Courant no longer…

02.21.10 Posted in College News, Courant News, Yale Daily News by Max

On Octo­ber 26, 2008, the first bits were com­mit­ted to the pri­vate Courant News project repos­i­tory. At the time, Rob, Paul and I were going to offer a hosted SaaS prod­uct for col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions, free­ing them from the grasps of Col­lege Pub­lisher and pro­vid­ing a sta­ble foun­da­tion for the future. In Feb­ru­ary 2009, we decided not to pur­sue the project as a busi­ness, but agreed to con­tinue devel­op­ment as an open-source project. On April 7, 2009, we opened our code to the pub­lic. After launch­ing the Yale Daily News on Courant in Sep­tem­ber 2009, we finally started to pick up steam in the past month. But after deep reflec­tion, we have decided to cease devel­op­ment of the project.

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Seeking Web/UX Designer

09.10.09 Posted in College News, Courant News by Max

Last night I posted a cryp­tic job offer­ing on Twit­ter, even offer­ing to pay for the work. After get­ting a num­ber of pri­vate queries for more infor­ma­tion, I thought I’d make my request pub­lic instead of pri­vately email­ing half a dozen people.

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On Forward Thinking in College News

05.01.09 Posted in College News by Max

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.

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Courant News Expectations

04.19.09 Posted in College News, Courant News by Max

As we will be open­ing doors to the Courant News code this week, I thought I would take a moment to address expec­ta­tions that peo­ple might or might not have regard­ing the project.

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Recruitment

04.12.09 Posted in College News by Max

Some­thing that I’ve strug­gled might­ily with is the trou­ble of recruit­ing tech­ni­cal tal­ent for col­lege news orga­ni­za­tions. It appears to be a com­mon prob­lem, and yet I have heard few good solutions.

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News Wikis

04.08.09 Posted in College News by Max

Today Joey Baker tweeted about a link to a blog post on the Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Lab which talks about the author’s vision of the future of dig­i­tal news cre­ation and uti­liza­tion. One of the core con­cepts was the idea that a wiki would serve as an author­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion source, to which blog or news posts would point for back­ground while pro­vid­ing just new tid­bits of infor­ma­tion them­selves. This reminded me of Daniel Bachhuber’s post on top­i­cal wikis on the CoPress blog a few months ago. Daniel and I had had a per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion about the topic, but I’m not sure I really under­stood it at the time.

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Courant News: A history and status update

04.02.09 Posted in College News, Courant News, Yale Daily News by Max

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.

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