Has your paper made a switch in Content Management Systems?

How did it go?

What do you wish you knew before you started?

Show us your site. (Please)

I’ve considered blocking the site on each newsroom computer except one, where reporters/editors could log on to use the site legitimately. I really don’t want to have to do that though. I’d like to instead enforce a rule that would help curb erroneous or aimless use of the site, especially when other work could be done. There are always press releases to be rewritten and story idea sheets to be written up, etc.

Any suggestions? I’d like to encourage responsible use of the computers rather than acting like a mean babysitter. Just for reference, its the copyeditors/designers and editors themselves who are the biggest offenders.

As editors and staff move on to whatever is next and leadership roles are filled by new people there is a passing of information.

A lot of what you’ll be doing will stay the same. A lot of what you do will get better. A lot of what you do won’t be fully appreciated by your readers, but we the inky-fingered members of collegiate newspapers are a unique militia of information.

Older and Experiecned Staffers: this is a good time to put that last little tid-bit out there for the newbies to learn.

Younger Inexperienced Staffers: this is a good time to ask some questions.

And we’re not going anywhere.

So leave your thoughts as comments to this post.

(Also, tell your staff, all of them, to sign up for College Newsroom. We’d appreciate, seeing as we’re not much without our members!)

To say the least, browsing the web has become quite a different experience. We’ve reached a day where we don’t think twice to pull out our cellphones to look up a quick piece of information. “Oh, I’ll just Google that,” or “let me check Wikipedia.” We can do this in the blink of an eye and a finger tap of a screen.

But where does that put us, the college newspapers of today. Many of our papers are just now getting online. Others are just now joining the social media craze. But how many of us have mobile versions of our web site?

Gladly, I can say that my college newspaper, The Ferris State Torch, does. This past year, after getting on the WordPress bandwagon, we have also pushed all of our content to a mobile friendly version of the site. It automatically detects what type of phone you’re browsing from, and even gives you the option to switch to the full version of the site. Commenting, search, categories, and even tags are all available and easy to use.

Sounds like a lot of work, right? Wrong. Thanks to WordPress having thousands of plugins available, we found one that is truly amazing for mobile publishing: WPtouch. After installing and activating the plugin, our site was ready for mobile viewers. The screenshot above shows a preview of our mobile edition.

What other benefits are there from adding a mobile version? Mobile doesn’t just mean phone anymore. With the recent rise of the iPod Touch (I see these all over my campus), there is a whole new market of college students to tend to. You want to be able to provide them with an easy, and fast, experience of your newspaper’s web site. The easier and faster it is for them, the longer they spend on your site and the more content they read.

However, setting up a mobile site isn’t enough. You have to promote it. Show an image on your regular web site, something along the lines of “be sure to visit our mobile site”. Heck, you could even put up an image of an iPhone, Pre, Blackberry, to help promote your newly found mobility. Run a house-ad in your print edition. Odds are, a lot of your readers aren’t sitting in front of a computer when they’re reading the paper, but I bet they have their cellphones on them.

With how quickly the web is changing, it’s not a bad idea to keep up with the trends. Who knows, maybe mobile will become the next big thing.

For more info on WPtouch, and how to integrate it with your WordPress-based online newspaper, visit the WPtouch web site.

I write these things down.

That way, I can tell everyone during our Sunday meetings what they did to incur my editorial wrath.

Because the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University is so good at what it does many of the students don’t get proper writing instruction until halfway through sophomore or the beginning of their junior year. (That’s another post entirely …)

That leaves it to me, my editors and an occasional professor, to come in on Sunday afternoons and conduct crash courses in journalism. Sometimes it’s about libel, plagiarism, profile writing, lede workshops … You name it, they need to know it, and we’ll teach it.

This week I felt it necessary to remind people what exactly a direct quote means.

One of the things I’ve really focused on this semester is giving writers feedback.

So often people dog on the Evergreen because our writers are inexperienced. This is a true but unavoidable fact at a college paper. The only thing I can do is to try to prepare my staff as well as possible so they can GAIN experience.

Posted by Dominick Bonny

Two blizzards, four days of canceled classes and one destroyed outdoor canopy later, things seem to be returning to normal at American University.

The weather caused us to miss two print editions, so the Web became center stage.

As Web Editor at The Eagle, I continuously monitored Twitter and Facebook for signs of any news. I was originally tipped off about the canopy story through Twitter, and we also learned about some snow-related personal injuries through the snow as well.

We asked for user-generated content on Twitter and Facebook, and got some great pictures as a result.

Our biggest news day was Wednesday, when the canopy collapsed. Our readers were hungry for updates, and we tried to provide those to them. Officials who rarely talk to us at outside of normal working hours were happy to talk to us — in the middle of a blizzard — which surprised me

I also started doing rewrites of some metro news that came from other sources. It was good to have, but the traffic did not seem to agree with me.

But in closing, my best advice is to have a Web plan going into a major news event. Know what your resources are. We were fortunate to be given some advance notice, and were also able to benefit from not having classes, but that’s not always the case. Either way, think of creating an “on duty” position — someone responsible for keeping the blogs updated, keeping the art and homepage fresh and doing rewrites. Basically a jack-of-all-trades.

And most of all have fun. Enjoy the increased traffic to your site, Twitter followers and Facebook fans. Working hard to cover a major event definitely pays off.

We’ve had a few inquiries about this. If your paper has a Social Media policy, a resource for one or something else beneficial, please paste it as a comment below, or share a link to it.

We also run into this problem when writing album/movie reviews. It seems like all of the sites that have images of the album artwork/movie posters are heavily copyrighted.

Any insight?

Rachel Harper
Editor in Chief
The Lookout

But for college newspapers, a facebook fan page can create a forum where comments may be less about stories and more about attacking writers, staff members or spreading rumors.

Does a Facebook fan page work to bring more readers to your Web site? Should college papers have them?

How does one moderate comments, if at all?

Any examples of well used Facebook fan pages?

To compound matters, his release was a developing story full of off-the-record sources revealing information well before the release was made public and official the next day. Web sites were updated with supplemental news as quickly as it came in, meaning the local newspaper wasn’t only scooped by ESPN.com, a national news outlet—it was printing day-old information.

The Internet age has presented fresh challenges to an industry already fighting a war on a recessive, economic front. Newspaper revenue, which stems from advertising sales, is directly proportional to a publication’s circulation. When readership goes down, so does the revenue, so does the size of the staff, and so does the quality of reporting.

It would appear, then, that amidst unprecedented layoffs and budgets cuts, newspapers are becoming more and more obsolete.

The Cincinnati &Kentucky Post newspapers, for example, closed in 2006 after 126 years of print, The Rocky Mountain News published its final paper in February 2009 just shy of its 150 anniversary, and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently announced additional budget cuts and layoffs, citing advertising revenues as the culprit.

Still, 40 percent of Americans read a newspaper, according to a Pew Research Center for the People & the Press report released in 2006. Those numbers are down from 71 percent in 1965.

While the future of newspapers may look bleak, these tough times are forcing the print industry to overhaul its publication’s revenue stream.

Among those overhaul options is making it possible for newspapers to register as nonprofits. Senator Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, proposed the Newspaper Revitalization Act that would grant a nonprofit status to newspapers. Or, like the French counterpart, the American newspaper industry could look toward the government for a bailout.

Of course, nonprofits and newspaper bailouts aren’t without their critics.

Washington Post columnist, Adam Ross, said newspapers that appear all too chummy with their government aren’t as trustworthy as independent business models and would ultimately result in backlash, thereby hurting the very industry the bailout was intended to help.

“A reliance on government subsidies undermines the independence that gives media organizations their authority,” Ross wrote. “Readers aren’t likely to trust a newspaper that seems to be in bed with the government.”

Still other methods call for limiting the availability of news on any given news Web site. Instead of providing a free online news buffet, some syndicates are looking at charging readers a subscription cost, thereby requiring visitors to log-in for their news.

The Web site InDenverTimes.com, whose staff is made up primarily of former Rocky Mountain News journalists, intends to provide free online news content to all visitors, paid for by 50,000 subscribers who will get additional functionality at $4.99 a month.

“Journalism is not free, it’s expensive. Good journalism is very expensive and we need the people of this community to be vested behind this idea, and to help pay for that quality journalism,” Kevin Preblud, InDenver Times employee, told theDenverchannel.com.

The InDenverTimes.com appears to be onto something. While newspaper readership might be down, it isn’t the result of an uninterested population. Rather, the newspaper industry’s problem might be found in the very name—newspaper.

Jack Meyers thinks so anyway. Should newspapers have focused more on “news” than “papers,” he argues, they would have rightfully invested in the digital revolution early on.

“But they didn’t and now, for the most part, they are just one of many competitors with little unique differentiation and a weak business model,” Meyers wrote in, Is There a Future to Journalism?

While a national market might not be the best for newspapers to compete in, some experts predict that a newspaper’s community, and the localization of news, will ultimately save them.

Thoughts?