Silfies Scope Geekish journalism and media ramblings from a student.

CoPress: Changing college journalism

What is CoPress? It’s a network of journalists and students working at college publications trying to solve some of the technical problems with publishing online. What does that mean? We’re trying to fix the “CMS problem.”

The CMS Problem

Technical problems keep student publications from having the freedom to innovate because they usually end up with a CMS that is restrictive. There’s a need to provide student publications with the option to manage their content online — they need help.

CoPress

This is where CoPress comes in. It’s a project to reinvent college CMS options, to give the small publication the freedom necessary to operate online. Right now it’s a group of students and online journalists pooling their resources to get more options and distribute a product to colleges so they can operate with a functional and innovative CMS that doesn’t need a team of technical specialists geeks to run the shebang. There’s a better source of information on the CoPress site.

What am I doing for CoPress?

Right now I’m giving the rest of the CoPress team a perspective of a non-coder. I do not know anything about open-source coding and I get lost with the developer talk. I’d like to learn a bit more of the technical side of the operation but I figure we need that view as well in order to create a better product.

Either way, I’m excited to see where this endeavor will take college media, it’s becoming a brain trust of information.

[...] CoPress, in the words of one of its founders, is “a network of journalists and students working at college publications trying to solve some of the technical problems with publishing online. What does that mean? We’re trying to fix the ‘CMS problem.’”  Their main problem is with College Publisher, recently rechristened College Media Network.  It is the content management system (CMS) of choice among major student newspapers.  (Go to Google and look up 10 college publications.  My prediction: Nine out of 10 will be using CMN.  You will know this because all the papers’ sites look basically the same.)  According to CoPress and its supporters, the CMS of CMN is “too restrictive, poorly developed, and proprietary, locking innovative students to a platform that limits creativity.  [P]age load times are atrocious because of far too much Javascript, and if they go out of business, your website goes down.  The answer, instead, is open source.” [...]

I got to meet Greg Linch and Kevin Koehler last week at ONA and hear a bit about the project. Sounds like a really great thing you guys are doing.

Good luck, all.

[...] Jared Silfies - CoPress: Changing college journalism [...]

[...] Jared Silfies - CoPress: Changing college journalism [...]