:%s/,|||,/=nr2char(11)/g
:%s/,|||/=nr2char(11)/g
:%s/""/=nr2char(21)/g
:%s/"//g
:exe '%s/' . nr2char(11) . '/","/g'
:exe '%s/' . nr2char(21) . '/\"/g'
:exe '%s/"$//g' # add a
:%s/^/"/g
:%s/<br /><p><br />/</p><p>/g
:%s/<p></p><p>/<p>/g
:%s/<BR><br />/<br />/g
:%s/<br /><p></p><p>/<p>/g
:%s/<p><br />/<p>/g
:%s/</p></p><p>/</p><p>/g
:%s/</p><br /><p>/</p><p>/g
:%s/<br /><p>/</p><p>/g
:%s/<p><p>/<p>/g
:%s/<P>/</p><p>/g
:%s/</p></p>/</p>/g
:%s/<br /></p><p>/</p><p>/g

Two more things: 1) Anyone who’s ever tried to tell you to use find and replace in bbEdit for large files is dead wrong. 2) College Publisher, you suck ****. ‘,|||,’ is not a valid delimiting character. Quit being malicious.

Lastly, if I’ve thought ahead, I would’ve tracked invalid markup against prevalence and date range. That would’ve made for a fascinating anthropological study.

Mad props to Ivar Vong and the rest of his team who finally pulled it off. They did the switch to “web-first” too. It’s been a long time in the making.

Case in point: The Daily Emerald, I believe as a part of their magazine edition for IntroDUCKtion, created a campus directory. The directory includes dozens upon dozens of email addresses, URLs, and phone numbers for student organizations and sports at the University of Oregon. In the print magazine, which I don’t have access to because I’m in Portland, I’m sure this list of contact information is beautifully presented in an approachable, useful format. Unfortunately, this same list made its way into the website as a long, ugly, flat text file:

In my humble opinion, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

What if, instead, we approached this directory as the database that it really should be? This web-native directory would have profiles for every student organization much like students can have profiles on Facebook. I’d be able to search for organizations based on the name, the location on campus, people currently involved, the mission of the organization, tags, etc. If I found a organization I was interested in, I’d click through to their profile. The profile would then give me access to all of the contact information I might need in addition to the most recent or popular articles, images, videos, updates from the campus’ microblog, etc. There’d be a small wiki section for the organization or sport where I could read up on its history and know that the information I was getting was true because it had been curated by the beat reporter.

I see at least two advantages to this approach, in addition to making all of the information much more accessible (versus the flat text file). One, you’d only have to build this once. Two, you’d save the reporter or designer a lot of time having to search for the most up to date contact information because they could just pull the information from the database as they’re creating the print product.

Think of role of the student news organization less as a newspaper and more as a platform for impartial, accurate community information to be shared.

Then I read the editorial.

The argument is that people in the newsroom are concerned about the manner in which a new Publisher, Steve Smith, has been chosen for the paper. According to the article, the “editors felt that the Emerald cannot afford the salary Smith proposed, [...] were extremely concerned that allowing Smith to work as an adjunct instructor at the journalism school while serving as publisher was an obvious conflict of interest, for multiple reasons, [and] were also concerned that Smith would be at the Emerald for only one year and if things didn’t go how he planned, if the Emerald actually ended up losing money, he would not be held accountable.”

Ryan Knutson’s comment on Steve’s initial post, though, really says it the best (emphasis mine):

And while I disagree with some of the fumbling steps taken by the board, I would only expect a strike of the staff to occur if the board tried to appoint J-School dean Tim Gleason, Dave Frohnmayer or any other administrator or permanent faculty member, but not a champion of integrity in journalism and ODE alumnus like Steve Smith. To assume Steve, who has worked in the newspaper business for decades, would suddenly drop all respect for the ethics of watchdog journalism and prevent the Emerald from criticizing the UO just because he might also teach journalism students in the classroom is naive.

[...]

When I was on the board during fall term of this year, I pushed strongly to try and involve Steve into our operations, knowing that his experience and his integrity would be a tremendous asset to the Emerald as it tries to find itself in these changing times.

In short, the Daily Emerald reached out to Steve because they thought he would be the right person to turn the news organization around. The discussion shouldn’t be about the editorial integrity of the student newsroom, but rather how the Emerald is going to completely reinvent itself. I had the opportunity to sit in on a Society of Professional Journalists session with Steve this past fall, and also had several conversations with Ryan about the paper and the future of news. I believe Steve’s own explanation of the situation, instead of the sensationalism that this has grown to be (it has now been covered in the Eugene Weekly, the Oregonian, the Chronicle of Higher Education, College Media Matters, and other publications).

Granted, I fully sympathize with the newsroom staff and their concerns that their voices weren’t being heard. I had to try and fight through the same institutional inertia this fall.

This is a critical juncture for the Daily Emerald, however, both as a newspaper and a news organization. The real dilemma isn’t the potential conflict of interest between the Publisher and editorial content of the paper, but rather how to bring the organization from the red into the black. In fact, there was argument made that the Publisher could indirectly control the voice of the paper by dictating how many pages were to be printed. To my knowledge, you just don’t have this problem if you have a website (or Twitter, or a blog, or anything digital for that matter). With declining revenues from print, what they really need is strong leadership to right the ship and figure out how to effectively “innovate” and monetize online.

I’m not entirely sure that the organization has the capacity to pull an IBM. Only time will tell.

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.

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.

My decision comes after two months of frustration trying to get the Daily Emerald off of College Publisher. College Publisher, for those who are unaware, is a proprietary, locked, and nearly obsolete content management system (CMS). In my opinion, the first step student newspapers must take to survive in this “digital era” is to invest significantly in adopting an open source platform for their web presence. Open source allows a student newspaper to truly evolve into a student news organization. It offers the ability for you to have the final say in how, where, and why you publish your content. In proprietary systems, you leave this technological innovation up to the company to whom you’ve contracted out the work.

A metaphor for the people who have grown up with print: open source means your newspaper design and layout can be just whatever the heck you want them to be. Proprietary code means that you only have a certain number of colors, fonts, and article lengths to work with. Your sections always stay in the same location, and you can only adjust the placement of the stories to the smallest degree. All of those innovative front page newspaper designs from last Wednesday? Those wouldn’t be possible with proprietary code.

At the Daily Emerald, however, I was told we must first hire a publisher before we can consider any changes to our CMS. On top of that, we have a contract with College Publisher for at least the next six months (although we receive very little money from the deal so I’m not exactly sure what the Daily Emerald would lose by breaking the contract). Furthermore, the board meetings are closed. This means that I, the guy with Google Doc upon Google Doc of ideas, have to be invited to participate in the decision making process. To me, this sounds completely illogical. Instead, I have to pester the already overworked EIC with the things I’d like to do, and then have those suggestions go up the “chain of command.” It’s not a functional system for the real change which needs to happen.

Although I completely understand how busy the Daily Emerald newsroom is in producing a daily paper, it is busy work distracting the organization from what really needs to be built: a strategic vision for what student news is in the coming years. If I were in charge, I’d call an emergency board weekend retreat that anyone with expertise would be invited to. Student newspapers, just like the traditional media giants, need to completely rethink themselves because, by not innovating on the web, they’re is making themselves completely vulnerable to one potentially huge problem:

Competition from the people who get it.

Threat one: Monetary. Advertising revenue dries up on the print side, print costs go up, and your online product isn’t compelling enough to generate the same type of revenue. That, or your online product is College Publisher and you can’t even boost the advertising revenue if you wanted to. One counter argument is that student newspapers could just go to student government to up their funding, a “bailout” of sorts, but I don’t think that could ever be a long term solution.

Threat two: Staff disappearance. Students no longer want to work at their student newspaper because their industry of choice has a bleak future. Jessica DaSilva is already facing this challenge at the Independent Florida Alligator and, as I commented, this could be the greatest short term threat, especially if your paper isn’t perceived as all that digitally progressive.

Threat three: Dearth of talent. Publishing and monetizing news online is quite different than print, and requires a skill set that potentially isn’t represented by current staff. The further a newspaper gets behind, the more it will have to invest when it does decide to make the gigantic leap in the future. This financing to buy talent might have to come out of its investments or from a significant fundraising drive.

At the moment, this is threat identification and analysis. I don’t have exact solutions to any of these issues right now. My hope, though, is that by studying and mapping out the specifics of each threat we can develop strategic plans to make the transition and keep campus journalism alive.