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Greg Linch, community manager at CoPress explains why he thinks student journalists need to look outside their own universities in order to succeed online and what his current project offers. Linch blogs at The Linchpen and studies journalism and political science at the University of Miami in Florida.

In the worlds of professional and college journalism, collaboration is key. But this mostly takes place within an organisation, making it like an island.

In college media, CoPress hopes to change that. We believe that working together is the best way for student journalism organisations to succeed online.

CoPress is a group of student editors who have experience working on campus news sites. A non-profit organization, our ultimate goal is to help spur innovation and collaboration through our three main areas: community, technology and hosting.

From our earliest days, we have operated transparently and under the influence of past open-source projects.

In the group's formative stages, we learned a great from each other by talking over email and Skype. Our weekly calls on Skype are available as podcasts and our listserv is open to anyone.

Discussion is one of the most simple and easy ways to share ideas, but you can't achieve much unless you take it a step further and collaborate. We hope the result of the discussion and collaboration we spur help solve some of the key problems that hinder student news sites: time, money and people.

Problems with student media technology
One of the most significant challenges for student news organisations is high turnover. Some wisdom is passed down, but there is relatively little institutional knowledge at college news sites. Exceptions exist, but there's no denying this is one reality that hinders greater progress for most organisations.

Based on what I've seen during my time and heard from peers is that this is particularly problematic when it comes to technology. Thus, it's difficult for many to put sufficient time and resources into their sites.

Early on, College Publisher was great for newspapers looking to move online: you don’t need to have money (it's free), web design skills, knowledge of web servers and databases or any of the hardcore skills that go into creating a dynamic news site from scratch.

But open-source software and other technologies have changed that. WordPress and Drupal, two open-source content management systems, have extensive documentation and large communities to help developers. Yes, there are discussion boards in CP4, but that doesn't really constitute a community.

For now, CoPress is offering to setup and host WordPress sites, but we hope to expand that to include other open-source solutions, such as Drupal and Populous, a CMS being developed with a Knight News Challenge grant.

We chose to support WordPress first because that's what our team knows best and can best support. With our cumulative knowledge, in addition to that of our wider community, we are able to provide services and support that is usually only available for large, independent college news organisations.

CoPress' cost solution
In addition, by offering student news sites full control over their sites, CoPress aims to change way student news organisations look at the web in terms of revenue.

To put this in context, College Publisher takes several prime ad spots for their national advertising network and only gives some papers a small cut. The student organisation can sell other spaces, but their placement is less than ideal and makes the site look cluttered and ad heavy.

An independent site set up through CoPress allows students to sell all the ad spots they wish to - or none. One pitch I like to make is that if student journalists take advantage of their new freedom to generate revenue online, they could use those funds to offset CoPress' one-time WordPress setup and transfer fee ($125) and/or monthly hosting fee ($65).

Hosting is offered at cost and the setup fee covers the time to setup the new site and transfer archives - and it is a very time-intensive process.

When setting up new sites we are not only sharing ideas, but also resources; specifically, server space. There was a very spirited, in-depth discussion of this issue on our Google Group, but I won’t get into that now. In short, it stems from our hosting strategy of purchasing space and hosting two or three papers on servers in order to cut down on costs. Although organisations may share space, there is still plenty of storage and bandwidth to run a site quickly and efficiently.

Another resource we plan to share is a Python script written by Miles Skorpen, who leads our hosting efforts. Miles wrote the script to transfer our first partner's archives from College Publisher's format to the new WordPress site we set up for them. Read more about our first site here. The script will be released after some problems and bugs are fixed, so others can use and improve on it.

It's pretty clear that our focus mostly technological. But if you look beyond the three areas of community, hosting and technology and our overall goal of collaboration, CoPress is essentially trying to help student news organisations succeed online - by working together.

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