Philly.com, the site for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News relaunched with a much more aggressive design.

The best way to describe the new Philly.com is attitude. This site does not look like your typical stale, stoic newspaper Web site. It packs plenty of spunk.

I like the color pallet, it’s anything but safe. It’s edgy — memorable. I also really like the use of Philadelphia landmarks in the design.

It’s a site that few people will forget after leaving. Most newspaper sites look interchangeable.

I’ll take a closer look at the under pinnings of the site and its features over the next few days. But at least this site looks like the people running Philly.com realize that the old way of doing things wasn’t working.

This is one of the few journalism sites that is actually attractive. Imagine that.

A lot of colleges are using College Publisher as a content management system, but is it the best choice?

Well, College Publisher is free, so it can’t be that bad of a choice (that automatically makes it a pretty good choice actually). I’ve heard a lot of complaints about College Publisher as a CMS, but honestly Ellington is the only CMS I have heard journalists praise.

Let’s take a look at a few papers who have either switched to College Publisher or are switching from it:

Lehigh University - My college newspaper switched to College Publisher this past fall from a proprietary CMS (disclosure: I was editor in chief of the paper three years ago). It has been a rocky transition. Apparently, College Publisher does not provide a lot of help or guidance beyond just the initial install.

The new Web site for The Brown and White could use a lot of work. There are numerous CSS issues, it’s not very attractive (a lot of white space) and it lacks some modern features. Ironically, one would think that College Publisher is a good system to go with if you don’t have a lot of technical talent because you are working with a company that specializes in setting up Web sites for college newspapers.

Apparently, however, that is not the case. You need developers who know CSS and other programming to really make College Publisher sing. If you don’t, you end up with a Web site similar to my school’s paper, which is arguable worse than the one it replaces.

If you have a lot of development talent (most college newspapers do not but should try to get some) you can customize College Publisher and make it more robust. However, if you have that much talent, why not just go with a much more powerful and customizable CMS like Drupal?

University of Miami - The Miami Hurricane is switching from College Publisher to a Drupal system this year. The editors at the Hurricane have not been happy with College Publisher, especially because of its technological limitations and the fact that College Publisher has control over the majority of the ads on their site. The ability to control and maximize monetization should be a paramount concern for collegiate newspapers.

Here is a video of editors at the Hurricane discussing why they are making the switch. Is College Publisher a good choice for your collegiate newspaper? I think the answer comes down to what kind of technical talent a paper has.

For the pure learning experience — and that’s what college is for — I’d go with Drupal. This is provided a newspaper has the talent to customize Drupal. Drupal is not easy to customize, but it provides a power framework for future and continual R&D.

Continual R&D is how the Web is supposed to work. The idea of doing a major redesign ever five years is very print centric. Drupal gives papers the ability to roll out continual improvements and new features.

If, however, a paper does not have the talent to use Drupal, College Publisher seems to be the best choice. There are some pretty decent College Publisher sites out there, and setting up a College Publisher site doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge.

If you’re going to go with College Publisher, I’d strongly recommend you hire a consultant to help design and set up your site. It won’t help you with continual R&D, but it will make sure you at least have a pretty good site.

If your college newspaper does not have Web developers, get some ASAP. Any college newspaper without Web developers is very 20th century. Colleges are supposed to be on the cutting edge, not the tail end.

Collegiate editors, how has your experience been with College Publisher? How about Drupal? Are you using another CMS?

For the first time in the Washington Post’s history they are bringing in outside help to redesign their Web site.

The redesign is supposed to be the biggest in the history of the Post. The current Post design isn’t nearly as solid as The New York Times or CNN. It just doesn’t flow well. Take a look at the homepage versus the national news page. There is no synergy between those pages.

Why doesn’t the national news page look and act more like the homepage? That’s what the Post is hoping to tackle with this latest redesign. Brady told Editor and Publisher:

“It is bigger than any other [redesign] since building it in the first place,” Brady says about his site, which first launched in 1996. “We are trying to fill it with the strategies we’ve emphasized the past few years — reader engagement, multi-media and providing useful data bases for our readers.”

It’s interesting that the Post of all companies, with it’s large Web staff, is bringing in outside help. If the Post needs to bring in outside help, almost every other paper might need to as well. But outside help only works if you hire good help.

Mediocre or bad Web design companies are a waste of your money and time. The Post will be working with The Wonder Factor of New York — a company with a huge roster of big-name clients. The Wonder Factor recently redesigned Newsweek (another Post property) and National Geographic.

Newsweek is an infinity better looking and navigable Web site than what the Post currently has. I haven’t spent enough time at the redesigned newsweek.com to do a full review, but I like what I see so far.

I’ll be real with everyone for a second: Almost every newspaper Web site sucks, even the so-called good ones. My newspaper’s site sucks, your’s sucks and your friend’s sucks.

And instead of sucking forever, maybe we should partner with people who don’t suck. I’m just saying, sometimes it’s fun not to suck. Sometimes it’s fun to make products that people want (AKA our readers and users).

The best designed journalism Web site is probably CNN.com, and I have yet to see a newspaper adopt CNN’s incredible easy to use and navigate minimalist Web 2.0 approach. Now if CNN just had better content, they’d really be in business.

Would your paper be open to having outside help? And, more importantly, would they pay for good help?

To be the best, you have to want to be the best.

A site that has always typified that swagger is my high school’s Web site. It has the audacity to want to be the best in the world, and it has succeeded for years. When I was a junior in high school, it was named the best k-12 education site by Cisco and Education World.

The very next year, while I was co-student Web master, we set out to redo the Web site. That’s the thing about wanting to be the best — you have to believe that nothing is good enough. So, we redid, and it completely and utterly blew our award-winning site out of the water.

That designed stayed for six years, and is probably still the best k-12 site anywhere, but today my high school launched a new version. It’s bigger, it handles content better and it certainly is more audacious.

Why did they redesign a Web site that gets 30,000-40,000 visitors a day? Because they could.

Why do people climb Mount Everest? Because they can.

Kenston has between 1,000-1,200 students, and yet manages to attract more eyeballs than most daily newspapers’ sites. How is that possible? Simple.

About 15,000 people or so live in the school district, and all of them know about the Web site and many check it religiously. Alumni like myself check the Web site at least several times a week, and relatives all over the country can see what their family members are doing.

Plus, high school’s all over the country come to the site for inspiration. Want to know how to build a great Web site? Just go the Kenston site and you’ll know all you need to know.

So, what are the keys to success?

1. Content
The site is filled with content. It does a much better job of covering sports teams than local papers do. Want to see several hundred photos after every football game a few hours after the game is over? You can. If your son got on the field, even just for just a play, he will almost certainly be on the site.

Why pay for prom pictures, when your son or daughter will be on the Web site the next day?

Every class, club and team is covered on the Web site in varying degrees. The site is loaded with content. Some of it is certainly much better than other content, but they are at least trying to cover as much as possible.

2. It’s the place to go for info
With great content comes great information. Want to know the football team’s schedule or stats? Go to the Kenston Web site. Want to know if a softball game is canceled due to rain? Go to the Web site. Want to know when the next PTA meeting is? Well, you get the idea.

3. People have to believe
Cleveland, Ohio is not a technology hub. It’s an aging rust belt city. The only way to get a Web site like this going is to transform a community.

The site started with just a faculty adviser, Ronnie Continenza and a few dedicated students. It then grew to incorporate a Web design class. Now, Kenston has hired a second Web design instructor to teach advanced courses because the demand is great.

Imagine having a class that everyone wants to be in. The site regularly has about 100 kids working on it every day. Why?

Because it’s what all the cool kids are doing.

The site itself has no direct budget. Most of the money comes from people in the community who enjoy the content so much that they donate money. The site also has a few sponsors, but it general it is what it is because people believe in it. People believe in the product.

4. You need an impresario
Apple has Steve Jobs. He is the heart and soul of the company. Works hard to make products and to sell his vision.

Kenston has Continenza. He is a tireless worker. He puts in the usual work day as a teacher, but than covers games at night for the Web site, taking at least tens of thousands of photos each school year. He is the glue that holds together the Web site.

In many ways, he is the Rob Curley of Kenston. He may not have the technical prowess that Curley has, but he has at least as much heart, if not more. After Curley left Naples Daily News, the site quickly began to go downhill.

Your site, paper, etc needs an impresario. You need someone so dedicated, so good that everyone around him believes in the site and its future. That’s the biggest problem facing most newspapers today.

There simply isn’t that one person who wills your operation to victory. That one person who can change the mind of the publisher and make top editors believe. The thing is your staff might have one, but bureaucracy and seniority are holding him or her back.

Honestly, how many of your Web sites are run by someone with little new media skills or experience and were long-time print journalists? You need someone beyond just a person who volunteered to take over the Web site because he or she thought it would be a good career move.

You need someone who eats, drinks and sleeps the Web. Continenza is not some Web or computer genius. He’s best skill is photography, which he is quite good at.

But his biggest asset is the ability is to listen and take advice from people who know the Web. He listens to talented students and alumni, which is how the Web site has gotten so good. You can have someone head up your Web operation if they aren’t a Web God, but they have to be willing to listen to others who are more knowledgeable.

When you combine his hard work with his ability to listen to others, it’s easy to see how someone who took over the fledgling Kenston Web site in 1998 almost on a whim was able to make it the best in the country.

Conclusion:
If you want to be better, you have to actually believe that you can be better. You should always strive to be the best. My high school didn’t have to redesign its site and add more technical tricks to it, but it did.

It’s not about blogs, video or x, y, z. It’s about hard work, dedication and doing something not because you have to but because you want to. It’s about believing in the product.

Continual R&D is extremely important to the long-term success of any Web site. Sure, there are some things I think my high school could have done better (utilizing more databases and video for instance), but in general I like the idea that they are willing to reinvent the wheel.

Why?

Because they can.

One of my favorite journalism blogs is Journerdism, and it just got better with a new redesign.

The new look is certainly sharper, but what I really like is how Will Sullivan is positioning his content differently. Instead of doing big updates with multiple small stories, he is posting each item as its own update. In many ways it just makes more sense.

Reading through 10 tidbits and links in one post can be daunting, but reading a few separate posts a day is much easier to digest. It’s also more in tune with new media. A continuous news cycle is where all newspapers should be headed and blogs too.

We still see many sites (mine included from time to time) that pile on a lot of content at one time and then go dormant.

Sullivan brought a continuous news cycle to his blo, and I think makes for a much more enjoyable experience. For other bloggers out there who do big updates with a lot of links, I’d consider a format similar to Journerdism.

The site is still very much new, however, and it does have a few bugs and inconsistencies that I’m sure Sullivan is ironing out. Regardless, it should be one of first new media journalism sites you read each day.

I’m going to experiment with updating my blog in a similar fashion. My blog posts are traditionally broken up into two different classes: my longer-more indepth writings and my “today’s thoughts” posts that often have multiple shorter tidbits of information. The latter also tends to be more link driven, while the former is more original content.

I’m going to do away with the today’s thoughts concept for a few weeks and see how it goes. Let me know your thoughts too.

I was on vacation up until yesterday, which is why the updates have been slow on this blog. A lot of good content is coming soon.

Gannett and its 24-hour “Information Centers”
this year to less-than-stellar results. Part of it is just poor thinking, which I’ll tackle in a minute.

Editor and Publisher profiled the “Information Center” at the Daily Record in North Jersey. The center was launched this year, and already has begun back tracking. The editor profiled in the piece, Kathy Shwiff, no longer comes in during the middle of the night, for good reason.

A 40,000 circulation paper has no business paying an editor to come in at 2 a.m. What could possible happen in the middle of the night in Morris County, New Jersey that anyone would care about? Nothing.

Gannett and the Daily Record would have made a much smarter decision spending that money on a journalist dedicated to making special features for the Web. Alas, they thought posting random updates at 4 a.m. was money better spent. News flash, you’re not The New York Times, I’m not checking your site in the middle of the night for “breaking news.”

And why is Editor and Publisher writing a story about Gannett’s “information centers” when the one they profiled no longer has someone coming in during the night?

USA Today relaunches its Web site
It is what it is, which is nothing special (but a much better site nonetheless). They are embracing some cool social networking features that every news site should have been doing for years.

The stories are tagged, which allows users to find similar stories, which is a good way to get people to view old content (this is a good, cheap feature that every news site should have). Users can also click the recommend button on stories, but I’m not sure why that is so much better than having a section of the site for most popular stories by page views. Yes, one is recommended by users, but users clicking on headlines is itself a recommendation.

Either way, these aren’t exactly earth-shattering enhancements in 2007. USA Today also allows every registered user the chance to have a blog, make friends, send messages and have a profile. All of these are fine ideas, but I don’t understand why the paper spent all the money on social networking for a site geared towards older people.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to get younger people in first and then add social networking features? USA Today still is a heavily print-focused site. Print stories have huge headlines (also to attract old people I assume), while video, blogs and other features are buried at the bottom of the homepage. That’s quite forward thinking.

USA Today should have added more video, more slide shows, more special features, more database and more new media journalism long before it decided to try social networking. As it stands, I have no reason to join the USA Today social network because the site’s content isn’t very good.

Content is king.

USA Today allows comments on just about all of their stories, which is a step in the right direction, but every news organization should allow this or some sort of “talk back” feature on their stories, especially the bigger ones. News outlets need to embrace two-way communication, because if they don’t readers will just go to other sites that do.

Head over to Read/Write Web to read more about recent site relaunches.

Backfence loses a little more of itself
Backfence was, is and will always be a citizen journalism pioneer. It will also be a foot note in history within a few years. The site just closed down it’s Evanston site, which is a wealthy suburb outside of Chicago.

Most of its operations and staff are shutting down because the site no longer has money. The ideas the site championed (a site centered around citizen participation and database content) will forever change the industry, but the site tried to grow too quick too fast (it started in several D.C. suburbs but went to California and Illinois, among others in a little over a year).

It’s an excellent case study in what to do and what not to do with citizen journalism.

You have to own a market before you expand.

Rob Curley likes what he sees in Europe
Curley, the VP of Product Development at The Washington Post, writes that he was impressed by what he saw newspapers doing during his trip to several Scandinavian newspapers.

He writes that the most important thing for success in new media is getting the top editor to buy into the concepts of new media and to be willing to try new things. From there, it’s all about new ways of telling stories.

“The lesson here is simple: If newspapers don’t get off their butts and start embracing this sort of storytelling, then the very folks we normally cover will just do it themselves.

If you don’t believe me, spend about 15 minutes on the MLB.com site for your closest Major League Baseball team, and then tell me if the hometown newspaper for that team covers the team as well or as deep.”

I couldn’t agree more.

CNN.com launched a new version of its site, and at first glance it doesn’t seem like anything earth shattering.

It looks similar to the old design. Some like it more, some like it less and few really care one way or the other (I have no real preference over the looks of either, as they were both above average but nothing special). The new CNN.com is a much better site, however, and here is why:

CNN got rid of Pipeline, it’s old commercial free video service on the Web. For $19.99 a year users got live feeds and a lot of CNN video clips (all searchable) without commercials. I was a subscriber, and it was a good idea, but wasn’t executed well. There was no Mac version of the application, and the Web player was buggy. It often didn’t work right, and I all but stopped using it out of frustration.

CNN also got rid of it because less than 1 million people subscribed. They just weren’t reaching a mass audience with the service, and CNN is a video company. They didn’t want to pull a Wall Street Journal and limit their impact on the nation.

Now pipeline is gone. In its place is the ability to watch video from CNN.com itself. The video is bigger, looks better and is easier to use than Pipeline. Best of all you don’t need to sign up and pay money to see it in a pleasing format. The occasional commercial is worth it in my opinion for free content.

(more…)