OStatic

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?

Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet has an interesting piece up called The big question really facing newspapers. As many newspapers are moving to online-only presences, because of a severe print advertising market, publishers and editors are having to rethink the whole newspaper business model. Blankenhorn suggests that many papers would be wise to consider open source content management systems for their online efforts. He specifically cites Drupal, which OStatic is based on, and Acquia, which provides a commercially supported version of Drupal. Here's why open source content management makes a lot of sense for the papers, and other publishers.