Daniel Bachhuber used to look at his college newspaper’s Web site and think about how much better it could be. Frustrated by the limitations of DailyEmerald.com‘s content management system, which was run by an outside company, Bachhuber started researching Drupal, Django and WordPress — platforms that would allow the site to have control over its content and source code.
His research, and subsequent conference calls with other young journalists, led him to create CoPress, a for-profit company that offers managed hosting and training for college newspapers looking to transition from a proprietary publishing platform to WordPress.
In many ways, CoPress illustrates what can happen when news outlets allocate resources internally rather than outsource Web development to outside companies, which can limit their ability to be creative, innovative and entrepreneurial. By moving this work in-house, journalists — students and professionals alike — take risks, acquire new skills and develop a Web-first mentality.
“The idea is that we want every student newspaper across the nation on an open-source content management system,” Bachhuber said. “What we really want to do is increase the technical capacity of students so they can take their news sites under their own wing and have two or three Web developers on staff who are building really cool Web applications.”
CoPress’ goal, he said, is to build a network of people who are leading this innovation so that they can cross-pollinate ideas and collaborate on projects.
So far, 21 colleges and universities, mostly in the U.S., use CoPress and are exploring ways to strengthen their Web sites and modify their workflow to make it more reflective of an online newsroom.
The majority of the papers that use CoPress transitioned from College Publisher, an online publishing platform that an estimated 600 college newspapers around the country use to manage their Web sites. Rusty Lewis, director of College Media Network, said the company offers its College Publisher publishing platform to college newspapers for free; in exchange, the company places two national banner ads on each site and keeps the revenue.
Making the transition to an open-source platform
To help students transition from College Publisher and other proprietary platforms, CoPress has weekly discussion topics on its Web site. Topics have included “How do you deal with old-fashioned thinkers?” “Restructuring your news organization” and “What are the best commenting policies?”
CoPress, which at one point was in the running for a Knight News Challenge grant, features a regularly updated blog on its site and a “College Media Lab” podcast that touches on a variety of Web-related topics, including how to effectively use Twitter as a journalist. Additionally, the site uses a wiki to share tutorials and plug-ins that students find useful or want to learn more about. The wiki has information about colleges and universities that are using WordPress, Drupal and Django. CoPress also has “around-the-clock support service” for students who have questions about their sites.
Bachhuber, CoPress’ executive director, is one of four student journalists who run CoPress’ customer support, hosting services and training. He said CoPress takes up about 40 hours of his time each week, which is partly why he decided to take a break from college earlier this year. He and the rest of the team are not paid, mainly because they’re building their business with their own capital and not taking outside investment. The various hosting and training fees that CoPress generates from each of its clients go toward operating expenses.
“We’re on track to start paying people for their work,” Bachhuber said. “Our hope is to scale the scope of what we can do by contracting some work out to the clients we train.”
Andrew Spittle, CoPress’ hosting director and webmaster for Whitman College’s student newspaper, has begun reaching out to eight to 10 colleges a week to familiarize them with CoPress and better assess the needs of student journalists.
Earlier this month, Spittle started holding a biweekly training series, “Hacking the Student Newsroom,” to help students learn more about WordPress features and foster a discussion about the challenges faced by college media. During the sessions, which are open to anyone, he interacts with students via a conference call and a Livestream screencast.
“We’re recording these sessions and creating a database of all that knowledge,” Spittle said. “It’s a place students can go back to and refresh their memory on things, which will be important when they transition to new webmasters” in the future.
Challenges, rewards of managing your own site
Tom Cleary, editor of Fairfield University’s student newspaper, spoke to the difficulty of this transition in a college newsroom setting, where turnover is high. The Fairfield Mirror‘s online projects manager, Joseph Cefoli, handled the paper’s switch from College Publisher to WordPress and has learned how to maintain the site. But he’s graduating this year.
“The one drawback, which right now has not really shown itself, is the fact that we have to handle the majority of the design and support ourselves,” Cleary said. “While CoPress is extremely helpful, it is really necessary to have a strong person running the site. The Web site is simple to use and can be run by anyone, but with a manager like Cefoli it looks a lot better and runs a lot smoother.”
Previously the Mirror had used College Publisher but ran into problems when upgrading from College Publisher 4 to College Publisher 5. During the switch, bylines were lost or assigned to the wrong stories. Categories were also lost, so Cefoli and others on the Web team had to recategorize more than 7,000 stories last summer.
“When College Publisher did the upgrade, it really didn’t go smoothly,” Cefoli said. “Data integrity is important to us, and we don’t want to show prior writers that we’re missing or losing their stories. That looks bad for our staff even though it wasn’t our fault.”
Many students say the College Publisher content management system is limited and doesn’t allow for smooth integration of video, audio and other multimedia.
Bachhuber wrote a case against College Publisher in August 2008: “Rather than outsourcing the heavy-lifting to College Publisher, student newspapers need to allocate resources internally to running and developing their own platform. This can seem somewhat paradoxical, adding to your staff when you’re losing more and more revenue, but it is a necessity for survival. The future isn’t all that bleak, we’re just in a time of transition.”
One of the advantages to WordPress, Cefoli said, is that The Fairfield Mirror was able to choose from a variety of themes that can be modified. Since making the switch, the Mirror staff is beginning to develop more of a Web-first mentality. Previously, the staff would e-mail their stories to editors and let the Web staff do all the work. Now students are learning how to use the content management system themselves. Cefoli said the switch has saved the staff about three to four hours per week.
Lauren Rabaino, student Web advisor for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s student newspaper and CoPress’ creative director, said her paper’s staff has made similar changes since switching from College Publisher to WordPress in April.
Collaborating with the rest of the CoPress team and those who use the service has motivated her to want to take greater risks, be more entrepreneurial on the Web and help other student journalists find ways to demonstrate skills that might otherwise be limited by a lack of opportunity or support.
“Students working for college newspapers should be on top of innovation; we shouldn’t be following the industry, but that’s how it’s been,” Rabaino said. “We really want to foster the idea that college newsrooms are the place where experimentation should happen. It’s much easier to fail in a college newsroom than it is in a professional newsroom.”
