College Newspapers to Get WordPress Mojo

by Sam Dean - Nov. 02, 2009Comments (0)

It looks like some college newspapers are about to head in the same direction as many well-known ones, and in somewhat the same direction as the White House. CoPress is a new company that offers managed hosting and training for college newspapers interested in tranistioning from expensive proprietary content management systems to WordPress. Many newspapers, forced to slash costs in a punishing environment, are looking to open source and free content management systems, and quite a few of them are reporting significant cost savings. Why shouldn't the trend extend to college newspapers?

Poynter Online explains the origin of CoPress:

"Daniel Bachhuber used to look at his college newspaper's Web site and think about how much better it could be. Frustrated by the limitations of the DailyEmerald.com's content management system, which was run by an outside company, Bachhuber started researching Drupal, Django and WordPress -- platforms that would allow the site to have control over its content and source code. His research, and subsequent conference calls with other young journalists, led him to create CoPress, a for-profit company that offers managed hosting and training for college newspapers looking to transition from a proprietary publishing platform to WordPress."

You can view a long list of school newspapers that are already signed on with CoPress here. Just as many name-brand newspapers are switching to content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla, and training their workers to use these platforms, CoPress could play an important role in teaching young editors and writers how to use open source and free tools. CoPress sounds like it has a future.

(Disclosure: Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.)


Browse Blog

Randy Clark uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?




Comments

image
Share Your Comments

If you are a member, to have your comment attributed to you. If you are not yet a member, Join OStatic and help the Open Source community by sharing your thoughts, answering user questions and providing reviews and alternatives for projects.