The CMN Blog

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – In an office where wood plaques adorn the same walls as trendy magazines and memorable news pages, the Daily Tar Heel staff bustles with excitement and drive on this Sunday night.
The mood among the Web staff is particularly energetic, and for good reason. When Volume 116, Issue 66 hits newsstands tomorrow, not only will it carry the day’s leading headlines, but a teaser months in the making.
“Dailytarheel.com is getting a new look today.”
Lara Hanson, Dave Studinski and I are in the Daily Tar Heel offices to serve as on-site support and observe the challenges a college newsroom faces as they transition to CP 5.
The Daily Tar Heel puts out a ton of content on a daily basis and as Web Editor Nicole Norfleet said, “The Tar Heel is unique from other newspapers because the editing process goes through so many rounds …  so there is a lot that happens before the stories get to [the web team].”
We felt the complexities of this particular newsroom were a good test to observe the successes and hiccups of this process.  We also wanted to see how long the process takes for a daily publication and how steep the learning curve is.
After a few trainings with various staff over the last couple few days, the Daily Tar Heel staff is working diligently on retro-fitting their editorial process into the online publishing tools of CP5.  Specifically, Nicole is looking into ways to harness the time-saving capacity of the InDesign XML upload.
Norfleet said she feels confident she will change the procedures in the newsroom to take advantage of this, but these first few issues may not be the greatest end product from a presentation perspective because the tools are new and unfamiliar.
“We’re a team of two people right now, our system is just not setup to fulfill all the things we want to do on the site this early in the semester,“ she said.
With area commercial newspapers scaling back staff in this tough economy, the DTH is feeling the pressure of being a more trusted source of news in the region. Norfleet said they are actively recruiting more Web staff and are looking to change the way the organization publishes news.  The Daily Tar Heel is looking to migrate to a 24-hour news cycle, where some stories break first on the Web.
The staff seems to be excited for this challenge and has a great number of ideas for Web-centric projects.  Norfleet said CP 5, although unfamiliar at this point, provides the tools to realize these projects.
“[We] don’t feel over whelmed, we can handle it,” she said. “In the next month, this site is really going to blossom.  Give us a few weeks and we are going to be trying some things you won’t see on other college newspapers sites.”
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The night will be long for us all tonight, but tomorrow will bring a new site for the dailytarheel.com. Stay tuned for an update in the morning.

As the new school year ramps up, we hope you are excited about the changes and improvements in College Publisher – we definitely are.  We are looking at an unprecedented amount of development packed into the last 8 months and feel we have turned the corner and produced a system for the next generation of web publishing.

That said, we know that the delays in our delivery are a source of frustration and confusion for some.  We would like to take a moment and give some context to our operations.

The last school year was a challenging year for our organization and, in certain ways that showed with our level of service to our partners.  This was in part due to making the final transitions to our parent company and in part due to the rise in demands of digital news consumption.  Our adaptation suffered some growing pains.

That said, there are two main reasons for the delays to the deployment of CP 5.0 we have experienced:

-> The base code of the CP 5.0 software that we are upgrading to is being built from the ground-up to address the unique needs of the college newsroom.  While we are partnering with a Swedish-based company (Polopoly) that developed this content management system [CMS], there still remains a great deal of work to customize this system so that it matches the unique features of the existing software.  Off the shelf, this software is a potent CMS, but it needs to be streamlined for your specific needs.   College Publisher, as you see it today, has evolved over the course of eight years – in about eight months we have upgraded the engine of College Publisher and essentially matched the functionalities.

-> The calendar and publishing cycles of our partner newspapers dictated when the first of our sites could launch.  On a case-by-case basis, the launches of newspapers have been delayed either by the newspaper staff acknowledging they need more time for the transition or opted to wait until additional features are rolled out as development continues.  From a User Interface perspective, CP 5.0 is completely different from CP 4.0 – thus, training modules and training documentation are helping flatten the steep learning curve with the new system, but that is still a reality for the early adopting newspapers.  We have advocated for caution with launches as the worst possible thing we could do is rush our early adopters to launch without being completely comfortable with the new tools.

Some of these delays could have been better anticipated on our end, and better communicated to the partners who entrust us with their websites.  We have 25 sites live on the new platform and will continue to roll newspapers over throughout the semester.

By end of semester, that number will likely triple or quadruple.  We are looking at our processes, collecting feedback and tweaking procedures to convert more papers faster.

We thank you for your patience and urge you to stay in touch with us.  Please stay tuned to the blog for more updates.