create a comprehensive knowledge center for newsrooms that are interested in using the platform and joining the eco- system. We are currently collaborating on wiki and through a Google Group. Check back soon for more updates!
I think it serves as a good reminder as to the broader goals of what we’re trying to do, especially as I try to reformulate and synthesize the about page. Keep it up, guys!
For those of you who couldn’t make it/didn’t get our one day notice.
Albert, Greg, and I did a virtual panel for a BarCamp NewInnovation
conference today. It was much fun, and I hope none of us said anything
too embarrassing. 
Just wanted to share a few things we learned:
• We were told to checkout:
http://www.newsorviews.com/ — a project being done by one of their grad students
http://campusmediagroup.com/home.asp — a way to do quick and easy ads.
(i’m sorta interested in this one)
• Mogulus is still a bit buggy — it caused my comp to crash (a mac,
crash!?), and we lost audio a few times, etc… still it was very cool
to be able to get 4 video streams live
• Greg, Albert, and I had a skype text chat going on in the background
which was super clutch for communicating with each other.
• The three of us were online about 30 min ahead of time to make sure
everything worked … we used all our time
• Mogulus has a weird video delay that makes it impossible to listen
to your own audio because you’re hearing what you said ~3 sec ago.
Sorta sucks, but… meh. Solution: mute your audio when talking.
• Since I had never used Mogulus before, I have to say, the backend is
pretty sweet.
• We really need some girls on the CoPress team
• We really need an ad solution.
• People are still very worried about how to convince their newsrooms
to go online in a significant way, let alone web first. Us CoPress
folk need to remember not to leave the masses behind.
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