Tag Archives: CoPress

Sesh ideas for BCNI Philly

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Tomorrow morning will find me headed to Philadelphia for Saturday’s BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. Needless to say, I’m super stoked for this opportunity. Not only will I be able to finally meet my boss, my new colleagues, and the rest of the CoPress team I haven’t met, but I’ll get to spend an entire day, and probably much of the weekend, discussing the future of journalism with some of the smartest news folk in the country. If my flight doesn’t get laid over in Atlanta, I’d like to spend my time taking about at least a couple of different things:

Designing a News Startup From Scratch in 60 Minutes

The goal would be to rapidly prototype what a news organization of the future might look like by walking the hypothetical startup from concept to a year after launch and covering things such as:

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Take reputation systems one step further

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Mark Briggs wrote a post on Journalism 2.0 about how a reputation system could be applied to comments on a newspaper’s website. It got my brain in a party. A reputation economy is something we’re taking very much into consideration as we develop some of the core ideas behind the Connection Engine, the platform CoPress will eventually build to power our community, and I think the concept has tremendous potential as a tool to evaluate the map of expertise within your community.

In Mark’s scenario (borrowed from Stack Overflow), the reputation system would be used to identify the good comments from the cruft. If you post a good comment other people think adds to the conversation, then they might vote you up. You’d earn reputation points from that transaction. If you were trolling to derail the conversation or intentionally trying to provoke, then the community could vote you down and you’d lose reputation points. The author of the post, furthermore, could use his or her super reputation to bestow blessings upon really intelligent feedback. All of this information about the quality of content would be useful to the CMS and webmaster, and editor I suppose, in trying to determine what gets placement where.

The kicker is when you tie this reputation system into the database that’s tracking people in your community. This is where things could get really interesting. By adding semantic information to the reputation system (i.e. recording the topic that the commenter is writing on and saving structured data about the nature of their response), you could build a super useful for finding the diamonds in the rough. For instance, if Marcus Doe (a fake name to protect his identity) commented often on articles about climate change and water access issues, and his fellow commenters rated his insights highly, then Marcus’ profile in the database would indicate that the crowd seems to think he makes fair arguments. The news organization would then invite Marcus to contribute a guest article. If the readers then found that contribution valuable, it would increase Marcus’ profile as a source of knowledge about climate change and water access within the community. This would only work with real, verifiable commenters, of course.

This reputation system would be the engine to empower the community to evaluate information and sources for merit.

What is journalism?

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Dharmishta Rood started a thread on Seesmic for a class at Harvard on the 9th of March asking, “What is the future of news?” I don’t feel as though my two minute response conveys everything I’d like it to, and want to clarify a few of the ideas.

The future of news isn’t newspapers. The newspaper is an inefficient, uneconomic, and environmentally-troubling method of moving data. In my opinion, Steve Rhodes laid out an epic laundry list of everything that’s broken in the newspaper industry a few days ago. There isn’t any need to repeat that, thanks to the internet. The key takeaway is that, instead of trying to figure out how to financially support newspaper-style journalism on the web, we should be active in conversation about what journalism is, and how the internet will enable us to do it better.

To me, journalism is the act of providing impartial, accurate information to empower a community to make decisions. I had “independent” in the definition earlier, but I don’t believe that independence is entirely necessary if you partake in the art of full disclosure. The process of journalism need not be limited to newspapers, and the format need not be tied to an article measured in column inches. As Suzanne Yada rightfully noted just over a month ago, “Twitter isn’t journalism, just like television isn’t journalism, but you can find journalism ON Twitter and ON television.” Our information needs have changed from a hundred years ago, and the internet lends news organizations greater ability to fulfill this responsibility.

Two premises for the near future (that you’re welcome to dispute):

  • Newspaper journalism operated in the era of information scarcity, where “what is news” was determined by the amount of space available in the delivery mechanism. Online journalism operates in the era of information as a commodity. This means that “what is news” is defined by the quality of information.
  • We’re also now in an indefinite era of format fragmentation, meaning that journalism can be implemented in a myriad of different ways. This is another paradigm shift from the newspaper age, but not for the worse: the internet allows us to do more with information. The internet is ultimately a more powerful platform for journalism because users can be exposed to information automatically based on context and the depth of information they need.

The “Future of News” is going to be a competition to see who can create the most innovative and engaging ways to deliver information which empowers communities to make decisions.

Idea for News Mixer: Unique URLs for anything

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From an email conversation earlier today, I think it would be sweet if News Mixer, a Knight-funded open source commenting project built on Django, had the ability to generate a unique, static URL for any bit of content in the content management system. I really like the things that News Mixer is doing to take commenting forward because, all too often with the “normal” types of threads, the diamonds are lost in the rough (especially when the comments number in the hundreds and thousands). News Mixer is experimenting with the radical changes necessary for comments to be useful again. Being able to generate a unique URL to a paragraph or sentence would allow the community to respond on their own blogs in direct response (and make trackbacks more granular).

On another note, I believe we interviewed Rich Gordon for tomorrow’s edition of This Week in CoPress. I was out in the field doing research, but am definitely looking forward to hearing about his future plans for the project.

Free strategic advice for the @dailyemerald

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Last night, I realized we’ve started bitching about the Daily Emerald in the peanut gallery without offering any positive advice for change. I’d like to offer my thoughts on how to turn the struggling newspaper into a successful digital news enterprise.

Step one: hold a transparent weekend (or weeklong) jam session to develop a strategic plan. Invite as many intelligent stakeholders as you can to a retreat, and put together a website for that retreat with the agenda, list of everyone involved, and goals. It might also be useful to have a open community forum in the week preceding to hear strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of the audience, or launch a website where the community and submit and vote on ideas for the news organization. When retreat happens, however, make it open and participatory. Make sure everyone at the retreat is documenting the discussion on Twitter, and livestream as much of the discussion as you can. Have a designated “community manager” for the retreat who looks for suggestions from watchers and brings those to the meeting. Tap the intelligence of the digital crowd, especially because you’ll be able to bring even more smart brains from afar.

Step two: campaign over summer 2009 amongst the Daily Emerald alums to raise the funds necessary to implement the strategic plan. Shop the plan out to them to get their feedback and insights, and use CRM (or customer relationship management) software to track these interactions. When I left, they were using a FileMaker database system and analog mail. I would ditch this system immediately, and my first investment would be software like Salesforce.com (which a news organization could also use to sell advertising more effectively). Using the new CRM, it would be wise to fundraise amongst the alums who want to see their old newspaper experiment with this platform called the internet. Including them in the process, by sending them the strategic plan and a link to the website with an archive of all the video, will make them more invested in the process (if they like what you’re doing at least).

Step three: implement the strategic plan starting in Fall 2009. If I were the publisher of the Daily Emerald, these three are of many things I would attempt to drastically right the direction of the news organization:

  • Quit the College Publisher habit. Being on a locked, proprietary content management system is probably the worst foundation you could have for a digital news organization. Focus heavily on recruiting a few developers out of the computer science program, and build a basic website on Django that you can grow from. If you ask nicely, the Daily Gazette at Swarthmore or Daily UW might be willing to lend enough code to get you started.
  • Move to once a week in print. I know that this would be very, very difficult, especially because the bulk of revenue comes from the print product, but it needs to happen nevertheless. Necessity is the mother of invention. Do it, and publish daily online.
  • Empower your community. Break down the ivory tower, and hold workshops to teach interested community members how to report on the issues they’re passionate about. I am quite certain that club sports at the University of Oregon don’t get the coverage they deserves, and there are probably at least several people who could tweet at games and submit high quality images for a photo gallery.

Right now at the Daily Emerald, though, they’re going about it the API emergency meeting way, and this is just one of the many reasons I think startups make more sense in this climate. I mean, look at all of the effort it’s going to take to turn this ship around, let alone reinvent it.

There’s also been discussion that student news will be largely unaffected by the tornado ripping through regional newspapers right now. Even if that is the case, I would like to propose an analogy: if you’re driving towards the cliff of irrelevance, your direction is what is most important. It doesn’t matter that your car’s engine hasn’t seized up yet.

Organizing NewsInnovation PDX

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BarCamp NewsInnovation is a series of “unconferences“ happening around the nation with the goal of bringing together “energetic, tech-savvy, open-minded individuals who embrace the chaos in the media industry because the ability to do really cool things still exist. We also need find those people outside of our industry who love to consume news and information and are great thinkers and innovators.”

On the 21st of February, 2009, we’re bringing a regional edition to Portland. The Daily Vanguard has generously provided space at Portland State, but we’ve still got a lot of planning to do between now and then. If you’ll be in the area and are interested in helping out, please leave your name on the wiki and sign up for the Google Group. Personally, I’ll be satisfied if I get to spend a day jamming with like-minded entrepreneurs on these ideas:

  • What are the core competencies of a news organization online?
  • What is journalism in 10 years? How does journalism evolve with technology?
  • What would a local news startup look like?

Being back in the States on the 21st also means I’m ending my work in Peru prematurely, but CoPress has really taken off and I’m stoked to get back and be able to take it to the next level.

Greg Linch on CoPress

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Greg Linch was interviewed by David Cohn in the past week about CoPress which is way, way cool:

 

As the project has been a very, uh, organic process, I thought I might clarify on a few points Greg made.

First off, it is of my humble opinion that open source content management systems are philosophically better than proprietary. The key component to this argument is that you, as the developer or end user, are allowed to edit the source code with a platform such as Drupal, WordPress, or Django, whereas with a proprietary system like College Publisher you are limited to their ideas and their development cycle. News organizations not only need to be online, but they need to be able to innovate online. On top of that, in choosing an open source CMS we’re actually hoping student news organizations will take the initiative and start experimenting with how “news” or  ”journalism” is delivered. We’re different at the core because of this.

This conversation is especially timely, too. I’m in the process of drafting documents to define what the specific vision of CoPress will be for the next couple of years. Really, we’re a lot more than hosting. CoPress Hosting is an attempt to get student news organizations to be on the same platform so that they can collaborate. The core of what CoPress stands for is the network of collaboration, and we’ll be experimenting with the best tools to make this possible. In the video, Greg mentions a conversation that arose organically in our Google Group. We want to create a platform, something I’m calling a social intelligence tool, that allows those types of conversations to happen more often and to create more value. The short goal is this: the tool will connect you with the person most likely to be able to answer your question (whether it’s troubleshooting a faulty plugin or install Apache). To my knowledge, this has never been done. We’re a pretty ambitious bunch, though, and I figure we’ll give it a shot.

Greg also discusses the long-haul for the team. Personally, I never expected the project to get this big (it was originally going to be a 20% project at the Daily Emerald), so we’ve largely been making this up as we go along. We’re currently in the process of establishing six month, more formal positions, and my hope is that, if we start generating some sort of revenue stream, the core team will all be part-time positions. This is a bit different than what Greg said, but my logic is that I don’t think any of us (no offense to the team) is really qualified to do what we want to do. Part of it will be a learning experience, which will be valuable on its own, and part of it will be work, which it would be nice to be reimbursed for. 

On the plus side, we’ll be using the full genius of Joey Baker to put together a business plan and identify methods for long-term financial sustainability.

Another year, another grant application

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CoPress, an initiative on its way to becoming a non-profit organization, has submitted another grant application. We’re building a better technical eco-system for student news organizations, which means that we’re creating the tools and means for the techie kids at student newspapers to share ideas, collaborate on code, and generally work together to develop really legit websites. To do this, though, will require a bit of effort (which we’re already been putting forth) and a bit of money (which we as students don’t have much of).

Ashoka’s Changemakers has a pretty cool competition called “The Power of Us: Re-imagine Media” that might help us out. The winner(s) will receive $50,000 towards their project. If you vote for us, which we very much hope you do, it might just be CoPress.

Provide links to context, please

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In an article published today, the Daily Emerald reveals that Sam Dotters-Katz has proposed changes to the ASUO Constitution (which I would link to but it’s apparently not available online):

Dotters-Katz and Papailiou’s proposal would add two justices to the existing five-member court and require it to submit rules changes to the Senate for approval. It would also re-establish the Elections Board as an independent entity to avoid conflicts of interest that Papailiou said were endemic under previous administrations.

There’s something wrong with this picture. I’m not talking about the proposed changes, rather it’s in the way that the information is presented. Reporting in the “traditional” news brief format, the reader (me) is left more confused than informed. There is almost zero context associated with the article, and I haven’t the faintest idea what the information presented actually means.

Such is the old paradigm. Newspapers are dead; long live newspapers. I’m of the opinion however that the new paradigm, the one that everyone’s afraid of, is actually improving journalism. Go figure.

For instance, if the Daily Emerald had the innovation, talent, and tools, I would have been presented an array of options to expand my knowledge about Dotters-Katz, how the ASUO runs, and why he proposes a change to the Constitution. There would likely be a list of previous posts on this issue, a small topical wiki in the sidebar synthesizing the pulse of ASUO, and curation of student blogosphere reactions to the announcement (like this one and one from the Oregon Commentator), among other forms of information.

Instead, the readers get nothing better than a press release and I have to use Google, coincidentally, to educate myself further. Google is taking the place of the news organization largely because the newspapers are flailing. Get with the times, please, and use the infinitely useful and flexible platform the internet gives you to empower your community with information.

Oh wait, the Daily Emerald runs College Publisher. Make sure your CMS is open source, and then innovate.

Planes, trains, and the Bolt Bus

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Just as soon as I finish my oatmeal, I’m off for an epic trek across these United States for the first ever CoPress meetup in Philly. We’ll be talking student newspapers, strategy, the internet, and our favorite type of pie at this time of year. If you’re around town, you’re more than welcome to join us for a fun lunch party on Wednesday.