A post on Xark! today discusses why newspaper website comments suck and what might be done to “unsuck” them. The synthesis of why they suck is that newspapers don’t allocate enough time or staff resources to participating in the conversation and, when they do, newspapers take the wrong approach to community management. In short, there [...]

From an email conversation earlier today, I think it would be sweet if News Mixer, a Knight-funded open source commenting project built on Django, had the ability to generate a unique, static URL for any bit of content in the content management system. I really like the things that News Mixer is doing to take [...]

Greg Linch was interviewed by David Cohn in the past week about CoPress which is way, way cool:   As the project has been a very, uh, organic process, I thought I might clarify on a few points Greg made. First off, it is of my humble opinion that open source content management systems are [...]

If you wanted to build a completely digital student news organization from scratch, how would you do it? Which beats would you cover right off the bat? Would you cover club sports and campus sustainability, or the common news the student newspaper already covers? What form would your content take? Would you focus on text, [...]

One of the rather positive outcomes of my case against College Publisher from a few weeks back has been the formation of a diverse group of people around a new project to provide an alternative: CoPress. A product of the sudden realization that many online editors across the country have many of the same opinions [...]

On my argument against College Publisher, and for an open source coalition of student newspapers, Brad Arendt of The Arbiter presents several good points about the advantages of using College Publisher.  Considering the time he took writing a well-detailed comment, I thought I would clarify on a several things I think he missed. First, I [...]