Max Cutler

As with the news indus­try at large, I get the sense that there are really two camps in the world of col­lege news: the one that has existed for decades, and a newly emerg­ing one which is push­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of col­lege jour­nal­ism in the online realm. This post was inspired by a ses­sion I attended last week­end at BCNI Philly and a recent post by Col­lege Pub­lisher in response to the activ­i­ties of CoPress and oth­ers help­ing move col­lege news orgs to open source solu­tions like WordPress.

As some­one involved in an open source project to help col­lege news orgs define their online pres­ence, I’ve been keep­ing a close watch on dis­cus­sions around ways in which such orga­ni­za­tion can inno­vate online. There are a ton of ideas out there, but unless peo­ple start act­ing on them they will ulti­mately be worth noth­ing. If an idea falls in the woods and no one acts on it, does it really matter?

A guest speaker (who will remain anony­mous out of respect for his wish for the dis­cus­sion to be off-the-record) at a con­fer­ence the YDN hosted in Feb­ru­ary talked about his organization’s approach to find­ing new ways to make money online. His orga­ni­za­tion is prob­a­bly one of the most sol­vent of all news orgs in the world right now, still aim­ing to at least break even this year. As he described, try­ing out new ideas on the inter­net is incred­i­bly cheap, and so they try out just about every new option and medium that becomes avail­able. Web­site, pay-site, Face­book, Kin­dle, Twit­ter, the list goes on and on. They are will­ing to trial almost any­thing, and if it doesn’t work, then they lost only a minor invest­ment in the time of the devel­oper or two that it took to build. If it suc­ceeds, they make money and con­tinue to grow that idea. Low risk, high reward sce­nar­ios that the web and dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies afford.

In the col­lege news realm, you have some orgs that are start­ing to push the bound­aries. Some are try­ing to do com­pre­hen­sive mul­ti­me­dia work, a num­ber are try­ing to do web-first on a reg­u­lar basis. But, by and large, the vast num­ber of col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions are con­tent to float along in the sea of the sta­tus quo.

At the BCNI Philly ses­sion, a num­ber of cur­rent and for­mer j-school stu­dents talked with j-school fac­ulty mem­bers about ways to improve the expe­ri­ence for all involved and make the expe­ri­ence more valu­able for a future in the news indus­try. The con­sen­sus seemed to be that teach­ers need to inspire the stu­dents to be more curi­ous and to learn new tech­nolo­gies and tools on their own.

As a soft­ware guy, this sounds to me much like the prob­lem com­puter sci­ence depart­ments have faced for awhile too: alot of CS stu­dents take CS to get a job in indus­try, where they work 9–5 jobs as code mon­keys and do unin­spir­ing work. How­ever, a set of stu­dents will be inspired and curi­ous enough to learn things on our own and really help push the bound­aries in the soft­ware world. Read Jeff Atwood’s post on “The Two Types of Pro­gram­mers” to get the full pic­ture. Maybe the news world has the same sit­u­a­tion, and so I ask whether that’s some­thing that’s a) change­able, and b) worth changing.

So now back to the Col­lege Pub­lisher post men­tioned in the intro. It is in response to a post by Lau­ren Rabaino, a post which rep­re­sents the argu­ments of many of the 20% group (see Jeff’s arti­cle above). By con­trast, I would argue that CP and most of the papers on it prob­a­bly rep­re­sent the 80% group. CP has been in the col­lege news game for a long time now, and have found a sta­tus quo that suits their busi­ness pri­or­i­ties. Can you really blame them for not want­ing to shake things up?

One thing that work­ing in com­mu­ni­ties like Django’s has shown me is that the news world des­per­ately needs coders. I almost want to put <blink> tags on that last state­ment. See this ses­sion from Djan­go­Con, projects like Every­Block,  the Journalists/Coders Ning group, count­less code projects (mine included), and spe­cial teams at the NY Times, Wash­ing­ton Post, LA Times, Wash­ing­ton Times, and oth­ers. I’ll expli­cate more on this in a future post, but I think that’s a trend­ing topic in the news indus­try, and per­haps what drew me to news in the first place.

Thus, state­ments like this make me cringe:

How­ever, rather than build­ing a CMS, we often won­der why inno­va­tors do not focus their ener­gies on build­ing up traf­fic with con­tent and multi-media pack­ages to raise the pro­file of col­lege jour­nal­ism.  In the end, col­lege news­pa­pers are in the news busi­ness, not the web business.

They go on to advo­cate against want­ing con­trol of adver­tis­ing because it neces­si­tates hav­ing staff mem­bers ded­i­cated to sell­ing ads, which is admit­tedly a dif­fi­cult propo­si­tion for some papers. I’d actu­ally tend to agree for some smaller news orgs: if your news site doesn’t get much traf­fic, it will be dif­fi­cult to impos­si­ble to make much money online, and stick­ing with an ad network/service like CP’s is prob­a­bly your best option. That’s just the real­ity for online ads right now. Maybe CoPress or oth­ers will orga­nize a com­pet­i­tive net­work at some point, but prob­a­bly not in the forsee­able future. How­ever, if you get any decent amount of traf­fic, go for it. Browse around the CoPress forums to find dis­cus­sions on the details, but don’t let CP or any­one else hold your ad rev­enue hostage. We have one per­son at the YDN doing online ads almost exclu­sively, and he has direct sold our entire inven­tory almost the entire school year.

CP ends their post talk­ing about the chal­lenges of “host­ing, main­te­nance and sup­port.” They have a very valid point here, and it is real chal­lenge in the high turnover world of col­lege news. There is alot to be said for the resources that CP pro­vides in that regard, and I do thank them for help­ing the vast major­ity of news orgs. But for those with forward-looking staff, and espe­cially those with tech tal­ent, it’s worth branch­ing out. Work­ing at a news org is about learn­ing, and doing it on your own (or with sup­port from a group like CoPress) is about the best learn­ing expe­ri­ence you can get. Any­one who has run their own sys­tem for a year can eas­ily go to a news­room using Atex/Polopoly and pick it up quickly.

One of my biggest gripes though, is the FUD approach taken at the con­clu­sion of the article.

There are par­ties (SPAMers, PHISH­ers, etc) that attempt to infil­trate sites all the time – and the appli­ca­tions deployed are more and more sophis­ti­cated each semes­ter.  Fight­ing this bat­tle is an unsung ser­vice CMN provides.

There are so many things wrong with these two sen­tences that I’m not even sure where to begin. The num­ber of sites run­ning Word­Press which are exposed to these threats far out­weighs the num­ber of CP sites, so to claim that CP has beat WP in that domain seems a bit silly. Last I checked, SPAM and PHISH aren’t acronyms, so the only log­i­cal use of upper-case let­ter­ing there would be as a scare tac­tic, which is just sad. So sad. Mov­ing on.

In con­clu­sion, I think the ten­sions between Col­lege Pub­lisher and CoPress are symp­to­matic of the sta­tus quo vs forward-thinking group debates. As described in Jeff’s post, most of the 80% will never be con­vinced of the mer­its of curios­ity and forward-thinking-ness, and it’s a los­ing bat­tle to try to com­bat those peo­ple. I hope that CoPress is suc­cess­ful in find­ing most of those in the col­lege news world who are in the 20% group and help­ing them work together to cre­ate a bet­ter future. But they should also real­ize that many still don’t “get it”, and per­haps never will. Let them go on to tra­di­tional voca­tional jobs. We won’t miss them while we work for a bet­ter future.