How Should a College Newspaper Publish on the Web?
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I graduated high school many years ago, and first got online in 1992. The Internet was there, but not the World Wide Web at that point. I wrote a series of articles for the newspaper at my university about the Internet. Chris wrote me with a question about his college newspaper, and getting it online. Specifically, he is confused about them needing something simple to update with an easy interface. The reason is, they won’t always have a tech guy around. Chris feels that buying their own domain name is just too much for them, and they aren’t happy with the free WordPress package, as they don’t like the templates. Additionally, they have almost no budget. So, he turned to me for help.
I will agree that the templates available for WP aren’t very much to your liking. If you like WordPress itself, spend just a little bit of money and buy a more professional one. I’m sure you have some kind of campus IT department. They could host the site for you. You may be able to approach a local business and get hosting from them, maybe in exchange for free advertising. With WordPress, you can find a good template that will allow you to make it look very much like the professional online papers.
Any money you might have to spend would be quickly offset with advertising, local businesses, or even time donated by other students to help. The sooner you can get the paper into a system that will work for them and grow with them, the better.
A blog is just one level. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many social features in WordPress. There’s no profile management, certainly not like Facebook or MySpace. While you’ll still be somewhat limited on themes, you could take a look at having a Ning community. Ning is basically a large network of free communities. I paid for a few extra options, including the ability to use my own domain and to run ads. There are features for Ning including photo albums, profiles, videos and forums. You can turn features on or off, as well. It’s certainly going to offer you a lot more than just a simple blog would.
I don’t know what all is out there, but I would certainly want to point you in the direction of open-source options. This way, you have freedom to make any changes you feel you may need. If anyone in our community has better recommendations, I’m sure that they will write and let me know.
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5 Comments
Game Invasion
October 10th, 2008
at 10:54pm
Chris Pirillo How Do You Buy Your Music Online? What Sound Does Your iPhone Make? What Kind of Digital Camera do You Prefer to Buy? What’s Your Favorite Beer in the World?How Should a College Newspaper Publish on the Web?
Ian Littman
October 10th, 2008
at 1:32am
If your newspaper isn’t afraid of working with a division of Viacom (and having the paper site running off of their servers) CollegePublisher (there’s a link to it at The Oredigger, “my website” for this comment) seems to be the ticket. Granted, there are a hundred or two papers that will look somewhat similar in their web presence to yours, and CollegePublisher reserves the right to put advertising on the page in addition to whatever content and ads you have on your own, but the ad overload isn’t too horrible and the solution is built for college newspapers.
On the other hand, I’m trying to get some of the more blog-like content broken out into Wordpress-based sites, so if your paper is into that sort of thing don’t let them stick to one solution to the exclusion of everything else.
But CollegePublisher seems to be a decent system, albeit one where such oddities as a set-as-default plain-text-editor for content reside. It’s not free open-source software but it does work. Hope this helps and shoot me a twitter message (iansltx) when the paper makes its way to online!
nanciesweb
October 10th, 2008
at 7:16pm
I happen to like “XOOPS” (www.xoops.org). You can add modules like forums, chat, and news articles. I’ve messed with it in the past and when I have the time to manage a community, I plan on using it.
Sourceforge.net seems to have quite a few similar content management systems to choose from.
mattman
October 10th, 2008
at 8:05pm
well i think it should:one be on on the website of they have one or two just creat a blog and both are great things to to so do whatever you think will be better
Pat Hawks
October 12th, 2008
at 8:55pm
I just helped my alma mater set up a website for their newspaper at hooverchallenger.com
I used self hosted Wordpress and created a theme from scratch that divides content based on the section and has a magazine style homepage.
It seems to be working well for them. It’s easy for them to update, it’s easy to comment stories, and the ad revenue more than pays for the domain and hosting.
In addition, many professional newspapers use Wordpress for sections of their sites, so it is good for the students to become familiar with it while still in the classroom.