By Mark Plenke
Adviser, The Lions’ Roar Online

Editors at the Lions’ Roar, the student paper at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minn., decided last spring to drop their print edition and go totally online. The decision was difficult because the paper had published continuously since the school opened in the late ‘60s and had a good reputation and a loyal audience among faculty and staff.

The editors had noticed, though, that there just weren’t enough reporters, editors and photographers to do a consistently good job of putting out both a print newspaper and a website. They’d also noticed that the number of newspapers they were recycling was getting bigger despite a dynamic redesign and stepped up efforts at social-media marketing.

So they pulled the plug.

Here’s what happened and what we’ve learned:

• There were complaints, both during the informal public-comment period last spring when they made the decision and this fall when the news racks stayed empty as school started. But we didn’t hear from a single student; a few faculty said they missed the print paper.
• The students and I did a good job of letting people know what was happening, including a campaign that used the empty racks (Can’t find a paper?–look online!) to promote the switch.
• Readership went WAY up. The number of unique visitors to the site is triple what it was last May. The comparison I like the most: Lions’ Roar used to print 2,000 papers and close to half were recycled. In the first full month of school this fall, the website had 2,893 unique visitors and comparable numbers for October (2,821).
• The key to success was giving up the student fee money that would have been used for printing (about $7,500 a year) to secure a promise of weekly access to the database of student email accounts. The webmaster now sends a weekly update of what’s on the website to every student email box, and we publish the same hyperlinked mini-home page to an employee portal so staff has one-click access to the site.
• The biggest growing pain was getting students to understand that they weren’t putting out a paper every three weeks anymore, that news had to be covered, reported and posted in a hurry (still working on that one, but it’s gotten a lot better lately).
• Many more slideshows and video stories are being produced now. It’s no longer a medium for feature stories only.
• Writers are using more web-friendly forms, especially lists.
• Blogs have replaced columnists, a really good change in terms of the writing. It’s much tighter and brighter.
• Students are thinking more visually because it’s the best way to get a story promoted on the home page.
• Happily, a few advertisers (but none of the national agencies, unfortunately) have decided to go online with the paper.
• The one minus has been the loss of social time when layout night disappeared, but we’ve started scheduling staff events (a pizza-and-pop party in the office this week, for example) to help replace it.

I’m biased, but I think it’s fair to say the change was a big success. The site has three times as many visitors as it did last spring and at least a thousand more readers than the print paper had each month. I also think the staff is being served well because they’ve learned to report news when it’s still news and they’re broadening the professional skills they’ll need to find a job when they’re done with school.

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Dan Reimold outlines the strategy in a very complete article for PBS MediaShift: Revolution in Georgia: Student Newspaper Goes Digital First.

I interviewed Red & Black Publisher Harry Montevideo about some of the behind-the-scenes details of the development of this new publishing model.

I’m including a transcript of the entire interview below the fold, but I did want to mention a few of the top-level takeaways from the discussion:

• The Red & Black spent a lot of time looking at the issue before deciding to go from daily to weekly.
• The staff and board of directors spent a lot of time researching the issue before making a decision.
• Students were understanding and accepting of the change – a key buy-in.
• The staff interviewed advertisers and received assurances that the advertising income would be similar even in a weekly format.
• The Red & Black hasn’t had to spend a lot of extra money on equipment to upgrade.
• The student staff structure is pretty much the same as it was, with the exception of a few fewer page designers.
• The new Ampersand magazine is an effort to pull in students who normally wouldn’t work for a newspaper, and provide another vehicle for advertising income.
• The primary goal of the Red & Black is still training students for their future careers in journalism, no matter what format/publication schedule they have.

Here’s a look at the cover of the first issue of Ampersand:

The full version will be online at the Red & Black web site next week, says Ed Morales, editorial adviser. The magazine might get its own dedicated web site next year.

I’m paraphrasing the topics that we discussed, rather than transcribing my questions. It was a bit of a wide-ranging discussion, and I think this format is easier to follow.

Discussions about changing the Red & Black’s publication format

It’s a conversation that’s been going on for probably 2 or 3 years, along with the industry. Nobody here has been unaware of the issues that are affecting newspapers, newspaper readership, the delivery of news.

At what point did that conversation turn in to “Hey, let’s go digital first, and print weekly?” Officially, the board approved it at their June meeting a couple of months ago. Unofficially, the discussion has been going on since November last year.

It’s a relatively a big change. There’s a couple of ways you can look at it. Going from a daily to a weekly sounds on the onset like it’s a big change, but when you get into it and start to look at what the mission of the paper is and the community we serve, the end result is it’s kind of a big deal, but it’s kind of not a big deal.

Buy-in from the board of directors

There was a huge amount of work involved in persuading a 15-member board whose average age is probably approaching 70 that life as a student has changed so dramatically that our business model needs to change. It took a tremendous amount of research … e-mails, reports, communications to give them the information that they needed to make sure that this was a sound decision for the Red & Black.

And the board was diligent enough in their responsibilities to say, “Hey, we need to make sure that we’ve crossed the t’s dotted the i’s that we’ve done everything we need to do to make the best decision for the Red & Black.”

Buy-in from student journalists

One of my big reservations was that my perception that a majority of the staff was still print-centric and would want to hold on to a daily print edition. When we did sit down fairly early in the process and talk to them about it, I was pleasantly surprised for them to realize that they knew the industry was changing – how they were consuming news, how their fellow students were consuming news – and they were actually kind of relieved to get out of the cycle of creating the ‘daily miracle’ and packaging it up in a weekly and be able to devote more time to delivering the news digitally.

So, to my surprise, it was very well received among the student staff. I thought it might take more convincing, more selling them on the idea. They grabbed it immediately.

Inspiration or ideas for the new format?

I follow the industry fairly closely through various listservs, Poynter Institute, and trade publications.

We’ve been doing the same thing the industry’s been doing, looking for the golden egg or the magic pill that was going to solve all our problems, but what all of us have found is there is no one right solution or easy path going forward.

Part of this started with a little bit of a “What’s a worst case scenario: what does the Red & Black look like 5 years from now?” Maybe at some point in time we’re only able to afford to print once a week. It almost kind of came in a backwards sense.

Once we started looking at some of those things, and looking at the pros and cons and seeing how many of the pros outweighed the cons, we said, well, maybe if this happens in 5 years, it’s not such a bad idea. Maybe we should look at having it happen now rather than having this decline continue, being forced down that path.

One of the key factors for us was, we actually went out and did interviews with advertisers, and asked them how would they value the Red & Black as an advertising vehicle if we published once a week versus daily. And the feedback we got from the advertisers was that they were most interested in reaching that market in the most efficient way, and that they saw the value of being able to put their ad in one product that reached a larger percentage of the market through a longer shelf life, through increased pickup.

And basically, it told us that they would spend in essence the same amount that they would spend whether we were daily or weekly. They are interested in reaching what’s a very affluent 40,000-plus demographic in a relatively small marketplace. The university community is a huge player in the economic portion of Athens. That didn’t change anything.

That kind of gave us some confidence that the business model … that we could support ourselves financially. We’re pretty confident that that’s going to hold up.

Campus response

Honestly, there hasn’t been a huge response. I’m not sure we were expecting anything. There hasn’t been a lot of “Gee, I want my daily Red & Black back,” there hasn’t been a lot of that. We’ve got the largest freshman class ever at the University of Georgia, so we’ve got 5,500 students who don’t know any different anyway. They’re new to the university, they weren’t expecting a daily newspaper, didn’t know there was a daily newspaper. Close to a third of the student population on campus isn’t familiar with the fact that the Red & Black wasn’t a daily product.

We took a fair amount of time trying to promote it, trying to explain it, so maybe we did a good enough job in saying what we were doing and why.

Staff restructuring

We’re breaking news every day. We’ve got pretty much the same staff structure that we had before. The one area that it’s impacted is page design. We’re putting a few fewer pages out, and spreading the work out a couple of days. So I think we’ve got a couple of fewer page designers, but by and large, they’re still working some on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights getting the weekly product out.

If you were inside the Red & Black, you wouldn’t see things much different than it was when we were printing. We’re just delivering the news digitally versus in print.

Online traffic

We’re seeing about a 20 percent increase in unique visitors and a tad bit less than that in page views. Our local traffic is up as well. We’re expecting this to be somewhat of an evolution as people who had been daily readers some of them will convert and read us online daily, some of them probably won’t.

That’s something we’re going to promote over the course of the year, we’re going to try to encourage people to get their daily news, to keep in touch with what’s happening at the university on a daily basis by either going to the web site or viewing us on their mobile device or following us on Twitter or getting our e-mail headlines or even interacting in Facebook. social networking, all those things are part of the plan to stay engaged with our audience, basically.

(Print circulation) has gone up to 14,000 each Thursday. It was 12,000. We feel that with the paper being out there over the course of a week, we’ll be able to distribute 14,000 papers.

Ampersand

We’ve got a 32-page 4-color magazine going out. We’re excited about that, to see how that’s received. Some of that will be distributed in the racks that would normally have a Monday paper in it, but we’ll also be distributing them through retail channels, hotels, visitor’s center, so it’s a little bit different distribution channel than just sticking it in news racks.

We expect that to go a little bit quicker. We may increase that circulation as time goes on. We wanted to start the product with a fairly low cost of entry for the advertisers and just gauge how well it’s picked up. Not having anything like that on campus now, the first issue covering football, football being so huge here, we’re pretty optimistic that it’s going to be picked up fairly quickly.

We’ve never done a magazine before, and it’s one of the largest disciplines in the journalism college here. We’ve tried to encourage them to work in the newspaper in the past, but the magazine is more of an attempt to give the magazine students their sandbox to play in so to speak. If we can make a little bit of money, we’re happy to, but for the most part, the magazine is put together with a  volunteer staff with some oversight from the regular newspaper/online core of students that make up every media operation.

The idea from the educational standpoint is to provide the tools and the infrastructure here so that students to get all the experience that they need so that when they graduate they’ll be more marketable in the marketplace. That’s kind of bottom line what I think the mission of student newspapers ought to be.

We want to serve the community and give them dynamic products … but our real mission here is focused on giving the students the training and experience that they need so that they can go out and get jobs when they graduate. We try to add software, hardware, whatever, that enables them to do more, to deliver news as it’s currently being delivered.

I think the shift to weekly is a pretty big shift in itself, the magazine is a pretty ambitious product. Where we’d like to focus this year is to try to get those done as best we can, and deliver those two products solidly, and obviously deliver more content online.

We’ve made a few minor improvements in the web site. But we’re looking at it as kind of an evolution, not just a big shift – here we are. It’s going to take some time to build more online-savvy students, it’s going to take time to get more magazine expertise, the weekly newspaper will probably be tweaked over the course of the year. I think for the next year, we’ve got our hands full with what we’re doing.

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UPDATE

Editor’s note: These are the responses I received from College Media Network’s Rusty Lewis in response to questions I e-mailed him about their new business model/fee structure.

Since the announcement says that papers with an average of 25,000 page views/mo. will not be charged a fee, how many of your papers do you expect would be charged? What percentage of the total client list is that?

Approximately 100 CMN news sites are above the 25k threshold; this is about 20 percent of our network. We attempted to create several lower cost options for the publications with traffic below this mark, as we know many of them have limited resources.

When it comes to paying fees, there’s never a great time to implement such a change or make this sort of announcement. We understand many student publications use the spring and early summer to budget for the upcoming school year, so the start of the calendar year was as ideal as any time. This announcement allows CMN a full semester to explain and educate the market about the new options with enough time for publications to understand what they need to budget for in the coming school year.

What kind of feedback have you received since announcing the licensing fee?

While it feels like a sudden change, many of the publications or individuals we have reached out to expressed that this change makes sense In an industry full of semester- and year-based turnover, CMN’s success is largely due to the continuity our staff and services provide college media. We wanted to remain in existence, and so far our partners understand that desire.

That said, we have received a some very positive feedback in our efforts to provide multiple options/packages.

Today is actually the second wave of social activity. A CP partner tweeted the initial post within 12 hours of posting it to our site, and we saw an initial buzz for a few hours after that. Overall, though, a surprising amount of the conversation we’ve seen has taken place between people beyond the college media circuit.

Why the difference between the standard CMN/College Publisher package ($1995/yr) and the WordPress package ($4500/yr)?

College Publisher software relies on already existent infrastructure designed to share resources and provide streamlined support. This allows us to spread costs across the entire network. Our WP option is an individualized installation enabling the newspaper staff to customize their site (through themes and plug-ins) in ways network-based software can’t do as easily.

Will you charge $150/hour to support WordPress, and what sort of support is offered in the yearly plan?

The $4,500 annual license fee covers support related to CMN services related to server environment operation, DNS services and integration of CMN plug-ins. Many of the CMN plug-ins –advertising system, traffic reporting, city guide publisher, e-mail newsletter – power the core functions for a news site.

This support package does not include CMN digging into the custom code web editors write. If the site is experiencing failures, we will make sure that CMN plug-ins are not causing the error and then roll back to previous versions in order to isolate what is wrong.

CMN will be responsible for deploying WP core updates, which can be frequent, but are essential to assuring security and stability of the site. Compatibility development post-update for themes and plug-ins (non-CMN plug-ins) is solely the responsibility of the newspaper.

Any supplemental charges for support (at $150/hr) would be discussed and approved in writing in advance of any work being done. These charges would be limited to requests for review of custom code, design work or staff training.

Is there a cost associated with moving to WordPress on the CMN network? (i.e., from CP5 to WP on your system)

Data migration projects can vary from publication to publication so we are not setting a policy on costs for archives. CMN will tackle these requests on a case-by-case basis.

Will you assist in the site design for WordPress as a part of the yearly fee?

No. Our design services are available for our core platform, CP5.

What would be the advantage to having CPPro? ($8995/yr)

This system has dedicated resources (from a hardware, software and personnel standpoint.) A publication choosing this option can expect a high level of customization for any convergence type of project or newsroom work-flow situation. All customization would be unique to this instance (as opposed to CP5) and tailored to the specific needs of the news organization(s) on an ongoing basis.

Why was this announced Dec. 20, when most college media are on holiday break?

It was really simply an unfortunate byproduct of the way the calendar fell with regard to the new ownership of CMN. It took almost three months to fix, assess, plan and announce. The Access Network Co. felt it was the most responsible thing to announce plans for the CMN business as soon as they were finalized (as we would look to start implementing these changes early in 2011.)

The posting of this policy change on our site served as a reference point. In contacting our partners via phone and e-mail, we have somewhere to refer folks to dig into the details. When considering the alternative – “sitting” on the story until the New Year – we hope the news hounds out there understand the decision to post the information as soon as it was ready.

Beyond the business model, what is the overall vision here?

CMN is a collection of niche sites serving the college community. When we started, there was a great need for getting online quickly. We filled that need the best we could. In the previous decade, needs changed and spread to reflect the diversity that exists in college media.

This change is long overdue. College media is unique in that all of our partners serve the same purpose in their local markets, but they do it in a variety of ways. We needed to offer options and customization.

In order to provide college media with more services and more distribution channels, we needed to make tweaks to the business that allowed for client customization. Now, college newspapers can be a member of CMN and use one or all of our products.

This major change in our business model was always an internal discussion point, but only until the most recent change in ownership has the capability from an accounting perspective existed to make this adjustment possible. The Access Network Co. is a technology provider to publishers and brands – they have the infrastructure to help CMN navigate this change.

Innovation is essential to college media’s survival, and ultimately ours, too.

Our goal is allowing students and faculty to focus on storytelling and information dissemination. This doesn’t have to exclude the handful of students who have a passion for custom development. While this is a growing number of students, it’s not nearly a critical mass. We are looking to create an ecosystem that allows publications to experiment with that minority of student developers and easily transition to something else when those students move on.

Anything else you’d like to add that I haven’t asked about?

All of the prices and packages came from competitive analysis of various providers to the college market. When it came to pricing CP5 and CP Pro, we really took a look at the costs we are incurring to support and develop these systems to determine the price tag. We need to cover costs.

Our focus in 2011 is generating revenue, not just for us, but for our partners. The Access Network Co. is looking to create new revenue programs and hopefully get more digital advertising dollars to college media.

We thrive on feedback and sincerely want partners to let us know if they have any concerns or questions about this model change, our services or anything else related to our goals for 2011.

——— ADDITIONAL Q&A ———–

When did CMN begin looking at charging for the product?

This has been an idea kicked around for years going back to Y2M days. The issue was we never really had the infrastructure to execute this type of business model and client tracking. Investment was put off at several points in the past for a variety of reasons, but the economy definitely made our budgets lean (at least in recent history.)

How soon will this begin affecting existing customers?

We are contacting some newspapers now.

As stated in our communications, we are honoring all existing contracts. Our process involves giving 90 days advance notice to our partners that we are not renewing the existing agreements under the current terms. We have only just begun the process, but under the new set of options, we feel that newspapers will be getting more than they were under our older agreements.

How do you plan to get the word out to your partner news outlets?

We are using all the means at our disposal.

Collegepublisher.com is the hub of info newspapers can use for research and information gathering. We are beginning outreach via email and phone this week and will continue to do this all through the semester, prioritizing newspapers by the renewal date of their contract.

We definitely appreciate CICM for covering the story as it helps clear up any confusion. However, if a newspaper has any questions, we are available through email (support@collegepublisher.com) , phone (866.733.9231) and twitter (@collegepublish).

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Among the winners, CMS used:

• WordPress: 11*
• CollegePublisher: 4
• Drupal: 3
• Ellington: 1
• Joomla: 1
• Homegrown: 3
• Hand-coded HTML: 1

*The College Heights Herald recently moved to TownNews, but their site was on WordPress when they were judged, so they count as a WordPress site for statistical purposes.

Other notes: Two of the Drupal sites are from the same college news organization (the Daily Illini and the217.com), and both of Swarthmore’s winners were homegrown, but different organizations. The HTML hand-coded site was from Spokane Falls Community College.

I would encourage people not to read too much into the numbers. Good journalism is not CMS-dependent, as I’ve said before.

Below the fold is a screen shot with the CMS noted above each site. I added the CMS name – it’s not on the ACP web site.

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I have created a page under the “Resources” tab at the top of the blog with a list of links to free online tools. This is a gathering place for links that I showed during a presentation at the National College Media Convention in Louisville (and also a couple of other workshops). I’ll be updating it in the future with other sites. Check it out here.

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