I'm happy to announce the availability of annotated wireframes for the Digital Newsroom portion of the Populous Project. The functionality, as eloquently described by Gary Kebbel at the Center for Future Civic Media Conference, is being able to "edit from the beach." I'll never forget that description because it elegantly describes the core of what we're trying to accomplish with this software: allowing editors and reporters to get out of the office and into the communities they're covering more often.

At UCLA we'll probably have to forgo the beach and just attend class more often, or after 10 hours of work leave the newsroom and finish from home. But there's also a lot more to it. The vast majority of collegiate editors I've spoken to over the past year said a large impediment to their ability to plan and manage a collegiate newsroom effectively is something to connect a bunch of busy editors outside of the office.

For example, as the editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin I manage 10 departments and am tasked (with a great deal of help) with making sure 40 plus editors can communicate and coordinate their content on a daily basis. The result is a File Maker Pro dump for our story planning, three whiteboards for our photo planning, a whiteboard to plan our sports coverage, a whiteboard to plan our multimedia content, a whiteboard for story ideas, a few whiteboards for copy tips, a whiteboard for video coverage, a few google docs few people have access to, dozens of email threads, and countless thousands loose sheets of paper.

If that seems like too much to keep track of it is. We also have daily meetings to tie it all together, and somewhere in there we try to foster video and multimedia convergence efforts. The bottom line is that our system doesn't work as well as I need it to. We need a way to see everything at once, neatly tie it together, and collaborate in real time in and out of the office. And we're not alone, because there is currently no free and easy way of accomplishing this that is specifically tailored to a college newsroom.

Two weeks from now we should have a working prototype of the Digital Newsroom, the part of the Populous Project that will solve the issues I'm talking about in this post. At the start of UCLA's next academic quarter on March 30th the Daily Bruin will be using it full time to plan our content and collaborate. It will also be released open source for anyone to take, add to, and adopt.

I've written about the conceptual foundation of this software before, so rather than getting into a detailed description of what it does I'll let interested parties take a look at the wireframes. Something I do want to note, however, is that the Digital Newsroom is not specifically designed to support copy flow. Editing versions of stories is something we would love to be able to accomplish, but just is not in the scope of this project. Instead, we're offering a suite of features that can be used to plan and coordinate almost anything that would appear in a newspaper.

Some of the things it will do:

• Plan stories, photos, graphics, video, and anything else.
• Link coordinated content
• Integrate a staff list
• Notify reporters when they have an assignment
• Allow the newsroom to post editable documents and files
• Allow comments on any entry to facilitate collaboration

In the future, once we have a usable demo, I plan on doing a screen cast and writing a post that will incorporate that as well as a few nice screenshots of the product. For now please keep in mind that the wireframe is to demonstrate functionality and not design, and that the final product will be fully skinable.


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I'm excited to discuss some of the other projects and features we're incorporating into Populous. We realized a long time ago that we weren't going to be able to make a viable platform for online publication unless we included a number of other projects that would help us accomplish some of the functionality we're looking for.

We are leveraging and incorporating the following open source projects into Populous, which I think all news sites should be taking a look at:

News Mixer and Facebook Connect
Most people who read this blog have heard of News Mixer, so I don't think I have to explain what it is. At Populous we think it's the future of commenting on stories, but also a whole lot more than that. Many of the social networking features we were planning on building into our project can be accomplished through News Mixer and Facebook Connect. Basically, when you comment on a story, ask or answer a question, etc it will alert your friends through Facebook.

Initially we were planning on building similar features into Populous, but our original vision was to create a whole separate network on our own site to handle it. That plan had a few problems, but two in particular were too large to ignore: Facebook is ubiquitous on college campuses and it does social networking better than we ever could, and new readers would have to join a whole new network which is an unacceptable impediment.

We realized that using Facebook Connect as a way of authentication for the site, and as a way of giving our readers a robust social networking experience, would almost work better than making the whole thing on our own from scratch. Facebook, we think, will also help drive additional traffic to our site because people who aren't already on our network will still be exposed to content when their friends interact with it.

Open Calais
One of our more exciting discoveries has been Open Calais, which automatically tags text with names, events, and other important information. The applications for this are endless, but to list a few it will: improve searches, improve suggestions for related content, allow for the easier creation of automatically generated topical pages, and even automatically suggest content for further reading from other sites.

All of this tagging is called "semantic metadata," which basically means key words are extracted and associated with the content. Yahoo has actually begun an endeavor to index this data across the Web, which means that in the future indexing this data on Populous sites could make them more valuable and searchable to the broader public. The strangest, and most exciting, application for the kind of automatic tagging Calais offers is that eventually newspapers might be able to discover relationships between content on their site they hadn't thought of before. Because users aren't creating these tags (though editors will be able to tag stories in other ways) they won't fit into existing paradigms of news coverage and conventional tagging.

GeoDjango
GeoDjango is a highly complex and powerful application that allows sites to integrate geo-tagged information. As an example of what it's capable of, GeoDjango can automatically generate google maps with geo-tagged information. In the context of an earthquake in Southern California, readers could submit geo-tagged photos through an iPhone and have them automatically populate a map to show which areas in a city experienced high levels of damage (or not).

It can also be used for real-estate listings, mapping buildings or businesses, mapping crime or city infrastructure, etc. You can even geo-tag video, audio, news stories, or other content to populate on a map so readers could look at stories that were geographically relevant to them.

OpenX
Advertising isn't exactly my specialty, so I won't spend very much time here. We spent a while thinking about an advertising solution for Populous, and came to the conclusion that it would be more adoptable by a wider array of news organizations if we simply went with a well known and well supported open source solution. OpenX is powerful and scalable, which means it can do as much for you as you want it to -- everything from simply placing ads on a Web site to managing whole networks of advertisers.

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We're coding Populous in Django, a Python rapid development framework specifically designed to quickly build robust news sites. So if there are any coders out there that know Django and are interested in participating in the development of, what we think, will be the newspaper site of the future please let me know. We have also hired Lincoln Loop, an excellent Django programming boutique, as a professional development partner to help us speed up the process and stick to our timeline.

Everyone in the small, but growing, community that is following our project has been looking forward to the release of our CMS, but I want to emphasize that this only the first stage in three. Following our development timeline (we're right on schedule with the current release) in the Winter we will release our workflow management portion and in the Spring we will release the social network aspect. The CMS, though it's very good on its own, will serve as the foundation of the other elements we're working on.

We're also placing the finishing touches on a demo of what our CMS can do, and we should be making an announcement about its completion in the near future. The launch of the demo will be exciting for two reasons: people who do not know how to program will be able to see the potential in Populous, and it will be important for people to understand how the CMS looks and feels.

When we launch the demo we hope we will be able to solicit a great deal of feedback from the community and incorporate that feedback into our final release. For those of you unfamiliar with our process, we plan to roll out each of our components in beta, solicit feedback and continue development on all of them, and release a final version over the Summer. I'm extremely happy to announce that we're about a third of the way there.

Please circle the following places where you received a significant amount of information regarding the current election? Please circle all that apply.

Television Debates ----------------------- 71%
Television News -------------------------- 66%
Word of Mouth ---------------------------- 56%
Other On-line Websites/Blogs ---------- 41%
From Parents/Family --------------------- 40%
Other Sources ------------------------------ 32%
Youtube.com ------------------------------- 25%
Daily Bruin Newspaper ------------------ 25%
Other Newspaper -------------------------- 25%
Los Angeles Times Newspaper --------- 23%
Mail/Advertisements Through Mail ---- 10%
Church/Religious Organizations --------- 9%
No Answer ----------------------------------- 2%

As you can see, an equal number of students reported getting a significant amount of information from YouTube as from newspapers. Surprisingly for me, more students reported receiving a significant amount of information from the Bruin than the Los Angeles Times. Another interesting figure is the 41% that said they received information from websites or blogs.

I think the Internet figure coupled with the YouTube figure could say that UCLA students likely received a staggering amount of information about this campaign from internet and social media sources. Though I don't have statistics to back this up, I would say that these figures are likely much higher for people my age than the over-30 demographic. But I think what's also interesting is that television news and debates remained the two dominant sources of information, followed by word of mouth.

I think these numbers can say quite a bit, and we have mounds of data to go over in the next week or so, but I think these preliminary results are interesting. One conclusion I would be interested in exploring, perhaps in a different survey, would be whether or not the 30% of students who didn't get a substantial amount of information about the campaign from television opted for social media, blogs, or even newspaper coverage. Any ideas from those of you on here with PhDs?

Soon we'll make all of our data open to the public so everyone can have a chance to look at everything we asked. If you go here you can see a sample survey and more detailed data tables. But in the meantime I thought the readership of this blog would be interested in taking a look at this.

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Later in the speech (see attached YouTube video, recorded in very low light from my Flip Cam) he outlined how the Internet is changing things for newspapers, and in particular student journalists who want to get jobs at newspapers. He said that writing and video need to be even more compelling online, and students who know how to do it will have a better shot in the industry. That's probably true, and I think his speech was insightful on many levels. Later in the keynote he showed some examples of brilliantly done multimedia packages, which his students had the opportunity to work on over the summer. But as the speech went on, it got decidedly less practical.

The packages looked fantastic, and were produced impeccably, but I think they were far beyond the means of the majority of student news organizations. I was looking for practical advice on how to easily incorporate more multimedia content into the Daily Bruin site, and maybe a few ideas on how to train my staff. Instead, I got examples of professional quality multimedia packages that incorporated databases, code, and weeks and months of time. For one package he sent his students to an island where a person got marooned hundreds of years ago, and was the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. It included a video game and a 3D map of the island. Cool, yes, but completely undoable. One of my Twitter friends from UNC, Andrew Dunn, wrote a similar blog post about the speech.

Directly after that keynote there was a small roundtable of students from all kinds of papers that wanted to talk about technology issues in the newsroom. At that meeting, in particular, I started to see how simple knowledge of social media can start to divide news organizations into haves and have-nots -- even people my age, and even in college newsrooms. I hear from a lot of people that J-Schools aren't teaching social media tools, and aren't doing a great job of teaching multimedia either.

Everyone keeps saying (including Rich during his speech) that my generation needs to be the one that teaches the professionals how to use social media and create interactive content online. But who is going to teach us? Many of the papers that sat in on that technology roundtable, and a number of other people I have met at this conference, didn't know how to use Twitter or an RSS feed, didn't know what a CMS is, and had no idea where to begin with multimedia content.

I think that at conferences like the one I'm at, where college newspapers come together from around the country to talk about mutual issues, etc, we should be getting this kind of education -- not just talking about it. Why else do we pay thousands of dollars in registration fees, flights, hotel rooms, and food? I honestly had no idea there were college papers out there that didn't understand the value of an RSS feed, or simple audio slideshows. But I was immediately brought back to one of the reasons I wrote the grant proposal for Populous. There is a true need out there for a simple and powerful tool for newsrooms to use to create a great website. But there are so many other needs out there that aren't being addressed either.

If we're supposed to be the ones, as Rich says, training the professionals and being the smart, young people in the newsrooms, and a great many college papers are just as in dark, what hope is there? More and more I'm starting to appreciate the potential power of an organization like CoPress, which is a group of online editors from a handful of schools around the country that are banding together to provide online resources to other schools who have less technical knowhow.

It it truly going to take a lot to get college media up to the point where the rest of the world thinks we already are. I just hope, for our future jobs and our readers, that we can do it.

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Institutional Problems

Again, that's all true. But collegiate publications don't have the budget to fund innovation like many of the professional papers do. We also don't necessarily have the expertise, the time, or the willpower to actively try to break out of the institutional molds we're stuck in. I think one of the chief problems plaguing the collegiate press is a combination of institutional forgetfulness and inertia.

Every year the people who have been at a college paper the longest graduate, often having established a set of policies and a way of doing things that people continue to use long into the future, even if they are no longer best practices. I understand this happens in a lot of other industries too, but the degree to which it takes place in college newsrooms is highly exaggerated. Students have class, part time jobs, and the newspaper. How do they have time to reexamine the practices and policies they use every day to make them better when they already work OK?

The fact of the matter is that college editors can't sit around and wait for a professional newspaper somewhere to invent an ingenious new way of delivering the news, or break ground on a brilliant new business model. Every college paper has to find the time, energy, and resources to start innovating. Maybe that involves applying for a Knight grant? I'm not sure. But college papers are actually in a better position to reach out to their communities than most larger, professional papers. I think there is a bit of a misnomer out there in the "new media" crowd (of which I am a card carrying member) that simply working on a better website, blogging, integrating video and audio, and adding more interactive content will start to solve the problems of the industry. I think that's largely false.

Community Generated Content

In my opinion everything the new media people are working on equals better journalism, and more accessible content. But it's not enough. Newspapers have to find a way to become central to the exchange of information and ideas in their communities if they want to start making more money. Newspapers need to be more local and more central, they need to offer social network and social bookmarking features, and they need to embrace a certain level of user generated content. That could mean a lot of things, though, so I want to explain how I am going to use my News Challenge project, Populous, to achieve some of those goals.

Right now at UCLA there are something like 800 different student organizations. There are far too many for the students to keep track of, and there is no real tool for these organizations to have a web presence, market themselves, or organize online. There are also no good directories for local shops and restaurants. These are all information needs on campus that need to be filled, and the Daily Bruin is working on doing that through Populous.

The Community News Network aspect of our project aims to provide every student organization on campus with the opportunity to create a website on the Daily Bruin's network. They will be able to do basic things like add members, have a blog, and contribute to a community calendar. Every time they want to do any of that they will be coming to our website.

We're going to fulfill a need on campus by providing this service, and we will also provide our readers a searchable database of the student organizations on campus and create a platform for an all-inclusive community calendar at the same time. And that's just part of the vision. We also understand that we're not the only people that can report on the news going on on campus, and we're never going to be able to cover everything. So we're going to let all of our users create their own blogs on our network so they can write about what's going on around them and in their lives.

An Alternate Business Model?

I think once we accomplish this network, essentially a robust news- and community-focused social network, we're going to be driving a lot more traffic to our website. Will it be enough to increase our online advertising revenue to compensate for our decline in print advertising? Unfortunately, no. That's where another philosophical decision we've made at the Bruin comes in: to use our website to generate support for, and interest in, our print product. They are going to have to work together and complement each other. My hope, and intent, is that once people see the Daily Bruin making more of an effort to engage the community in its news coverage they will be more interested in picking up the print version of the newspaper.

We are also going to redesign the print product to incorporate some of the community generated aspects of our website, and retool it to make sure the news and style of the print product complements, but doesn't repeat, what's online. But that's a whole new entry. My plan to increase the Daily Bruin's revenue has two prongs: one is to support our current business model with increased community interest and through our web presence, and the other is to flip some of the features we're working on into alternate business models.

Hopefully this approach will work out for us, and maybe other college publications can adopt it and start doing better financially. But it also concerns me that we're one of the only college newspapers thinking like this. We might be right, but we might not be, and the more people that are working on these issues the better.

There was an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today about the financial state of student newspapers. This is a topic of particular interest for me (I was briefly quoted in the story) and an issue my News Challenge project is trying to tackle directly. As the Editor in Chief of the Daily Bruin at UCLA, entering my fourth year working for the paper, I have seen first hand some of the financial hardships a collegiate newsroom can endure.

I have to disagree with the premise of the article in the Chronicle, though. It presents a relatively optimistic outlook for the future of student publications, citing strong ad sales at many of the schools interviewed, and a mostly free or cheap workforce to sell ads and write stories. While these things are true, the author presented recent cuts in publication at UC Berkeley's Daily Cal and Syracuse's Daily Orange as outliers -- blips that don't necessarily illustrate a trend.

To provide some background, the papers at Berkeley and Syracuse are well known among collegiate editors. They are typically looked to as good or excellent examples of financially independent student publications, and recently they have had some budget troubles. Both papers have made the decision to reduce their publication from five days a week to four. I would argue that two strong, independent student publications taking drastic cost cutting initiatives in the midst of a budget crisis should be seen as a canary in the coal mine. If other papers aren't careful, and don't take preemptive action, they could be caught in this mess very quickly.

At the Daily Bruin we're getting closer and closer to that precipice every year. When I was a freshman at UCLA the Bruin was in the midst of a budget crisis. That year, in lieu of pursuing a student fee referendum for additional revenue, our department made several hard budget decisions -- including reducing the money available for staff stipends from more than $200,000 to $130,000. We also reduced our travel budget, equipment budget, and cut our circulation by several thousand.

Other papers around the country are looking at a similar story, and they're not advertising it. Over the past couple of weeks and months I've had the opportunity to speak candidly with more than a dozen other collegiate newspaper editors and what we're experiencing at UCLA isn't unique. College newspapers are desperate for a plan to bolster their circulations, increase their ad revenue, and better their websites. In the next few years their lives could depend on it.

And the independent papers aren't the only ones that have to worry. There are relatively few student newspapers that can claim "independence" and it's a coveted title in our industry. The Bruin, and only a handful of other collegiate papers, aren't supported by a university department, receive no financial help from the university, and usually pay rent for office space. But many of those papers that have the benefit of departmental and other financial support from a university still sell ads for a significant portion of their revenue. These papers won't be able to escape the broader industry trends for long, and more than ever they are going to have to adapt if they want to stay relevant to their readers and make money.

Tomorrow I will explain how I think they can do that.

There were a few things that happened after I realized that. First is that all of a sudden, having discovered a new feature on my phone, I became a much more social person. I had to run around and show this to as many people as possible -- including my co-grantee Dharmishta who was busy actually talking to people. Second, I started to upload photos. There are a few consequences of being able to upload photos to Facebook immediately, and I should probably explain the social and political implications of that to those of you who have never experienced the utter horror of being tagged in a compromising image. Let me also say that I am 21 and go to UCLA, so this is likely specific to my demographic.

Usually when people upload photos to Facebook they don't do it blindly. People tend to think about the images they put out there for the world to see, especially when other people are in them. So if you're at a party and happen to take a picture of your friend hooking up with someone, taking a shot, or doing something else you either don't put it up or ask beforehand. If it manages to actually make it on Facebook you're really not supposed to tag anyone in it. The danger in being able to upload photos straight onto the internet is that there's no real filter, and everything is immediately broadcast to everyone you know via the mini feed. I actually ended up deleting an image or two later that night.

But there is a huge positive to this feature also. Because people tend to think a lot about the photos they upload -- and there is usually a USB cord, waiting, sifting and resizing involved -- often people end up never bothering to put up the images they take. For instance, I was in London and Italy over a month ago and still have no Facebook albums to prove it because my camera is such a hassle. With this feature, it is dramatically simpler to develop quite the collection of images on Facebook with no camera and no effort. I think in the near future we're likely to see an increase in the number of people broadening their Facebook albums and contributing to this unique aspect of social media.

Aside from Facebook, I think this feature has huge implications for journalists and bloggers. On some level I was live photo-blogging (plogging?) from that party, complete with comments on some of the images. If we could create an application, which wouldn't be hard, to upload iPhone pictures automatically to a blog or to the front page of a newspaper website the possibilities are endless. All of a sudden it would be easy to relay images of breaking news to a massive online audience without having to import, edit and post images -- which can take a while. People could live blog with images without having to worry about bringing a camera and a computer and finding a wireless connection. It's clearly not perfect (2 megapixels and usually blurry) but I think it's a very good and intriguing start.