Welcome to CUNY Campus Wire. This new initiative by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism is designed to help you streamline operations, educate your staff, introduce you to the latest technology, and connect you with other CUNY campus papers in order to share knowledge, resources and content.
Starting April 2011, we’re rolling out three new programs:
- Managed WordPress hosting – In light of College Publisher’s prohibitive new licensing fees, we can oversee your transition to WordPress and provide your staff with basic WordPress training. This program is led by Daniel Bachhuber, former founder of CoPress, a company that hosted over 50 student publications.
- Staff training – We’ll get you and your staff up to speed with new technology. Our pilot project at Lehman College, for example, involved two workshops in the Meridian office: one, a weekly four-hour staff tutorial on shooting and uploading video and slideshows, the other, a half day of consulting on shifting to WordPress. You can see the Meridian’s new website here. One on one training is led by Sophia Tewa, multimedia trainer.
- Summer workshops at the J-School – We’re preparing a series of short workshops covering everything from advertising to newsroom management to social media and blogging to copy editing for the web. Workshops will be taught by J-School faculty and staff.
These programs are just phase one of a serious initiative to increase collaboration opportunities between CUNY publications. In the future, we hope to offer a news wire for publications to share content and a forum for student journalists to discuss and share knowledge.
Sound interesting? Please take our short survey to help us understand how we can best support you and what workshops you need most. If you’re interested in switching to WordPress, we’ll be following up shortly, and may be able to relaunch your website this summer.
Why WordPress
- Open source – Free software gives you the freedom to use the software as you’d like. You can modify the software as you’d like, and distribute those improvements to others. This has really significant practical applications.
- User friendly – WordPress is incredibly easy to use. There’s extensive documentation on how to get started (books even), and your entire staff can have accounts for posting to the web.
- Strong community – Did you know WordPress powers over 10% of all websites? Millions of online publishers use WordPress which means lots of documentation,video examples and constant, new functionality in the form of plugins. WordPress is used by some of the most respected publishers out there, including: The New York Times, the BBC, The Wall Street Journal and Wired, as well as corporations like Sony, Ebay, Yahoo and even Ben and Jerry’s.
- Personalization with themes – Themes are how the design of your website is controlled. There are hundreds of free themes in the WordPress.org directory, and there are also premium theme providers like Pagelines, Gabfire and WooThemes who offer support in addition to a good-looking theme.
- Full control over advertising – An advantage to hosting your own content management system is that you have complete control over the advertising run on your website. Don’t want any advertising? Don’t install advertising software. Want to target the communication department’s alumni campaign to a specific state? Use Google Ad Manager for free and pick the state.
- Regularly updated with new features – WordPress 3.1, released on February 23rd, includes contributions from more than 180 developers and adds features like a new streamlined writing interface, post formats like Tumblr if your theme supports it, and better functionality for linking to past archives.
- Extend functionality with plugins – This means you can extend the standard functionality and add features like Twitter widgets, permissions management, Google Analytics integration, and guest content contribution.