Context

During the fall semester we made significant progress with Courant: switched to Haystack for search, improved multimedia browse-ability, added the headers app for improved mobile and alternative versions of a site, implemented powerful automated caching busting, refactored the staff app, added OpenX integration, added mapping and basic geo functionality, started work on Nando, added batch uploading of photos, and continuously increased performance.

But in early January, Rob and I had a serious conversation about whether it still made sense to develop Courant. Although the YDN was using it, no other developers had joined the team, and we had doubts about the project’s long-term survivability.

Our last best hope was to convince the team at CoPress to help support clients running on Courant. I met with them at their team meet-up in Philadelphia over MLK weekend and tried to feel out their intentions and plans for the next year. There was still some glimmer of hope, and I considered joining their support team to make this a reality.

Two weeks later, the YDN Business and Online departments hosted a conference for college news organizations, at which I gave a presentation about Courant. Two of the attendees were enthusiastic about the idea of migrating to Courant, and I’ve been in talks with them in the intervening weeks. We even wrote a CP4 to Courant data migration script while working on a prototype installation for one of the potential partners.

The Decision

Shortly thereafter, CoPress decided to shut down their operations. Without CoPress, and without any other potential developers to take over the reins, we had to make a tough decision: continue developing the project and potentially transition these two new sites to the platform without long-term support plans, or abandon the project.

Having worked on this project for over 16 months, pouring countless hours of my life into its development, it was an extraordinarily difficult decision. But, in the end, I feel it would be irresponsible to continue, especially knowing that I am going to have to leave anyways after my term at the YDN expires in October.

I’m currently working to transition the YDN off of Courant to a commercial system; although the front-runner is currently Ellington (from which Django was originally extracted), a final decision has yet to be made and it will likely be several months before I can talk publicly about our choice.

In the meantime, there may be occasional bug fixes to Courant, but substantial development of new features will not occur. We will leave the website and code online at least through the summer, and will likely move the code to Google Code or Github before retiring the website. Please feel free to use the code, but know that we will no longer be providing support of any form.

Conclusion

Had we pursued grant funding or other avenues of development, perhaps Courant could have lived up to its full potential. I truly believe it could have been a major player in changing the landscape of college news. I’m very proud of the work we did to create a generic and customizable, yet still very powerful, solution tailored specifically to the needs of college news organizations. Components like the get tag, dynamic/custom fields, the headers app, and the cache system are beyond the scope of most existing college news CMSes, and represent months of analysis and planning. The system was battle-tested against outrageous traffic spikes and proved to be quite resilient. We are not the first, and will surely not be the last, team to attempt to create a new CMS option for the college news world, and I wish others the best of luck.

I owe immense thanks to Rob and Paul for their contributions to the project over the last 18 months; their support has been invaluable, and I hope to work with them again in the future. I also want to thank Andrew Spittle for his assistance on designs for Nando, it’s unfortunate that they never saw the light of day. Thanks to everyone who has been supportive and encouraging over the past year, especially those who contributed to discussions on our mailing list and privately via email or IM.

I look forward to seeing how college news organizations respond to the current crisis in the media industry, and I hope they learn to adapt and look forward instead of backwards. My stint in the college news world has been enjoyable and a great learning experience, but I’m ready to apply my skills to new areas of interest. If you need an experienced developer for your software or robotics project, please get in touch.

Background

As you might have gathered from my other blog posts, I am, first and foremost, a developer. I’ve done stints as the combo designer-and-developer for sites, but I’ve learned that my design skills are lacking and have tried to find more talented partners when working on projects that require interfaces.

Last week, the first site was launched on the Courant News platform. There are still a slew of template bugs that I’m working through, but the platform has performed admirably over the past week. It currently uses a more-or-less stock Django admin interface with the grappelli skin. However, the ultimate goal is that of the digital newsroom and Nando.

The Job

I am seeking a web/UX designer to work with me on designing the Nando interface. For those not familiar, Nando is the codename for the admin interface in the Courant News publishing platform for college news sites; it combines standard CRUD content management with a digital newsroom and the ability to manage an organization’s site from the web interface without touching code. For full details, you can read through the spec and the first round of community comments.

Because Courant News is an open source project, we don’t have the money to pay a huge amount for this work, but I am willing to work out monetary and other forms of compensation and negotiate terms of the work with interested individuals. When Nando is complete, Courant News will represent one of the best options for college news sites who embrace the web-first mentality and want to push the boundaries of online journalism; by working on designing Nando, your mark will be left on all of these endeavors and will touch members of the next generation of journalists.

Contact Me

So if you are interested or have questions, please send me an email (maxcutler AT gmail DOT com) or find me on AIM (S/N: Goaliexam).

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.

I know that currently there’s a strong desire for alternatives to College Publisher. WordPress and Drupal are great, but sometimes they aren’t the best fit for a news organization, and so a custom news CMS is an attractive prospect.

At this point, we’ve been working on code for Courant News for almost six months, and have been thinking about it conceptually for at least a year. As I’ve discussed in a previous post, a CMS is fundamentally all about content management, which means that the administrative interface is the most important component. We have plans for the Courant News admin, which will become public when the project site launches this week. But for now we are still using the Django admin app as a stopgap solution, which is passable but far from ideal. Until we’ve implemented a more news-oriented admin, I don’t think I could recommend use of Courant News for a production site.

The point of releasing the code and opening the process is to get the rest of the college news community involved. We can all collaborate on the design and implementation of various aspects of the platform, and make something that is really built for and by the college news community. We’re now ready to get people involed in a hands-on manner, and that’s why we are “releasing” this week. But please be careful not to confuse the term “release” as meaning “ready to be used.”

I think Courant News has a ton of potential and can be a rallying point for college news, and I hope we can get alot of voices involed in the process. We need developers; we need journalists; and we need visionaries. Get excited and get involved because you see the potential and want to help us through the process. Don’t get carried away thinking it’s an immediate cure or immediately useful tool. All in due time. All in due time.

I’ve often been asked by my colleagues at the YDN what we can do to recruit more people to the web team. There are clearly people with the requisite skills on campus, but running house ads, putting up posters, and sending campus-wide email blasts have been completely unsuccessful this year.

Many college news orgs pay their student staff, which is one way to incentivize work, but the YDN is a volunteer-only organization. No one gets paid, and that’s really not even an option, no matter how desperate we may be. So if you won’t get paid, why would you work for us?

I’ve struggled with this question over the past year or so. There are a number of intangible advantages of working for a news org, especially one with a powerful list of alumni like the YDN, but it is hard to convince people on the basis of intangibles alone, especially when it is so easy to get paying jobs elsewhere on campus or online.

One of the big draws for me was having my work seen on a scale uncommon to most freelance projects. The YDN gets tens of thousands of pageviews per day, and have had peaks of up to several hundred thousand in a day when our stories get picked up by some popular aggregation services (e.g., Drudge Report, Huffington Post). Large amounts of traffic bring some interesting new technical problems to building a website, but is that alone sufficiently attractive to prospective staffers?

I often hear people recommend giving a pitch at a Computer Science class, but I’ve often wondered what kind of talent you can get. If you pitch at intro-level classes, they likely won’t have the programming skills to be immediately helpful anyways. If you pitch at a high level class, you need a really damn good pitch to convince people who have skills that are high in demand.

So I ask you, fellow college news folks, what means have you used to recruit and retain technical staff?

Since that talk with Daniel, I’ve been hard at work on Courant News and thinking about the problems of actual journalistic content production from the editorial standpoint instead of the purely technical standpoint with which I was more familiar. As a result, I think that this idea actually has much more merit than I initially gave it credit for, and could serve as a valuable tool for both the news organization and its consumers.

For the news organization itself, a wiki can serve as a tool for maintaining stores of information on given topics, from which reporters can refresh their knowledge or learn about a new beat. Instead of relying on a constant rehashing of the history of a given subject in articles, a wiki can maintain a persistent record and be updated with new information to maintain a consistent information source over time. By tying that in with tagged content, as Daniel suggests, such wiki pages can be useful tools for research and exploration in addition to purely documentary purposes.

Similar arguments can be extended to the news consumers as well. Instead of relying on search functionality to find out more history or related information about the contents of an article or an arbitrary subject, a consumer can look at the comprehensive wiki. I can’t count how many times I have gone to Wikipedia to look up information on all sorts of random topics. Having a wiki run and/or produced by a news organization allows for it to be more in-depth –and potentially more credible– than a general-purpose wiki like Wikipedia.

I’m not sure it necessarily makes sense to allow such news wikis to be editable by anyone and everyone, but the news organization does not have to be the sole provider of authors either. Daniel’s example of allowing a student government to maintain its own wiki entry is a good example of a case where a news organization could allow an outside individual or group to maintain a page about themselves or a given subject. This may not be exclusive authorship rights, as the news organization may want to retain the ability to add new and edit existing content provided by such outside sources, but select partnerships would prove beneficial for everyone (news org, outside source, and consumers).

I would be surprised if many news organizations do not already have some internal database of sorts, and I think there is a lot of value in opening them up and establishing news wikis. Doing so provides another reason for consumers to visit their websites and stick around, thereby increasing traffic and potential revenue numbers. There’s much to gain, and very little to lose. Is there anything blocking the way except institutional (and possibly technical) inertia?

I’d like to take some steps down this path with Courant down the road once some other more essential components are taken care of, and I’d like to see others begin experimenting with such ideas on whatever technical platform they know how to work with.

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.