Max Cutler

This morn­ing on Twit­ter I announced that the Yale Daily News would not be migrat­ing to the Courant News plat­form this week­end as ini­tially planned. That imme­di­ately prompted some ques­tions about whether this meant that Courant was not going to be released until next fall when the YDN launches. The short answer: def­i­nitely not.  The long answer follows.

Some­time last sum­mer, Robert Baskin (@rsbaskin), my for­mer “boss” and men­tor at the Yale Daily News, and I talked about an idea we had for a startup com­pany: cre­ate an online pub­lish­ing plat­form for col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions. The YDN has run on a cus­tom CakePHP-based CMS since Jan­u­ary 2007, which Rob built with Henry Corrigan-Gibbs from scratch. Last spring (April 2008), we held a web con­fer­ence for the Ivy League news­pa­pers, and the big take­away was that open source solu­tions were not good enough; we needed a CMS designed for col­lege news orgs, by col­lege news orgs. Col­lege Pub­lisher was a blight upon the col­lege news land­scape, and we thought we could cre­ate a viable alternative.

Fast for­ward a few months, and we brought Paul O’Shannessy on board. Paul was fin­ish­ing his mas­ters degree at CMU where he worked for the TCPulse. With dreams of a suc­cess­ful com­pany that Paul and Rob could work for after grad­u­at­ing this year, we worked hard for sev­eral months, and even had a week-long meetup and code ses­sion in the Philadel­phia area over our win­ter break. We courted a few clients, and started refin­ing our mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als. We had designed and started build­ing a hosted platform-as-a-service, which was designed to be fully man­agable through a web-based admin inter­face ‚while still allow­ing pro­gram­mers the abil­ity to add new func­tion­al­ity thanks to Django’s awe­some app-based design.

And then we looked harder at the num­bers, and thought about why we were doing this, and it all started to unravel. After some long dis­cus­sions, we decided to aban­don the busi­ness ven­ture, and we all agreed to allow the code we had labored over to go into the open source realm. Around this time, in late Jan­u­ary, I approached the YDN for­mally about switch­ing to the new sys­tem. It had been built with the lessons-learned from the YDN’s exist­ing CMS, and encom­passed a num­ber of improve­ments that the Edi­to­r­ial staff had requested. The deci­sion was made to move for­ward with switch­ing to the new plat­form, but only under the con­di­tion that it launched right after spring break to give time for our new blog to take off before the end of the semester.

With money no longer in the pic­ture, and the real­ity of the senior essays and full time jobs com­ing to the fore, Rob and Paul had to step away from the project, leav­ing me to work on it mostly alone. I took some time off in Feb­ru­ary to focus on school, but returned and worked hard dur­ing March to get Courant and the new YDN site up to snuff for launch. As recently as last week, I thought I could maybe fin­ish things in time for our planned April 5 tran­si­tion. Once the YDN site was up, I’d focus on truly open sourc­ing Courant and get­ting the ball rolling on that front.

A few days ago, I real­ized that I wasn’t going to fin­ish in time, and that I couldn’t, in good con­science, put the site out there in its cur­rent state. We have a work­ing, sta­ble web­site now, and there was no real rea­son to rush the launch other than for the sake of the new blog and some new fea­tures. As the sole active mem­ber of the YDN web staff, I had to make the hard deci­sion to post­pone the launch until later this sum­mer to allow for fin­ish­ing all the fea­tures and doing proper testing.

What this means for Courant is that we no longer have our pio­neer site at release, but it means I can give the project more of my atten­tion and get other peo­ple involved. I will be attend­ing the Bar­Camp NewsIn­no­va­tion in Philly this month, and my goal is to have the project site fully up by then, includ­ing post­ing all of the doc­u­men­ta­tion and plans from when the project was in the com­mer­cial startup phase. Courant News isn’t quite ready to sup­port a full site yet, but it’s close and just requires a few more weeks of work. Hope­fully, if other devel­op­ers and UX peo­ple get involved, the project can begin to gen­er­ate a com­mu­nity of its own and gain some trac­tion.  We’ve tried our best to make Courant cus­tomiz­able and suit­able for just about any type of col­lege news web­site, and have a few fea­tures that I’ve not seen else­where. In the com­ing days and weeks, I’ll begin post­ing about them here and on the offi­cial Courant News blog once I find time to set that up. Thanks to all who have expressed in inter­est in Courant, I’ll be sure to keep the news flow­ing on a reg­u­lar basis from here on out.

Update (April 6, 2009): At the request of the YDN, I have removed some details about inter­nal affairs.