They don’t have the resources to devote to dedicated staff to maintain server space, upgrade and patch software, and those types of things. Relying on students is an iffy proposition, since they graduate and your next computer geek may not be as well versed.

Realize we’re talking about hundreds of small to mid-sized college media outlets who may have one adviser and a handful of students putting out their paper. The ONLY solution that would meet the hosting requirement and be equitable to all the parties involved is a non-profit cooperative that would be paid for by membership dues from large and small media groups based on the amount of traffic/bandwidth they use.

Unless and until that happens, these types of issues will continue to arise.

In the school news industry, College Publisher, now branded as the College Media Network, desperately needs a competitor.

I would say, and so do you, they have plenty of competition. Want to pay for your CMS, use Ellington or get your own instance of Polopoly or other “pay for use” CMS systems. Need a free version? As you point out:

…my work involves researching mature platforms already in the ecosystem, such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Django,…

These are all free systems. Paid, free or even with the semi-free/semi-pay model of CP there IS competition. The problem as I see it, there isn’t a one do-it-all-like-media-wants-it system. Perhaps that is the problem – we are looking for a swiss army knife CMS but given the rapid changes in technology and media in two years we will need a new one! Maybe the answer isn’t an all-in-one system?

Most, too, are held captive to this partnership because there isn’t the motivation, manpower, or vision for more innovative options.
Should any independent student newspaper want in a part of this? No.

Well, not exactly. Let’s be honest, what is right for you or the ODE may not be right for any other student newspaper. More importantly, it may be right for the ODE or some other college newspaper right now but what about after some one like you (you come across as a well informed, active and excited student) graduates? Graduating seniors is a problem for more than just football programs! Lose a great programmer or just interested student and your site can stagnate in one year as technology changes around you.

Even you pointed out:

It offers under-staffed and under-funded newsrooms an easy way to get their content online at a price that can’t be beat.

And there is the attraction for many college newspapers and some students who aren’t more forward thinking like you. Even for those who are more forward thinking, things like budget cuts (ours for example was cut 25% this year) can be limiting (and I’m not talking ad revenue alone). Problem we experienced wasn’t convincing students to do more, it was convincing administrators and student government why a college newspaper should be more than just a printed product.

You do make a very good point:

…student newspapers need to allocate resources internally to running and developing their own platform. This can seem somewhat paradoxical, adding to your staff when you’re losing more and more revenue, but it is a necessity for survival. The future isn’t all that bleak, we’re just in a time of transition.

Give an Amen to that! We do need to be allocating more resources, no question, but this presents some interesting economic issues as well. How do college newspapers fund such investments? College newspapers largely rely on either free or cheap labor. Minimum wage increases, rising food, transportation and general living costs are all making it more difficult to recruit, retain and compete with the other bigger money backed media outlets (who seem to like college students because they aren’t afraid of the term blog or podcast) not to mention typical college jobs like hostess or barrista. This problem requires more than a CMS for a solution such as re-tooling of internship programs, training programs, pay adjustments, finding new revenue opportunities, using student citizen journalism and just trying new things. A problem which was neither created nor can be solved by CP, Drupal or any other competitor.

You go on to mention:

Part of the innovation that has to happen, I would like to add, is how you manage, display, and distribute your content online. For student newspapers, the solution isn’t College Publisher. It’s too restrictive, poorly developed, and proprietary, locking innovative students to a platform that limits creativity.

There are some rather innovative and creative things which the CP4.0 system does offer. I would not say it limits creativity, rather it is the students you have on staff who know what to do with the tools that limits your creativity more than CP4.0. The Daily Pennsylvanian has done some very creative stuff in the LAMP environment, which is open source. The Daily Tar Heel has also figured out an interesting work around for blogs, granted done via WordPress but the 4.0 system and the students figured out how to “fit” it in. More importantly, the creativity of any system is likely to be more limited by the people you have on staff who know how to use and program the features, than the system itself.

… page 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.

Page load times certainly can be an issue with any system. The Javascript implementation in one system might be slower where another is it faster so that is something to be aware of which ever system you choose. Open source though has nothing to do with “fixing” any Javascript issue. Network bottle necks also can affect your traffic/page load times. If I were to host arbiteronline on our internal server our load times would be very slow due to the bottle neck in our old campus building. The University won’t host it on their servers and moving the site off campus has money and its own bottle neck issues. Case in point, Va. Tech. Shortly after the shootings the collegiate times website was not accessible. If I understand the situation correctly, their off campus host had some issues which made the site unavailable to a large number of people outside Va Tech and Va in general. How important is it to have your site accessible when more people than normal would like to look at it? There are advantages with either side but open source an off site hosting don’t provide fix all solutions either.

You also mention losing your site if CP goes out of business which is some what true. You will “lose” your active site but should have backups of everything you have done, and based on some recent examples (Temple moving from CP to Wordpress) they do work. With an open source system you don’t get, and most people forget to think about making or implementing a professional long term backup solution. These systems cost money and having done several consulting jobs for video and data backup systems I can tell you the external USB2.0/FW400/FW800 hard drives have a high failure rate when used in an environment like is needed for a media outlet which will rely on digital media storage and retrieval going forward.

CP isn’t for everyone, but for some it might be a good solution. I find most recent discussions on a college newspaper CMS solution focus on CP problems and gloss over what it really takes to provide a solid CMS. I like your idea for a consortium as the more options available, the better – in my opinion.

Editor’s note: Minor formatting changes were made to this comment.

http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/2008/may/15/daily-bruin-receives-online-development-grant/