The bottom line is this: most of this student work was very good, and it’s important to show industry and other journalism students how we’re preparing the next generation to lead change in newsrooms. Students are young and therefore their work is not perfect, but it can be awfully good. Here are three examples, and the reason that each gives me hope for the future of journalism.
Splash! makes waves in school language programs
By Anika Anand and Kellen Moore

Update: Anand’s blog post on her final project experience, from Dec. 24

• The article was well written and free of grammar, style and structural errors. It demonstrated good news judgment. It was full of details that are best suited for text. It placed a story in a statewide context and clearly showed a substantial research effort to discover facts beyond the surface. It wasn’t investigative journalism by any means, but a good and full explanation of the subject.
• The content of the videos were appropriate for that medium. Anand and Moore used personal anecdotes that complimented the hard facts in the text. The subjects for the video were central to the story.
• The execution of the videos was very good, but probably had the most noticeable flaws of the project. I liked very much the consistency of visual style — the lower-thirds and the angle from which the videos were shot. Whether intentional or accidental, the effect of shooting up at the subjects and having the subjects look farther up still (and off the angle of the camera) made their comments seems “loftier.” Of course, you have to be careful of unintentional editorializing, but I found the message that was communicated visually here consistent with the content of the subjects’ words. The videos could have been shot tighter, I think. Especially in the one video where there are some distracting cords in the lower right corner of the frame. The audio on the video seemed hollow, which may have been a result of microphone equipment, placement or compression.
• The story included two videos that the students posted to YouTube. Using that method of getting video on site has weaknesses, but it also has two strengths. First, it’s easy. Second,  it serves as an additional distribution outlet for your journalism and a way to tease people back to the full story. A few things to remember when using YouTube to drive people to your site — be sure to include on the YouTube video a description of the story and and link back to your site. Also, consider grouping all other related videos together. The file names appear both on YouTube and on the site into which the videos are embedded, so be sure that the file names are descriptive. In this case, the titles were not descriptive enough to be helpful to searchers and scanners.
• All the videos were embedded in appropriate places in the story. Working with a designer would have improved the look of the package. But Anand and Moore did an excellent job with the tools they were given, and no editor or audience member could ask for more than that. By intent or accident, the alternating placement of the video subjects on the left and right provided a pleasant visual effect.
• Excellent work breaking up the story and anchor linking.
• The students on this project really demonstrated their ability to look for the “next-best” solutio — and that’s an underrated skill in deadline-driven journalism. When they weren’t able to embed their Google Map because of a problem inside the CMS, they solved the problem on their own by using  a screen grab. They had to do their own research to figure out how to grab a good still frame from the video to illustrate the piece. (The only improvement I’d make would be to make a link out of the map image as well as the map caption text. I wanted to click on that durn map.)
• Excellent and appropriate use of Google Maps to convey the *where* element of the story. Anand and Moore wisely used different colored markers to convey information. (Although I almost missed the key. Remember that when presenting tools like this, many people — especially people who are very comfortable with computers — will simply start clicking before they read. If they start clicking and don’t quickly “get it” then they will humph loudly and be on their way. The best tools rely on as little CHA (“Click here asshole!”) as possible.

Out-of-state students receive support from campus group
by Rachel Scall, Jeff Woodall and Tristan Long

Each piece of this project was executed well and the package as a whole made sense.

• The choice to do a photo gallery in video format was wise. The video editing application was the tool that these students knew the best and with which they felt the most comfortable. The content did not suffer at all because of their tool choice. The audio was well-matched to the images. They had multiple sources. The title on YouTube looked good, too.
• The map on this project was a knockout. It was nicely embedded into the story and it wisely provided two navigational techniques. The details were excellent and required a lot of reporting. I enjoyed spending a lot of time with it just clicking around, and that is the hallmark of a good online news package.
• The story was nicely done. It could have stood alone well, but it was appropriately enhanced by the other elements. Its links were appropriately placed and sent readers to appropriate destinations.
• I really like the smart way that Scall, Woodall and Long linked between each of the three elements of the story, allowing people to navigate horizontally. Each element stood on its own and had its own editorial reason for being.

Feeding hungry children one backpack at a time
By Elizabeth Lilly & Heather Mandelkehr

Overall, this is a good project. It went beyond the minimum requirements in terms of text length and presentation of the Google Map. The gallery was nicely organized from start to finish. There were a few things that kept it from being an excellent project, but it was overall well done.

• The choice to use a photo slide show instead of video was a smart one because they students were confident in their photo reporting and editing skills than their video production skills. To me, knowing your strengths and weaknesses shows a lot of maturity. Also, the subject didn’t need video. The order of the photos had a clear narrative arc that took us through the distribution process and it had a nice mix of faces and things.
• The audio of the slides sounded a little hollow, but that’s a technical problem that improves with experience. The bigger issue for me was an editorial one — the story of the audio I don’t think fit the photos as well as it could have. A better — and more difficult — audio would have been done with multiple voices of the volunteers talking about the program and walking the audience through the weekly process. Finally, I would have hid the captions as the default. I kept wanting to read them while looking at the photos and listening to the audio. Since I couldn’t do all three at once, I found myself getting distracted from the audio and stopping and restarting. If there’s good info in both the audio and the text, you don’t want your audience to miss either.
• The text was probably the weakest component of this project. There were some grammar and style issues, some passive sentences and imprecise wordings.  Also, I would have liked to read more about money, volume of food and quantitative descriptions of the program or its impact — and less about changes in procedure.
• The map was very well done and appropriately used for the information in the story. Good caption on the map and on each item’s window.
• Lilly and Mandelkehr  also showed an excellent ability to find the “best available” solution to problems. They were smart to insert a JPG of the map and also very smart to link the JPG as well as the text caption. And they demonstrated resourcefulness in your ability to embed the Soundslides. More than any technical proficiency, these problem-solving skills are important in all forms of journalism.

With that optimistic image fresh in your mind, let’s look at what CMSs do and why your news organization needs one.

Why do I need a CMS?

First, everyone else is doing it. The McClatchy papers have Digital Workbench, the Fayetteville Observer and Wilmington Star-News use the Software Construction Company’s SCC MediaServer, the Asheville and Greensboro papers use Saxotech. In 2006, Media General plunked down a somewhere near $400,ooo for a new CMS for its properties. Several of the state’s smallest papers use TownNews.com. The Daily Tar Heel uses College Publisher. OrangePolitics.org (and The Onion and The Virginian-Pilot) use Drupal. The Independent Weekly uses Gyrobase. The University of Miami student paper uses WordPress. The Lawrence Journal-World uses (and created) Ellington.

But aside from popularity, you need a CMS so you can:

• standardize the visual appearance of your site
• re-use the same headlines, story text, photos and other content simultaneously on several of your site’s pages without having to build each page by hand.
• create workflow efficiencies across media.

What Does a CMS Do?

At its most basic, a Web content management system is a database of content and metadata combined with visual and conditional rules that govern how the content is displayed in various settings.

A CMS usually has these components:

• A database
• A collection of cascading style sheets
• A collection of content display rules based on various conditions described in a programming language such as PHP.

Where Can I See CMS Examples?

The easiest way to play with a CMS is to sign up for a blog on WordPress.com.

There are several sites — including OpenSourceCMS.com — that will let you play with various open-source content management systems so you can see their strengths and weaknesses.

Where Is the CMS? Is it on the Internet or Something?

Content management systems are software applications, just like Microsoft Word. But they run on Web servers instead of your local computer. Very often you load content on to the site simply by filling out a form in on a Web page and/or uploading files from your local machine. If you can attach a file to a Gmail (or Yahoo or Hotmail) account, you can create, edit and manage content in a CMS.

So the first thing you need to do is get some space on a Web server where you can host your CMS. Be sure you can have access to the database, server configuration files and any other programming languages your chosen CMS needs in order to run correctly.

Few newspaper publishers have any interest in shopping for a host that is fairly priced and has the right version of PHP running. That’s why several companies offer all-in-one hosted solutions. You give them the credit card number and they take care of the rest. Some examples that are appropriate for small publishers are:

• Ellington
• Co-Press
• TownNews
  

Design and Other Customization

In order to make your site pretty you will need to customize it’s layout and format. This is done first through by applying a “theme” to your CMS and then by installing and configuring various additional pieces of code, often called “widgets” or “plugins.”

To do this, you need to hire a designer who has experience with user interface and information architecture design of news Web sites. Don’t hire someone who doesn’t have experience working with a news site.

Your designer should do this:

1. Work with you to understand the mission of the site and the ways that various audiences will use the site and the work flows that content creator/editors will build the site. These are called use cases.
2. Define a finite set of page templates. Each template will display content based on a set of rules that is common to all pages using that template. Examples of templates for a basic Web site would be:
   Homepage, Section Front (or Category Index), and Article Page. There could also be templates for things such as user comments, photo slide shows, restaurant reviews, search results, etc.
3. Create wire frames of each template.
4. Create black and white design comps that show where text and visual elements will appear on each template. These design comps usually include logos and other graphical elements.
5. Create color comps.
6. A final version of the page with an associated style guide.

Many of you, dear readers, are thinking to yourselves right now that you might just skip from step 1 to step 7. If you do this, you will discover that you’ve not clearly communicated with your designer or programmers. You will cause problems and frustration that make people unhappy. See “beach at Normandy” analogy.

A Final Word of Caution

The death of every well-meaning CMS deployment project comes in the battle between the need for universally standard templates and the need for maximum flexibility. News editors want standardization so they can hire people who don’t have technical skills, but who have strong news judgment. But they also hate being locked in to templates because many of them grew up in print newsrooms that value creativity and originality in layout and design.

If you have a staff that has any sort of creativity, be prepared to hear “But what if the mayor is assassinated on the day the of the state football championship and we want to lead the site with a video and user comments and a breaking news banner instead of a static lead text blurb with a dominant photo?”

And be prepared to have an answer.

If journalism is a conversation, I tell them, the first key to being a good conversationalist is being a good listener. You’d never walk in to a party and just hijack the first conversation you come across. You listen, wait and figure out what you can add and how you can move the discussion. Putting this analogy in to practice with links from your site to another site is the first step in developing authentic conversational leadership.

After all, the man who invented the hyperlink also hypothesized this role for journalists.

This semester, we are putting this concept in to practice in the site we’re building for Public Affairs Reporting for New Media. Using Publish2, the students are getting to practice “link journalism.” The site is now live, and here’s how we’re starting to build it out.

The first step was to set up a newsgroup on Publish2. As students find resources on the Web, they bookmark them, add keyword tags and add their own commentary or questions about the resource.

From there, I used Publish2′s widgets and RSS feeds to pull the students’ links in to the Drupal CMS we are using to build the site. The links live in three places:

• They live on the homepage, for now, under the heading of “Sites We’re Reading and Discussing”
• They will be used to populate the “Resources” page for the duration of the project.
• Finally, under the “Blogs” menu item you will see that each student has a place reserved for his or her blog that we’ll soon be starting. On those pages, I used each of the widgets associated with each of the students’ Publish2 links to populate a section on the right of the page called “Other Sites I’m Reading”

We’re meeting with our newspaper partners for the first time tomorrow, which will hopefully begin to allow us to expand our use of Publish2 in two more ways:

• The Publish2 widgets and RSS feeds we are creating are freely available for re-publication on any other site. Papers such as the Chicago Tribune and New York Times are already using Publish2 to power some pages.
• We hope that professional journalists will also begin to join our Publish2 Newsgroup and help us build a list of common resources and conversations about developing storylines around the low graduation rates that are becoming a state and national epidemic.

That said, there are still technical hurdles to overcome before we can start doing good journalism. Let me give a brief rundown of where we stand on technology on this third day of classes.

First, the sites for both Public Affairs Reporting for New Media and Newsdesk are being hosted by Ibiblio.org — my own personal group of technical saviors and a fantastic resource here at UNC. They take care of the maintenance of most of the server-side technical goodies — Apache, PHP, MySQL — that I need to install and run content management systems. They take care of all the security and ongoing maintenance so my site stays live and doesn’t get hacked. And — perhaps best of all — they give me a lot of rope to hang myself. They let me play around with just about any tools I care to install, and they are generous with their time when I get stuck in the mud as a result of my own overconfidence in my own technical prowess. I get all this for the low, low price of free.

This is a good time to point out that I like free. I try to use free or cheap as often as possible in my classes, partially because those solutions are often the best, partially to save the good people of North Carolina some money, and partially to demonstrate to students that they can build an innovation infrastructure themselves for relatively low cost.

The content management systems I’m using this year are WordPress for the Newsdesk class and Drupal for the PARNM class. I’ve been familiar with WordPress because my own blog is hosted on it. And we’ve used WordPress.com for students to do their blogs in previous classes. But I was really inspired by efforts at the University of Miami and University of Massachusetts at Amherst to give WordPress a test run as a full-fledged news site CMS that can do more than blog.

Drupal I’m using for the first time. I chose it because I have heard for a long time that it is excellent for the kind of community-driven sites like we’re trying to build. But I also chose it because I’d never worked with it before and, like Mae West, when I have to choose between two evils, I usually pick the one I’ve never tried.

At one point I considered WordPress Mu and Lyceum. While those both seem like good solutions for multi-user blogs, that’s not really what I needed. Instead, students in the Newsdesk class will each be working on their own sections in WordPress and students in the PARNM class will all have their own blogs in Drupal.

Last semester I used Joomla to create a class site, but I had some problems with it. The documentation is spotty and the user-base seems to be located mostly in Germany and Korea with a command of English that makes for cryptic installation instructions. I also couldn’t figure out how to define user roles and edit the workflow so that it would make more sense for a news class.

I had to download those content management systems and install them on Ibiblio.org. I also had to register some domain names and get the the Ibiblio staff to configure some DNS settings.  To install these content management systems, you do have to know some very basic Unix commands. The first time you do it, it’s probably good to have a strong support group, no children within earshot, and perhaps a stiff drink.

I’m certainly no designer, so I also went scrounging the Web for free design templates to install on top of both WordPress and Drupal. The Amherst Wire site sent me hunting for themes at  ThemeHybrid. There I found the Options theme and installed it on WordPress. But the Options theme is more than just CSS. It extends WordPress in some really helpful ways for people who want to do news.

OrangePolitics.org pointed me in the direction of the Newsflash theme. This being my first time in Drupal, I didn’t go looking for themes all that much and I really don’t know yet what I like or don’t like about this theme.

So far, so good, right?

Yeah, that’s usually the time things turn south for me, too. They say the darkest hours are just before dawn. That was true for me on this project. Right before the semester started I realized that I had installed WordPress on the wrong directory on the server — and moving it caused problems. Specifically, I couldn’t write pretty URLs. The kind folks at Ibiblio helped me solve that one after a few days of tinkering.

Then Drupal just started freezing up on me. Click on a link… wait two minutes… page loads. We still haven’t fixed that problem, but apparently we’re not alone.

Yeah, I don’t know what that means either. But it appears to be the problem. Wish me (and the good folks at Ibiblio) luck…