CoPress
Location
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
United States
Your idea
Will you launch your idea as a business or non-profit?
Non-Profit
Web site (url)
Name Your Project
CoPress
Describe Your Idea
Innovation
What is your idea? What makes it innovative? Why is it important?
Our goal is to bring college journalism up to speed with the ‘new media’ evolution. Better training for journalism students means a more educated journalism industry.
CoPress is a group of passionate individuals building a better technical ecosystem for student news organizations. As a network we can pool our knowledge by building a community of student collaboration, by offering hosting and support, and by providing other technical resources. We believe that these tools are desperately needed for college publications to survive and thrive.
Despite having grown up with the Internet, many of today's journalism students are not pioneering new and dynamic forms of storytelling online. This is largely because few college news organizations have web and technical expertise on staff. Restrained by turnover, most resort to free, simplistic, and closed software. Fortunately, advances in open-source content management systems have made it easy to produce a dynamic, interactive site.
Yet, taking advantage of all the Web has to offer remains a gargantuan task for one guy or gal running the organization's site. CoPress aims to bridge that gap, providing an array of tools that will put the cutting edge within reach.
The project has three evolving parts: community, knowledge and software. CoPress will support popular CMS options with fee-for-service hosting/management, continuing code development, plugins, and design for college media. Second, CoPress will connect student newspaper Web editors, webmasters, and developers with peers and professionals via regular regional conferences/hackathons, and research. Finally, CoPress will openly share the knowledge it accumulates, indexed and organized, an enduring hub of intellectual resources. Members will be able to edit, contribute and improve this hub over time. Such a community can create tremendous value with passionate learners working together on common problems.
Impact
What will be the impact of your idea?
Running a dynamic, modern and sustainable website is a daunting task for any news organization. As college media moves more and more into the online world, it is increasingly apparent that the de facto solution — College Publisher — is not providing the support, community, or knowledge that is demanded. CoPress will fill that role. As a network for students, by students, we can engage news organizations across backgrounds and the cliques that too often stifle dialogue.
Ultimately, such a cauldron of innovation would benefit the broader journalism industry as well. A great deal of the craft cannot be learned in the classroom but must be practiced in the newsroom. Today, as even professors can't keep pace with the constant evolution of Internet media, it is absolutely essential that aspiring journalists get the chance to experience and experiment. By getting the right tools to student publications, CoPress can take advantage of the college environment, which is ripe for experimentation.
This Entry is about (Issues)
People: We are looking for ideas from people who can make them happen.
CoPress has been an active organization since September of 2008. In January 2009, we incorporated and started the process toward becoming a 501c3.
We currently:
Hold weekly conference calls, which are open to the public, and shared as a podcast
We post relevant content to our blog, Google group, and social networks to encourage discussion.
Host a weekly podcast: This Week in CoPress
Provide website hosting
Sponsor #collegejourn, a weekly online chat
Have promoted awareness of CoPress at several conferences
The CoPress team is a synthesis of development, design, editing, and management talent from all across the nation, including Daniel Bachhuber (former webmaster for the Daily Emerald), Greg Linch from The Miami Hurricane, Kevin Koehler from the Old Gold & Black, Adam Hemphill from Eastern Connecticut State University, Joey Baker from The Daily Orange, Albert Sun from The Daily Pennsylvanian, Miles Skorpen of the Swarthmore Daily Gazette, Jared Silfies from the Temple News, and Ken Schwencke from the Independent Florida Alligator. These are innovators who are actively leading change at their student news organizations on platforms such as WordPress, Expression Engine, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, and Django.
CoPress is advised by Bryan Murley of the Center for Innovation in College Media, Drew Geraets of the City University of New York, and Anthony Pesce and Dharmishta Rood of the Populous Project who have been awarded the Knight News Challenge grant and share the CoPress vision
Sustainability
How much will it cost to launch your idea?
Ultimately, CoPress hopes to have the budget to pay for two full time staff members to manage our community and develop code for relevant CMS solutions. However, at this point, CoPress exists as an entirely volunteer organization. We have commitments from our team to continue to dedicate 10-20 per week per person through May of 2009.
We have also applied for the Knight News Challenge, and have submitted our second round application.
CoPress is currently providing website hosting to one college newspaper with plans for this to expand to five in the near future. These services are provided at cost, but when expanded to enough news organizations, this income can help offset the cost of paying our staff for support services.
Seed funding for basic necessities, like site hosting, incorporation costs, etc have been provided by CoPress team members with a special thanks to Adam Hemphill.
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