1. Start a blog | Individual project | Level: beginners

When employers Google your name, what will they find? The more often you blog, the higher up your name will rank on the search results. But blogging is about more than SEO. Blogging will strengthen your mind, your thoughts. A blog is a place for you to develop ideas you have about improving your news site or publication. If you build a community on your blog by linking out to others, then your ideas can be criticized and improved upon by commentors and other bloggers who respond to your posts.

If you don’t want to blog about the journalism industry, blog about your passion. If you have a second major in economics or a minor in women’s studies or you love horseback riding, blog about that. The more you blog, the more you will develop your voice as a writer.

Get started:

• How to start a blog
•  Choosing a blogging platform

No matter what you choose to blog about, there are rules. Because your blog will become a professional marketing tool for yourself. Take it seriously. Be responsible. Don’t write anything that would get you fired, destroy your personal brand, or come back to bite you in the butt. “Dear-diary” style blogs are only useful if meaningful lessons come out of them that others can relate to. The best rule is to stick with a theme, topic or style.

2. Redesign your portfolio | Individual project | Level: Intermediate

The summer is a perfect time to revamp your portfolio — or, if you don’t have one, start one. You can make your portfolio part of your blog or design a portfolio separate from your blog. Although it can be done in a program like Dreamweaver, it’s better to do it in a CMS so that keeping your clips up-to-date isn’t a hassle.

Key elements to have on your portfolio site:

• A short bio
• Links to your social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, your blog)
• Samples of your work, both writing and multimedia. Keep it limited to your absolute best pieces. Don’t make your potential employer sift through dozens of pieces to figure out which is best.

Although I’ve always agreed with the concept of having a resume on your site, I’ve since second-thought it. A resume should be tailored to specific jobs for which you’re applying, not a just a broad list of accomplishments. Your LinkedIn will suffice as that list of prior experience.

Resources:

• Ultimate Guide to Using WordPress For a Portfolio
• 7 journalists well-designed portfolios
• Top WordPress portfolio themes

3. Add a wiki to your news organization’s site| Group project | Level: Intermediate

This is something I’ve been thinking about since I read Daniel Bachhuber’s post about it in February. Why should news be disposable? Hard-hitting topics are continually developing and your community can help build upon the information you have through a wiki:

At the moment, if I as a student want to have any idea of what’s going on in student government, what bills are being voted on, and where my money is being used, I’d have to do some sleuthing. The most recent articles about the ASUO in the Daily Emerald will get me started, but I’d have to search across multiple sites, sift through a lot of information, and draft my own conclusions.

Instead, a landing page for the ASUO (and, a la the Guardian website, with nested topics) that was provided, developed, and maintained by a student news organization would be the first place I would go to get myself better acquainted with where the student government was currently at.

Wiki options:

• List of Wiki software comparisons
• MediaWiki (requires installation and database setup)
• PB Works (no installation required)

4. Develop a plan for a web-first workflow | Group project| Level: Intermediate

When your publication starts publishing regularly again in the fall, will you have a web-first plan in place? It may seem like I’ve over-emphasized it, but going web-first with your articles is just a small step toward maintaining a fresh, continuous flow of content on your site.

The summer is the perfect time to experiment with your web-first model because your publication likely only prints once a week or not at all. Develop a plan, train your staff and troubleshoot it. To make it a little easier, learn from my experiences with going web first. A few of the major problems we’ve had that you’ll want to plan ahead for:

• Who/how will you copy edit during the day?
• Who will post photos with your articles? Will you wait to post until you have photos?
• (Get your photographers in the habit of posting photos to a Flickr account so they’re readily accessible to post on your site as soon as the articles are posted)
• Will all articles go online first? Which will you save for print and why?

If you need a starting point, see the following flowchart of our workflow and read about it here.

Just a jumping off point

This is just a start of the endless possibilities for what you can do this summer. Among basics are things like learning HTML, practicing shooting/editing video, teaching yourself how to develop an iPhone app, redesigning your news site, laying the foundations for a full-fledged multimedia project, or holding a week-long camp with your new staff to brainstorm goals and ideas.

As always, good luck,

Lauren
Last post as CICM intern

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There are a few questions your staff will want to ask before pursuing the decision:

• Where do you stand (ethically) on running front-page ads and why?
• What’s the projected annual revenue you’d get from it?
• Is this a last resort or are you planning ahead (what other alternatives are there)?

Now, for my personal take on the issue.

Despite the unpopularity of my decision among my colleagues and advisors, I support the concept of a front page advertisement, but not as a permanent solution to newspaper budget problems.

The general arguments against front page ads are as follows:

“They will ruin our credibility.” In the case of the Daily Bruin, this may have been true. Or if you’re running an ad for a restaurant next to a positive restaurant review, that’s questionable too. But the “credibility” issue has nothing to do with where in the newspaper that ad is, but how it’s presented relative to other content (i.e. that example would still be considered ethically wrong on page 5).

“Newspapers traditionally haven’t put ads on the front page.” Throw tradition out the window. Traditionally, did newspapers run user-generated content? Traditionally, did newspapers produce video content? Relying on tradition hinders innovation. And, anyway, the convention of empty front pages didn’t start until 30 years ago. It’s not really a tradition.

“It would take away front valuable editorial content.” For newspapers that run wire or AP content, this argument of “valuable editorial content” is invalid. Although I’m not equating an advertisement to wire content, I do believe that if the front page content is not yours and not local, you might as well make money off that space.

Front page advertisements are not a permanent solution. Student newspapers need to be pursuing revenue outside of the print product if they’re looking for long-term sustainability.

This is where front page ads can help. Experimentation with web advertising is risky and it will fail time and time again. Extra money gained from front page ads can be used as “cushion” revenue, so to speak, while your staff works to figure out how to best utilize ads on the web — because you’ll never flourish online if you’re too scared to try it.

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Today UWIRE announced the winners of its second-annual UWIRE 100 with yours truly included on the list.

From the press release:

UWIRE, a free membership organization for college student media, announced today the second annual UWIRE 100, which honors the nation’s top collegiate journalists. The UWIRE 100 were selected from more than 825 nominations — representing students from more than 135 schools — submitted by professionals, students and educators. A UWIRE panel evaluated each candidate based on demonstrated excellence in the field of collegiate journalism.

Four members of the CoPress team (Daniel Bachhuber, Adam Hemphill, Greg Linch and Emily Kostic) were selected. I also recognize a names and faces from the Twittersphere (Anthony Pesce, Jackie Hai, and Emily Ingram, just to name a few).

Congrats to everyone. See the full list here.

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Update: Full disclosure – Lauren’s newspaper, the Mustang Daily, is partnered with CoPress and after her CICM internship, she will join the CoPress team. 

Since the Mustang Daily switched from College Publisher to WordPress two weeks ago (through CoPress), my inbox has been flooded with questions about the process. For all of you out there who still have lingering questions, this guide should provide all the answers .

The decision: Should you or shouldn’t you?

If you answer “yes” to one or more of the following, then you’re ready for the switch:

• Tired of not controlling your primary advertising spots?
• Wish you had an intuitive, user-friendly interface to work with?
• Ready for your site to not look like the hundreds of others in the college media world?
• Want it to be quick and easy to change the look, feel and content of your site?

A CoPress post entitled Can WordPress solve our College Publisher woes? from late September summarizes it nicely:

It (College Publisher) hasn’t been an open, adaptable system that allows students to truly innovate. You can’t open up the hood and fiddle around, or even replace the tires, because you don’t own the car. CP just lets you borrow it, in exchange for taking the profits from those gargantuan ads. That’s their business model, not necessarily a bad one for all customers, but inherently limiting.

If you’re in the same boat — and sorry for making assumptions, but you probably are in that boat — then now’s as good a time as ever to move on to a better system.

(If not, then I’ll quote an old inspirational poster cliché: “Change is not necessary. Survival is not mandatory.”)

Which option is best?

The open-source content management systems getting the most attention in the college media world right now are WordPress and Drupal. There’s also some talk about creation of a Django-based CMS specifically for newsrooms.There are many more options, but again, these are just the most popular.

At the Mustang Daily, we chose to go with WordPress mainly because it’s primarily blogging software and our reporters/editors are familiar with that. Not to mention, it’s clean, user-friendly and ridiculously simple to manage. But really, it’s up to you to decide what works best with your resources and staff.

A few features Drupal boasts:

• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Photo galleries
• File uploads and downloads
• Modules

Although I’ve never personally used Drupal, my understanding is that it takes a little more web geekiness to maintain (i.e. it’s less intuitive and simple than WordPress).
Example news sites using Drupal: Daily Illini, Minnesota Daily. Listen to a CoPress podcast here about college newspapers and the switch to Drupal. 

Features WordPress boasts:

• Full standards compliance (cross-browser compatibility)
• Customizable pages
• Links (blogrolls)
• Easy-to-use themes
• Cross-blog communication tools
• Multiple authors
• Intelligent text formatting
• Easy installation and upgrades
• Spam protection
• Full user registration
• Hundreds of free plugins

Example news sites using WordPress: The Miami Hurricane, The Whit Online, Mustang Daily, The Recorder

The process

In a CICM guest post far more informative than anything I could ever hope to provide, The Miami Hurricane‘s former webmaster Brian Schlansky described the transition his staff undertook in Sept. 2008. You should read it to get full details of how a switch functions.

I didn’t take the arduous steps Schlansky did to create the new Mustang Daily site– it what was perhaps the easy way out, I enlisted the help of CoPress to do the dirty work. That process was relatively simple on my end (handing over FTP access to the database files, followed by customizing design/pages).

The following are a few questions I’ve received most often about the process:

Q: How long did it take to get access to your College Publisher archives?

A: Short answer: About a month and a half.

Longer answer: After our first attempt to obtain archives from College Publisher, we were informed we’d need 90 days’ written notice from the editor in chief or the publisher consenting our desire to end our contract.

However, because we were not on a contract with them at the time, we were able to waive the 90 days (this is important for you, though, because you probably are on a contract). I requested access to our archive database the first week of January. We got the FTP login to access the files February 23. Had we been on a contract, we still wouldn’t even have archive access more than four months later.

I did learn from Emily Kostic, however, that when The Whit  made the request, they had access within two days. I don’t know how to account for that inconsistency, but I’d guess that they’re trying harder to hold onto customers now that more of us are eager to leave them behind.

Q: In what format did you receive your archives from College Publisher?

A: College Publisher gave us two CSV files that CoPress converted it into a MySQL database. (This part is over my head and a huge reason we reached out to CoPress instead of doing it ourselves).

Q: When should we tell College Publisher we’re ready to leave?

A: This is somewhat of a subjective response, but I’d say to do is as soon as you’re sure. There’s no use in waiting. The sooner you let them know, the better… especially if you’re locked into one of those handy contracts.

Q: Anything about WordPress you’re unhappy with so far? 

A:  Not really. Most of the problems we’ve had are in logistics of going web-first, although tweaks on WordPress’ admin end would make those logistics a lot simpler — and I’m not the only one who thinks it. For examples (WP chat, admin newsfeed + more), read a post by Daniel Bachhuber and listen to the podcast which hits it head on:  Improving WordPress’s admin for newsrooms.

You have the site. Now transition the staff.

A new site means a new workflow and a new workflow means a new mindset for your staff. But it’s easier said than done. My advice is to start early.

The biggest change we’ve made is going “web-first,” meaning we post to the web before stories go to print. Print is no longer the priority. (Read more about the structural changes here). In summary, we:

• Hired an additional copy editor
• Rescheduled the copy editors to work day shifts (and shorter night shifts) so we can post web-first
• Trained all reporters and editors to post straight to WordPress (instead of e-mailing articles and saving them on our server)

As soon as your new CMS functioning — even minimally — start training reporters and editors to use the system. Training is the key! They won’t get how simple it is until you show them.

But don’t take my work for it. It’s your turn.

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Use of a texting service is different than a mobile site or iPhone application because it delivers news to the reader without requiring the reader to seek it on his own. All he/she has to do is sign up.

I can see how it’d get annoying — perhaps spammy– but the service is all opt-in.  If you have high-quality content, this won’t be an issue.

Barack Obama’s campaign is proof tha text alerts can be successful. He texted alerts to his supporters and even broke news of his VP via text message.

It baffles me that most news sites which offer text alerts bury the feature somewhere on the site. Pro news organizations like Tampa Bay Online offer text alerts, but the feature is hidden under the “tools” option.

The New York Times offers the service too, but again, it’s a hidden option that most readers probably don’t realize they have.  Even a Google search didn’t yield results for LA Times’ mobile alerts, which only leads me to assume they don’t offer the service.

The option to subscribe for text alerts should be offered prominently on the homepage, right alongside the option to subscribe to RSS.

OaklandNorth.net, a project out of UC Berkeley, is a great example of college media that offers text alerts and features it on their homepage (found via Richard Koci Hernandez).

The best texting service is designed with narrow subscription options (i.e. specific categories/sections of news alerts) so your readers receive only the news they want.

WordPress users have the option of using a plugin called SMS Text Message which allows the admin to send an alert directly from the dashboard.  The downside is that it doesn’t allow readers to choose the category they want.

Another free option that allows you to mass text is Tatango, which can be used by anyone (even you College Publisher folk).  Tatango does allow readers to sign up for the category they choose and the account can be linked with your RSS feed.

The advertising hasn’t quite caught up for text alerts (The NYT doesn’t have a single ad in their alerts). I could see an ad offer being sent out every 10 alerts or included at the bottom of every few alerts.

Not everyone will sign up, but it’s about offering another means for your readers to consume your news. Those who prefer the service will value it.

So set a goal for yourself this week or this month to have a system for giving your readers text alerts. Experiment and see if it’s successful. Feature it somewhere on your homepage.

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