Update II: here is College Publisher’s response – ed.

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.”)

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(Full disclosure: CICM intern Lauren Rabaino is the online and multimedia editor for mustangdaily.net).

Today marks the end of one long journey and the start of a new one for me as the online editor of the Mustang Daily. Even before I was online editor, I had a vision of making the Mustang Daily’s Web site something spectacular, and that vision has come full circle with the launch of our new WordPress site, hosted and supported by CoPress.

The Mustang Daily has been with College Publisher since 2006 when CP bought over New Digital Media. Since the launch around 11 p.m. yesterday, a common question is, “How long did the switch take?” Here is a brief timeline:

• December 2008: I first heard about CoPress via Twitter and instantly DMed them for details
• January 2009: E-mailed CoPress informing them that we were “very seriously” interested in joining
• Late February 2009: Acquired access to our College Publisher archive
• Late March 2009: College Publisher database transfer was complete; we started working on customizing our design
• April 2009: Official launch

About four months after I first heard of CoPress, my the new site is up and running. That’s a quick turnaround (thanks CoPress).

The switch goes far beyond design. Structural changes that come with the new site:

• 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)

Now that I don’t have as much responsibility for posting articles, I plan to spend more time working with reporters to develop high-quality multimedia. With full control of the site, you can also expect to see more web-only content (see my earlier post about features I’m working on).

We welcome any suggestions on how we can improve the site so far. We’ve already received and followed through with a few suggestions from Twitter followers, we’d love to hear yours.

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