CoPress announces hosting plan for college newspaper Web sites

copress-logo

(Full disclosure: I’m the CoPress community manager, as well as a core team member.)

In a major move to help college newspapers thrive online, CoPress has announced a plan to move interested papers to WordPress and host the sites for a low monthly fee, plus a minor initial setup cost.

Or, if you’re just looking for low-cost hosting sans WordPress, that’s also an option. If you go that route, you don’t pay the initial setup cost.

What’s the advantage? Well, when you consider how much money your college news site could generate if you sold all the ads, and therefore took in related revenue, choosing CoPress could pay for itself.

Not to mention the fact that you have complete control over your site. That, in my view, is the most attractive reason. I oversaw The Miami Hurricane‘s move from College Publisher to WordPress last summer and wish CoPress existed at the time.

But, whereas our situation allowed us to make the move on our own, many school papers don’t have a server or the technical know-how to make such a move. Or, if you do, you can avoid a possible headache (particularly in transfering your College Publisher archives) with a little help from your friends.

That’s where CoPress comes in – we can do all that. Check out the post about the hosting plan.

For more information, visit the CoPress hosting page.

Leave a comment on the CoPress post or e-mail hosting@copress.org with any questions. Also, you can follow us on Twitter.

We’re not in Kansas (City) anymore: An ACP/CMA recap

My conference craziness for the semester finally ended on Sunday.

This past weekend I attended the Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers conference in Kansas City, Mo.

The Miami Hurricane sent six people, four from the newsroom and two from the business office.

Other UM student media also sent staffers, including five from the Ibis yearbook and one from Distraction magazine. The respective Hurricane and Ibis advisers also attended.

(Quick shout-out to Hurricane adviser Bob Radziewicz, who learned some iMovie and Audacity at the conference, yay! And he got Twitter on his own. Follow him @caneadviser.)

Another UM professor, Rich Beckman, was the conference’s first keynote speaker on Thursday (Mark Glaser of MediaShift was the keynote on Friday).

Rich started his talk by discussing how the newspaper industry fell behind with the Web. But, instead of harping on the negative, he mostly offered advice for the hundreds of students and advisers in attendance.

Video excerpt of Beckman’s keynote, shot by Anthony Pesce.

To summarize Rich’s advice:

  • You still need the basics — writing and editing across platforms, legal and ethical grounding
  • Everyone needs to know audio and video content gathering, editing and storytelling skills
  • Photojournalism and photo editing skills and the ability to produce audio-driven photo galleries and stories
  • Understand audience, usability, social networking, etc.
  • You need multimedia storytelling skills
  • Skills are given. Once you have them, you need to learn how to use them
  • Take advantage of what the Web is good at (interactivity, availability, etc.)
  • Use your publications to test your skills
  • Follow people, not organizations, when looking for good examples of journalism
  • Find mentors

Rich also discussed how multimedia design and infographic skills as well as multimedia programming and producing skills will land you the best (and best paid) jobs at top news organizations.

Besides the familiar faces, I got to see some new faces and meet some people in person for the first time, including Andrew Dunn, Anthony Pesce (whose video is embedded above) and Miles Skorpen. I’d known each through Twitter and the latter two from CoPress, so it was great to hang with them at the conference.

I also had a mini reunion of sorts with David Grant, editor of the Collegiate Times (Virginia Tech) and Kristen Daum, editor-elect of the State News (Michigan State). The three of us were part of the Al Neuharth Free Spirit scholarship class of 2005.

Speaking of awards:

  • The Hurricane didn’t win an online Pacemaker, but we got a pretty plaque for being a finalist. So, we’re looking to next year’s competition, when we’ll be entering the new WordPress site that Brian Schlansky and I created last summer.
  • Will Wooten, Hurricane visuals editor in spring 2008, won a third place page one design award for the “Do Not Rush the Field” cover

Sneak peak at next project

I’ll be playing producer and leading one of five video teams today for an Election Day 2008 multimedia project, which is being organized by the UM visual journalism program. The group, which also includes seven still photo teams, is being led by vis-j faculty Jim Virga, Kim Grinfeder and Rich Beckman.

We’ll be working in the West Grove and later putting together a site with all the stories, expected to launch soon after the election is finished. Note: This is not live coverage, but instead a documentary-style project.

I’ll write a recap post with my thoughts and a link after it launches.

Until then, follow the project on Twitter. Alex de Carvalho (@alexdc), who is one of the project’s other coaches, and I (@greglinch) will be live tweeting using the hastag #grove.

My first video of the year for The Miami Hurricane

Thursday night I finished a video about the UM student production of Cabaret (see related tweets), which I shot on Monday and Wednesday.

This is my first video of the year for The Miami Hurricane, where I advise online and multimedia production, and I plan to shoot more throughout the school year.

What’s noteworthy about this piece is that it’s the first time I’ve used Soundtrack Pro to fix the audio after editing the footage in Final Cut Pro. I’d previously only used Soundtrack for audio projects.

The video is online with a story by Nick Maslow and is on my Vimeo page. It also appears in a nifty widget on the sidebar of my site.

For more information about the musical, visit the Ring Theatre‘s site. Enjoy!

Using Twitter to cover Barack Obama event on campus

What could be better than waking up to the sweet sound of a little bird chirping the news? (see photo below)

Beginning at around 8 a.m. Friday morning, I will use the The Miami Hurricane‘s almighty Twitter account to liveblog a Barack Obama rally at the University of Miami.

The event, “Women’s Rally for the Change We Need” rally, will take place on the main campus in Coral Gables.

To easily find the related tweets, search miamihurricane + obama.

Read The Hurricane story, Obama to campaign on UM campus Friday; will focus on women’s issues.

Watch the UMTV livefeed online.

Doors open at 9:30 a.m. and Obama is scheduled to speak at 11:45 p.m.

Tickets, which were available online, sold out in less than two days of the university announcement on Tuesday, according to a university e-mail newsletter. Because more tickets were allotted than the BankUnited Center (our basketball arena) can hold, there is likely going to be quite the crowd early Friday morning.

I’ll be there to provide updates and photos using TwitPic.

Background

This will be the third large-scale event I’ve used Twitter to liveblog for The Hurricane, the first two being a baseball game last spring and the first home football game this fall when we played Charleston Southern University at Dolphin Stadium.

For the football game tweets, you can search for miamihurricane + football on Twitter. Also, I liveblogged the bus ride to the stadium (search for miamihurricane + bus).

For fun

Check out some random photos I’ve snapped using my photo and uploaded to TwitPic.

How we did it: Moving The Miami Hurricane from College Publisher to WordPress

This post also appears on the Innovation in College Media blog.

The question we’ve heard most often since launching the new TheMiamiHurricane.com is, “How did you do it?” Below, Webmaster Brian Schlansky offers a comprehensive explanation of the process, from setting up our own Web server to installing WordPress to importing our College Publisher archives.

For more background, check out these posts:

Enjoy!

Greg Linch
Editor at Large for Online and Multimedia
Former Editor in Chief (fall 2007 to spring 2008)
The Miami Hurricane

To contact me, visit www.greglinch.com or e-mail greglinch[at]gmail.com.

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