College Publisher is a vendor to college media, providing a hosted content management system for college publications. CP is by far the largest provider of such services in college student media, currently working with approximately 400 student publications across the U.S. As such, CP is definitely “in the mix” when considering the state of online college media.
Yesterday, I set up a “chat” online interview with College Publisher Director Paul Pennelli to discuss some of the issues we talk about here at Reinventing College Media. Along the way, we touched on some of the changes that have taken place over the past five years in online student media, what might be on the horizon for College Publisher’s system, and some geek talk about Web 2.0. Be sure to read to the end to find some interesting results from CP’s recent readership survey.
The interview was conducted using 37signals’ Campfire web-based group chat software. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation, edited to remove some chit-chat, emoticons, and some minor typos. I also added some paragraph returns to break up longer sections of text for readability.
(Disclaimer: The web site for North Greenville University’s Skyliner student newspaper has been served by CP for six years. I am an employee of NGU until the end of July)
*Bryan M.*: How many college media outlets do you serve right now?
*Paul*: At present, College Publisher works with approximately 400 student publications of various size from across the country.
*Bryan M.*: Are these all affiliated with student newspapers? i.e., any tv or radio outlets?
*Paul*: Not 100% of them. We have a few publications that are literary magazines, for example, but the vast majority are student publications. Right now, there are no radio/television stations using the College Publisher content management system.
With regard to radio and television content, one of our top priorities is working through ways in which our newspaper partners can integrate audio and video content into their web product.
*Bryan M.*: Do you have a number of how many student publications there are across the nation? i.e., how many there are who either aren’t online or using other systems?
*Paul*: We generally have the belief that there are anywhere between 2,500 and 3,000 student newspapers actively publishing at a given time. Many do not have a highly developed web-presence yet, as some often have a simple website that resides on university servers. Of course, I don’t mean to imply that all student newspaper websites that reside on university servers are simple.
*Bryan M.*: That’s more than I would have thought. So there’s still plenty of “growth room” for your business. Are you seeing a good number of newspapers contacting you these days to come online?
*Paul*: It’s a high number, but oftentimes a moving target. Many publications cycle in and out of regular publication and it’s oftentimes hard to nail down an accurate figure.
I think sometimes we lose sight of this issue, as newspapers that are members of CMA, ACP, and CNBAM, for example, are highly entrenched, active members of the campus media community. There are hundreds and hundreds of publications that fly below the radar, if you will.
Yes, we do see a fair amount of newspapers reaching out to us, many per week. Not all of them move forward with a College Publisher-powered website. We feel it’s important for us to offer the College Publisher technology to small newspapers with limited budgets, as it’s very necessary pre-professional training for the students who work at those student newspapers.
*Bryan M.*: Yes. So I want you to put your time-travel suit on for a second and think back eons ago to when CP first started. I think NGC was actually one of the first papers to sign up about six years ago (before I got there). What are some of the significant changes in the college media/internet relationship over that time period?
*Paul*: Well, in the interest of full disclosure, I was not at CP when it began in 2000; I was running my college newspaper at the time, and like NGC we were one of College Publisher’s first publication partners. But, since I came on board in 2001, a great deal has changed in the relationship between college media and the internet.
For one, the college media community has become significantly more “web-savvy,” which is a great thing. “Reinventing College Media” is a great example of that savvy.
Secondly, the college media has figured out that they have a great content distribution vehicle in the web; we just completed our second annual readership survey, where we ask subscribers to College Publisher websites to complete a very brief set of questions. We found that 34% of recent graduates (graduated in the last five years) read their online student newspaper two or more times per week, 47% of other alums and 54% of parents who were surveyed visit just as frequently.
Thirdly, college media is trying to take the lead in online publishing in ways that commercial media outlets are plainly missing. We don’t see too much motivation among college newspapers to keep up with the local newspaper in their market; they’re aiming big. They want their site to work like NYT.com or CNN.com. It’s great to see that kind of thought-leadership in student media.
In addition, many in student media, particularly at large, independent campus dailies, frequently ask the hard question “how are we going to make money online if all our readers are moving in the direction of our website?”
*Bryan M.*: so a growing realization of the importance of the internet as a medium. Anything else?
*Paul*: This may be an off-shoot of this growing importance, but we’re seeing more and more students who are really excited about online publishing, who look at online-publishing as a career. For them, it’s not just about journalism, it’s about focusing the journalistic ethos on this new medium. And, they don’t want to simply use their keyboard in this medium; these students tend to look at photos, video, and audio as fair game, a truly converged approach.
*Bryan M.*: okay, let’s talk about that for a moment. Clearly, audio and video are becoming more important functions of online media. You mentioned you were working on ways to help student media get that material online. Could you explain that response in more detail?
*Paul*: I would be happy to. We think about audio and video every day, and that is a major change from as recently as 12 months ago. It is certainly a top-of-mind issue for everyone who works at College Publisher, from management, to our technologists, to our newspaper relationship people.
Some of your readers may be surprised to read this, but the College Publisher content management system has accepted audio and video files in its media manager for about two years. However, the end-user experience wasn’t fantastic and files often had to be limited in size. Today, we’re doing a lot better. By using our templating language, newspapers can present their video content in a more elegant fashion and they can even host their video content in our LAMP environment. The same goes for audio, such as podcasts.
The challenge for us as a business, Bryan, is to figure out how to make that offer scale to hundreds of newspapers and pay for it. Hosting and serving large audio and video files can be very costly; there are players out there in market such as “YouTube”:http://www.youtube.com who host and serve a staggering amount of content, but they have no existing business model. Because we’re a small business, we have to make sure that as we offer more and more to newspapers in the way of hosting and content delivery, we can also make the numbers work. It’s a reality of our business.
*Bryan M.*: So what’s the best way for a college online site to do audio and video? Host their own a/v files and link to your site? Do you foresee continuing to host such large files (and the accompanying bandwidth loads) into the future?
*Paul*: Right now, we’re evaluating these very questions and we’ve yet to make a final decision. For the time being, we’re supporting the audio and video files of student newspapers but also providing them with ways to simply link a/v content to their College Publisher-powered site from servers housed in their offices.
*Bryan M.*: So moving on from the thorny A/V issue, what are some other things CP is working on for the near future?
*Paul*: Sure. Our developers are working on a bunch of improvements that are slated to launch for the fall. Our programmers are going to make cosmetic and usabilitity improvements to the College Publisher Administration interface, we will roll out ways for “WordPress -powered blogs to resides within the look and feel of the College Publisher website, we are going to improve our LAMP environment, and provide our partners with more web metrics so they can learn more about the behavior of their users.
There are other improvements that we’re still developing that should also launch in 2006. While student newspapers are our top priority, as we come closer to solving the a/v questions, we may also be able to provide a more compelling reason for a college radion and/or television station to work with our company.
We are going to rewrite all of our online help documentation, and probably relaunch it as a wiki, so that all editors and webmasters can contribute to the help documentation. We’re also going to build more videos that will allow a user to see functions utilized, first-hand.
Secondly, we want to try to improve the end-user experience on a College Publisher website. We’re definitely stay busy on the product development front over the summer months.
*Bryan M.*: Related to those issues, I’m curious what you folks are planning to do with AJAX, which is used in programs like campfire and more and more in other web sites (Yahoo! News’ new version, for instance).
*Paul*: The short answer is, we’re not sure as of yet. There may be some opportunity for AJAX to play a role in College Publisher. Our developers have gotten up to speed on AJAX, Ruby on Rails, and Macromedia’s FLEX over the last six months, so we have some ability there. The constant challenge for our software developers is: “what program will help us best acheive the desired result for the product?” AJAX certainly enters the discussion as that question is deliberated.
*Bryan M.* : I want to get your take on a buzzword that’s going around: Web 2.0 What does that word mean to you? And how does it relate to CP? Is that part of your discussions in house about future development? Or just hype?
*Paul*: The technologies used in Web 2.0 can be applied into our offerings, but Web 2.0 in and of itself, is overly-hyped. (Matt Crist, one of our programmers, walked by my desk and we quickly deliberated over that one.)
*Bryan M.*: You mentioned wikis and weblogs earlier. What approach is CP taking to incorporating these types of publishing technologies (and others) into your product? (for instance, you mentioned WordPress support)
*Paul*: We realized pretty early on that programs such as WordPress were being adopted at quick pace and there was going to be a high demand within student media to use an accepted and widely-known blog engine. So, we set out to integrate WordPress, rather than demand that journalists in student media use a product created by our staff. Why reinvent the wheel?
At first, the integration wasn’t so hot, but we’ve recently made tremendous strides and WordPress intstances can now integrate quite elegantly into an instance of College Publisher.
With respect to wikis, our first corporate foray into wikis will be our new help documentation; if a student newspaper came to us with a need for a wiki on its site, we would do our best to accomodate the request. We actually just integrated the first wiki on a College Publisher site a couple of weeks ago.
*Bryan M.*: Do you have any examples of the wordpress integration you’d care to share with the world? Or the wiki?
*Paul*: Well, the newspaper that we integrated with the wiki is not live on our system yet, and our new WordPress integation isn’t live yet. We haven’t completed testing on it. But, it works and will be available to our newspaper partners in the fall. (Sorry that I can’t take this opportunity to show them off! They look great though!)
*Bryan M.*: I want to move on to some of your survey results, but I have one more related “integration” question. I’m going to use the “F” word - “Flash“. Do you have any plans related to that software?
*Paul*: Flash is a polarizing topic amongst those in the development community, from what I understand. We think Flash has its uses in certain applications. With regard to written content, we would be very leary of introducing Flash into the equation unless search engines and indexers like “Google” and “Yahoo!” changed their approach to accomodate Flash. However, like I said, it does have positive applications; we have a photo slideshow that’s available to all of our partners that displays to end-users in Flash.
*Bryan M.*: Does it incorporate audio. That seems to be a common thing these days (audio slideshows)
*Paul*: We believe that search engines, RSS, and aggregators like Google News and Yahoo! News are going to play huge roles in how people experience content in the future, so we want to make sure that our newspapers’ content reaches as many eye-balls as it can, in that fashion. With respect to audio slideshows, I’m actually not sure - I’ll check up on that for you and get back to you. I will certainly send you links once we’re live on the blogs - I can probably send you a link to a test instance of CP where it’s live
I’ll get back to you on that, as well.
*Bryan M.*: Okay. speak to me a little bit about the aggregation question. What is CP doing on this front, and how can college publications “optimize” themselves for that future.(i.e., make themselves more visible to readers)
*Paul*: Well, we spend a lot of time thinking on this issue. We actually recently hired a dedicated front-end programmer to make a positive impact on this very issue. We try to ensure that all College Publisher articles are tagged and named in such a way that they will be quickly picked up by search engines and aggregators. We also allow newspapers to meta-tag their stories, which also helps.
For smaller newspapers a consistent publishing cycle always helps, because spiders and robots are on schedules and look for updates at certain days and times. The Google algorithm, for example, is proprietary, so there is a lot of guess-work that needs to be done on the part of online publishers, that’s for sure.
Two more things I just thought of:
We now display all College Publisher pages in semantic “XHTML”:http://www.xhtml.org/. I’m told by our developers that this merely means that each artcle page has a distinct hierarchy of tags, so that they can be more easily digested by search engines and aggregators. We also ping “Ping-O-Matic”:http://pingomatic.com/ when new content is published on the network.
*Bryan M.*: Now, you mentioned a couple of surveys you had conducted recently. What did you find that would be of interest to our readers?
*Paul*: Definitely. Well, we conduct a readership survey every year. This year, over 7,000 readers of college newspapers responded to our questions. There was a lot data that would be of interest to your readers, and I can make more of this data available to them shortly, once we have it orgnized. The survey closed recently, on Friday. But, at first glance, there is a lot of learn here:
An overwhelming majority people say that they frequently read their campus newspaper for local content: 90% cited campus news as a reson the read, while 59% and 41% cited commentary and entertainment, respecitvely. Those were the top three reasons why readers read college newspapers.
Another interesting tidbit was that 44% of readers want their campus newspaper to feature blogs and 30% want podcasts.
There are some other great bits of information on newspaper readership (campus, local, national) and additional information on the popularity of other websites.
*Bryan M.*: did you separate out “online readership” from “print readership”?
*Paul*: Yes we did.
Interest results:
35% of respondents say they read the online edition of their campus newspaper two or more times per week, while only 26% read the print edition two or more times per week. Keep in mind, however, that our respondents were not isolated to the on-campus community, so the results are a bit skewed against the print edition.
*Bryan M.*: Where do you plan to put make those results available when you get them sorted?
*Paul*: We planned to put them up on “collegepublisher.com”:http://www.collegepublisher.com and we would certainly be open to allowing “Reinventing” to post a copy from your site, as well.
*Bryan M.*: Sure. I look forward to more data. One last thing I want to touch on is “challenges.” From your perspective, what are some of the main challenges facing college media in the near future? (these can be specifically online-related, or more general, i.e., social, cultural, etc.)
*Paul*: In general, newspapers are really struggling to maintain relevancy in a world where there is a plethora of media options. The choices are literally endless for the consumer. On the bright-side, no one believes that content is going away. In actuality, content is more important than ever, but the manner in which consumers experience and prefer content is changing.
Campus newspapers have an enviable position. Student journalists provide local content that fills a niche that no other publication or media outlet can fill, and as a result, most campus newspapers will most likely enjoy high levels of exposure and readership, if they continue to present content in a manner preferred by the readers.
The challenge for us at College Publisher is to continue to talk to student journalists and readers and ensure that our products and services help student journalists acheive that end - if we do, everyone wins out.
*Bryan M.*: Thanks, Paul. I think that will be a good end for this interview. (stops tape)
*Paul*: Thanks, Bryan. May I make one more comment? With regard to the future product development of College Publisher, I want to stress that college journalists, editors, and webmasters should feel empowered to reach out to us with ideas and suggestions, because we certainly use them. At this point, College Publisher is really a product shaped by the entire community.
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