Case Study: WNET.org
WNET.org worked with Tierra Innovation to build 50 sites in 10 months using WordPress MU.

Related:

• WordPress CMS Toolkit and Best Plugins.
• Sleepless in Social Media: WordCamp NYC 2009 – WNET.org case study
• WordPress Publisher Blog: Fifty Sites. Ten Months. One CMS.
• Case Study: How a Non-Profit Media Company Profits from Building Open Source Online Publishing Platform (PDF)

BuddyPress Group API Extension

Andy Peatling, lead developer on BuddyPress, talked about the new Group API Extension and showed how it could be used to pull Twitter feeds into BuddyPress groups.

Related

• BuddyPress Group Extension API
• Presentation: BuddyPress: An Introduction
• Presentation: Cooking with BuddyPress

Case Study: TrueSlant.com
True/Slant, launched in April 2009, is built on WordPress MU and has more than 220 contributors/bloggers. One full-time editor selects posts for the homepage and topic stream pages.

The editor can activate “Editorial goggles,” allowing them to move content around the page by drag and drop. The system uses “heavy” JQuery to make this possible, according to Steve McNally, CTO for True/Slant. The editor can also add custom headlines, while still leaving the author’s original headline intact.

Content and contributors are also featured based on their “reputation” – a set of approximately 18 desirable behaviors (e.g. page views, posting frequency).

True/Slant, currently hosted on Slicehost, gives bloggers a detailed stats page to encourage them to grow their audience.

McNally said one of the challenges was to cross-reference content across many individual blogs, which tend to be fairly isolated in WordPress MU. Still, he said it was an easy decision to use WordPress MU and that he has “no regrets.”

Related

• Managing Flow in the New Newsroom
• Steve McNally: Musings of a New News Startup
• True/Slant: About

Hyperlocal Journalism with BuddyPress

Related

• InJersey.com
• SeeClickFix

Also of Note

• WordCamp NYC 2009
• P2 Theme
• WordPress 2.9 Features (e.g. image editing, post thumbnails, trash)
• WordPress & WordPress MU Merge in 3.0
• WPPlugins.com (“The WordPress App Store”)

8:25 p.m.
Question: What is the revenue model for Slate? Is it profitable?
Weisberg: Key costs (i.e. printing on paper) are reduced with online content and that’s been born out. He says his business is doing well but says the lawyers won’t let him say if they’re profitable. Almost all of the revenue comes from advertising.

8:19 p.m.
Question: How will Spot.Us survive after the grant runs out?
Cohn: Solicit donations like Kiva.org.

8:16 p.m.
Question: How will media address an increasingly diverse population?
Sewell: City Room had a discussion concerning publishing comments in languages other than English. He says the Times has published some stories in other languages (e.g. China).

8:07 p.m.
Weisberg: Going to launch a group blog focused on women: The XX Factor. Recipe for success? “We just had to kick out all the men.”

8:03 p.m.
Weisberg: They create one original video a week at Slate V.
“This is an attempt to see, what really is the DNA of web video.”

7:57 p.m.
Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief Slate Group: Says journalists need to be well-versed in new media and the web. “If you’re not immersed in that yet, I think it’s too big a leap.”

7:52 p.m.
Smith: Said she would’ve been laid off, too, if she hadn’t picked up some web skills (her Twitter feed).

7:49 p.m.
Smith: Paper Cuts started about a year and a half ago. About 41 print jobs are lost every day.

7:47 p.m.
Erica Smith, news designer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and “Paper Cuts” blogger is up.

7:45 p.m.
Farano: CafeBabel publishes in six languages with 6,000 people contributing for free. It has around 300,000 unique visitors per month.

7:41 p.m.
Farano: Was at a NBA game in California and wanted to pay for a pizza with a traveler’s check. The server asked for a passport and then asked, “Italy, is it still a country?”

7:39 p.m.
Adriano Farano, executive editor, CafeBabel.com
Starts with the question: How many Europeans are the in the room? About 1/4 of the people raise their hands – woah!

7:36 p.m.
Cohn: Cites Clay Shirky saying collaboration online is incredibly complex and hard to predict – like the weather.

7:34 p.m.
Cohn: We often attach journalism to newspapers, he says, but journalism will survive the death of its institutions. “Journalism is a process, not a product,” he says.

7:32 p.m.
David Cohn, founder, Spot.us: Gift economy in America is $300 million.

“There is a way to donate to journalism,” he says, pointing to NPR. “But in that case you’re kind of throwing you money over the wall.”

He jokingly mentions the fear of buying a $40,000 stapler.

7:23 p.m.
Sewell: Mentions Knight News Challenge Grant in conjunction with ProPublica and Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.

7:20 p.m.
Sewell: Times Topics pages – now pages are updated every few days that links to outside content (about time!).

7:14 p.m.
Sewell Chan: Dead-Tree Editions Sell Out was the headline on the City Room the day after the election – readers used the web to find out how to get a paper copy.

7:11 p.m.
Columbia has purchased 50 Flip video cameras for their students, according to Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs.

7:06 p.m.
Full room – standing room only (wait, people sitting on the floor, too)

Panel:

Sewell Chan, blogger/bureau chief, New York Times “City Room” blog

David Cohn, J2008, founder, Spot.us, a new crowdfunding investigative journalism project; winner of $300,000 Knight News Challenge grant

Adriano Farano, executive editor, CafeBabel.com – the first multilingual European current affairs online magazine

Erica Smith, news designer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and “Paper Cuts” blogger (coming from St. Louis)

Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief Slate Group – Slate, Slate V, The Root, and the Big Money

MODERATOR: Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs