Newspapers on Drupal

These are two new African projects that I am about to sign off . The first is self-descriptive and it is the online edition of a magazine named IT Business in Africa which is meant to be a meeting hub for CEOs, CIOs and all ICT professionals in Africa . The second is a public appraisal website for Nigerian leaders.

The Observer Media Group, the company that runs Observer.com and Politicker.com, is hiring again!

Kieran Lal of Acquia put together a slideshow of 50 newspapers and magazines using Drupal - it's great to see how many news organizations that have adapted Drupal as a framework.

You can watch it here:
http://vimeo.com/979664

And read more about it here:
http://acquia.com/blog/kieran/50-drupal-newspaper-and-magazine-showcase-...

Generally speaking I find that SEO articles are light on details and heavy on the same old simple ideas, so I was quite happily surprised by Newspaper SEO by Joost de Valk.

Of course, all of these things are easy to achieve with Drupal (if not already standard) :)

Some interesting tips:

<

blockquote>Make sure the article title is in the tag too, and include the category. - - works best in my experience.
...

The Public Press www.public-press.org is a concept for the next-generation daily newspaper. We're organizing a group of journalists, technologist and nonprofit managers to organize a new newsroom for the San Francisco Bay Area that would produce a Web site, daily print newspaper and collaborations with nonprofit news-gathering organizations locally and nationally. We've built a simple Drupal 6 site that we will be growing in the coming weeks and months, and we plan to start publishing on the Web using this platform.

This is not a Drupal job per se, but all of the New America Foundation's sites are Drupal-based, so a "power user" who's familiar with and interested in the Drupal community would be ideal. Details below, and at http://www.newamerica.net/about/employment_opportunities/6956

Managing Editor, NewAmerica.net

The New America Foundation is seeking a managing editor for NewAmerica.net to help improve and expand our online presence. The ideal candidate will have a love of both journalism and technology, and be keenly interested in a wide range of public policy.

NewsTools2008 -- a conceptual mashup for journalists, technologists and entrepreneurs

Register to attend one day of NewsTools2008 -- "Drupal Day at NewsTools2008," on Friday, May 2 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The registration fee of $50 includes lunch and end-of-day reception. If the fee is a hardship, email densmore@mediagiraffe.org to request a fee waiver. Otherwise, REGISTER HERE, choosing the "Drupal Day FRIDAY ONLY" button.

Folks -

Wondering if there is/are any modules that integrate events (think classic community-calendar stuff) with places (think of directories of restaurants, nightclubs, parks, other places where those events might take place).

A "big iron" / proprietary CMS example are the sites being launched by my corporate masters and Gannett: Metromix New York Metromix Denver .

What are some examples of similar event/place driven sites that use one or more Drupal modules?

cheers,

-tgd

Tom Davidson
Tribune Interactive

Hello,

I'm hesitating to choose image module for my online newspaper. It's rather large one, which tens posts everyday (and I'm sure there'll be about 100 posts from members everyday soon). Each post contains 1-2 images. There should be a few galleries embedded in certain posts.

I have now two solutions to start with:

• img_filter (http://drupal.org/project/img_filter): use Upload to create attachment for node, simple and light. But I don't know if it's possible to embed one image into multiple posts (for instance, some logo).

Hi everyone

I work for the University of Sheffield's Department of Journalism Studies as IT Officer. For the second year running I've developed a convergence website. This year using Drupal.

We run postgraduate courses in print, broadcast, web and magazine journalism and for the past two years have added a convergent element to the courses, as we understand (as does the rest of the journalism education community) the importance giving students a relevant and broad understanding of new media within journalism.

Hi everyone

I have relaunched the Newswatch (http://www.newswatch.in) site, and of course it has been remade with Drupal. I am calling this a Beta version primarily because the site isn't populated much.

Just briefly:
i) Two major section pages: NewsBlog and Features. Other section pages will be developed as and when there is sufficient content to play around with.
ii) The site makes extensive use of Contemplate, CCK, Views, NodeQueue and Node Images: best example for a variety of such combinations would be the homepage itself
iii) Number of content types: 16

The Job:
I'm looking for someone who rightfully considers themselves to be a top drupal developer to do extensive work on collegehoopsnet.com/collegehoops.net.

The site:
CHN is a college basketball site that is known for having the BEST content in our realm, but unfortunately we currently have a SECOND RATE site. This needs to change. Now.

The site is currently a mix of static html pages (like the front page) and a drupal section. I'm looking for the developer that will take our site fully to the top of the Drupal universe using the best practices possible.

You:

hello everyone,

i am rather new to drupal but must say that i am quite enjoying it, especially learning with the help of the community.

the reason i joined this group is because i am working on a concept for my final project for my university degree.
the concept "combines print and digital media", meaning that a weekly newspaper will be created by a online news community submitting content. now my general thought was to evaluate "printable content" through rating systems as well as the amount of discussion (comments) submitted content creates.

Clarification posted. Sorry.

An FYI. The finalists list of projects under final consideration for the Knight News Challenge were announced today. This list does not include the 17 winners, to be announced in May. Of the 29 projects, 5 were Drupal-related. Drupal projects include:

• Aaron Presnall -- Mapping Local News – Building the Virtual Model of a Local Community
  http://www.newschallenge.org/top_proposals/06.html

• Oiwan Lam -- Chinese-language platform for community journalism
  http://www.newschallenge.org/top_proposals/17.html

You're invited to help define the future of technology and journalism:

-- By adding to a dialogue about the 10-most-disruptive technologies affecting journalism today (or in the future) How? Go to this link: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-sv-disruption

Then reply to this post with your additions/deletions/comments on the 10-most list.

-- By attending some or all of a three day conceptual mashup and "do team" facilitation at Yahoo! Sunnyvale on April 30-May 3.

Your invited to:
Technology and the New Ecology of News

See: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-sv

Drupal programmers, user -experience experts, social-network innovators and web 2.0 entrepreneurs, are invited to attend: NewsTools2008.org at Yahoo! Sunnyvale, April 30-May 3. "Technology and the New Ecology of News: How will technology innovation support journalism and participatory democracy?"

Hi all,

We are working on a high school newspaper. We are wondering if anyone will share their theme for their front page. We won't just change the images and titles and use it ourselves. We just want a starting point. We plan to use panels and 4 views. (one for each section), we are just looking for example html to use as a starting point. If you would like to share this privately, use the contact form.

Thanks you very much,
Sara.

As I have worked with different content management and middleware solutions, one problem I have encountered numerous times, and that I think needs a better solution in drupal, is import and export of data and provision of web services. I think it would be good for drupal to create an import/export framework that would allow drupal developers to make re-usable, sharable import and export modules by implementing PHP objects to a few commmon interfaces and then adding their new import/export type into a central, common import/export module.

This is especially relevant for modern corporate newspapers that need to integrate content from different legacy systems, produce that content, then send it off to a number of different web publishing systems, and then also face the prospect of their systems changing if they are bought or sold. The framework as outlined in the design below could also be a means of implementing REST services (SOAP or XML-RPC would probably require another layer on top of this, though you probably could do it in this framework).

I'd like to propose building a web-to-print module for Drupal as a SoC project.

Ok, it's not anything great yet, but I'm using Drupal to put together an Online Coupon section for my grassroots journalism sites.

Things I still want to do:

• Track how many times each are printed
• Choose two (or more) coupons that you want printed on 8.5x11...
• Attach to PayPal for automation
• Auto expiration of coupons

I just noticed that groups.drupal.org has enabled an automatic preview for comments. Now a window is generated automatically to present a preview of a poster's comment, eliminating the need to click the preview button in order to see the comment.

I kinda like this feature. Does anyone know what module does this? And whether it could also be applied to content types, rather than just comments? And whether there are irritating side-effects to doing this?

A copy of the official proposal can be found at http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/mew66/gsoc.pdf.

Hello everybody,

I'm Mike Wacker, Assistant Web Editor for The Cornell Daily Sun. Over the past school year, The Sun has used a web publication system, codenamed MustRun, to manage our content online from when the story is assigned to when the story is finished.

The Daily Hampshire Gazette is located in Northampton, MA, and is one of the oldest continually published newspapers in the US, est. 1786. A one year project to redevelop GazetteNET.com is currently in BETA testing (http://www.gazettenet.com/beta). We are looking now to build out our team and have an opening for a Web Developer in the New Media Department.

Following Yelvington I'm crossposting this to the following groups: SOC2008, Knight Foundation, Newspapers on Drupal and Search

One thing that would be really cool, is a module integrating http://www.sphinxsearch.com/ and Drupal. Our experience is that core search doesn't play nice when you have alot of nodes (we have 150.000+). Indexing simply kills the server.

So instead we use Sphinx. It's REALLY fast, both when searching and when indexing. BUT everytime we alter our content-types we have to manually reconfigure the sphinx configuration. This is why I propose this as a module for the SOC08 - a module that integrates Sphinxsearch and Drupal

Moved to official ideas list: http://drupal.org/node/237907

I want to propose a project for building a module that pulls news content from a global news service called Daylife (http://daylife.com)

Daylife is a global news aggregation service that offers an Open API platform called DayPI (http://developer.daylife.com) for any developer, blogger, news service to pull stories and photos about any topic in the world. The API returns data in XML, JSON and PHP serialized formats. You can read the Daylife About page at http://www.daylife.com/page/about to learn more about the company. All platform documentation is on http://developer.daylife.com/docs

Status: Added to official ideas list http://drupal.org/node/234652

I'm crossposting this to the following groups, all of which have a dog in this hunt: SOC2008, Knight Foundation, Newspapers on Drupal, RSS & Aggregation.

News agencies, "legacy" newsroom management system implementors, publishers and archiving companies all support an XML standard called News Industry Text Format (NITF), developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council.

We need a robust, broadly supported common NITF feed handler that works with the Drupal FeedAPI framework, ultimately enabling loading of NITF data into CCK nodes with configurable entity mapping. This feed handler should expose its own API so that additional handlers can be added to process NewsML (primarily championed by Reuters) and Atom wrappers (used by the Associated Press in AP Exchange).

For those who don't know, Nexpo is a gigantic trade show put on by the Newspaper Association of America every year. Over at my day job, I'm a member of the NAA, and this interview was with the NAA monthly trade magazine.

Hello!

I already have a news website built on Drupal, but now o work on another news website and at this point i have a problem...
What i need is to display a tree of terms like this:
News
--Industry
--Technology
X
--YY
--ZZ...
"News" and "X" are terms in a vocabulary. "Industry" and "Technology" are therms in same vocabulary but the have as parent the "News" term.
When i go to /news (the path alias of the "News" term) i want there to be list of all sub-terms of this term.
Another posibility will be to display teasers of the nodes in "Industry" and "Technology".

[This is a cross-post from my blog.]

We had a very successful BoF on Wednesday. The goal was to discusss how the Drupal community would manage our relationship with the Knight Foundation.

For those who were not at DrupalCON, here are the basics:

-- The Knight Foundation (KF) provides funding for open-source development, products and innovations that are in line with their core goal: improving communities through the free exchange of news and information.

To all News folk at DrupalCon this week - just noticed the DrupalCon BoF event posting below and thought I'd post here to raise visibility. I didn't get a chance to meet others at Lucky's yesterday (raucous fun, but not too conducive to conversation!). Come on by if you're interested in Knight or just want to chat over Drupal.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/9383

• Chip Kaye

Kristine Lowe interviews Nikolai Thyssen about Danish news sites using Drupal for Journalism.co.uk, the British journalism website.

“The price of Drupal is an in-house developer. You get some good building blocks, but you have to think of Drupal as a framework rather than as plug and play: you have to discover everything for yourself,” said Nikolai Thyssen, head of new media for Information.dk.

This thread is for colleges/universities who currently use or are planning to use Drupal.

My name is Greg Linch and I'm the editor of The Miami Hurricane at the University of Miami (Florida, USA).We're in the early stages of building our site.

To kick off the conversation, here are some blogs and posts discussing our redesign:

www.greglinch.com
http://www.greglinch.com/2008/01/video-themiamihurricanecom-redesign.htm...

www.willwooten.blogspot.com
http://willwooten.blogspot.com/2008/02/where-were-starting-and-where-wer...

Using taxonomy is a great way to organize your content and it seems that most newspapers on Drupal uses this method. But how do you make autogenerated menus from category-terms with pretty urls in a generel manner?

The module "Taxonomy menu" generates menus from category-terms but leaves you with ugly urls of the form: http://thisNewspaper/taxonomy/term/3, which can't be very search engine friendly.

Using views and making every menu-item by hand (pointing them to a view) gets you pretty urls, but is a fairly complicated way of making menus.

I've posted this to a few job boards, but if you know anyone that may be interested in moving to the Savannah/Hilton Head market, please let them know!

-chris

--

The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette are seeking a Web Developer willing and able to learn fast, take on new challenges and build new products in a deadline oriented environment. Must be experienced with object oriented programming, PHP, MySQL, Javascript. Additional background with Ruby on Rails, Python and Perl is a plus. Linux/UNIX experience a necessity.

Just wanted to throw a link to this out there to see what people thought and try to find someone to hook Drupal up to their API. ;)

http://www.opencalais.com/Overview

http://www.opencalais.com/Developers

I haven't read up on it a lot yet myself...

K. Paul Mallasch - Publisher
http://www.kpaulmedia.com

My friend whurley has launched an online poll to bring open source to the attention of politicians -- specifically, the presidential candidates. He, like many of us, is troubled by the recent calls for patent reform put forth by larger companies that may wind up blocking innovation and threatening open source-oriented companies and contractors.

You can view the poll here and vote for which candidate you believe is best for the open source community. (Don't worry: "None of them" is an option!)

We are going to launch a new travel website.
http://voyages.liberation.fr
Let us know if you see any bugs.

It's the first stage of the project and we are looking to increase interaction with the readers. Do you have any User Generated Content suggestions?
We were thinking of uploading photos, posting stories and blogs, sharing tips and advice...
Please feel free to share your views below.

Thanks

I'm halfway threw setting up a newspaper site and I think I have everything figured out except the best way to approach the menu. Given its a weekly newspaper updating the menu by hand would be rough given the 50+ sections of the paper that would need to change. My first idea was to use views to limit the node with a single "checkbox" value then just show that View. But thats really going to screw with Google and I would rather use the Scheduler module anyway. Is there a way to setup my menus to auto update to the newest published article?

-RM

Hello All

I am working with an online youth media publication that is looking to upgrade their website/e-publication and I am looking to upgrade/switch them to Drupal. I need advice on the article adding, node add/edit screen and functionality.

We've recently redesigned our website, so I took the time to do a small writeup and look back on our switch to Drupal a while ago. Hope you enjoy the read.

Making the transit from Textpattern to Drupal

Hi all!

We are looking for speakers for the upcoming DrupalCon in Boston. Since you are subscribed to the Newspapers group, you might be especially interested in the "Business and Marketing" track (see http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/business-and-marketing-track-description... ).

This track covers the following topics:

• The Drupal ecosystem
• Businesses learning to use Drupal
• Case studies
• Showcases: NPO, Education, News, Media, Government, Healthcare

The Seattle Drupal User Group is happy to have participated in a presentation by The Seattle Times NWSource.com staff demonstrating their conversion to the Drupal content management framework. Please watch the video and peruse the notes from this excellent talk in which NWSource.com producers and engineers detail their experience with Drupal and the challenges they faced.

http://seadug.org/nwsource-drupal-presentation

Special thanks to The Seattle Times and staff for hosting and and giving this informative presentation. We'd also like to thank the SeaDUG community who came out for the event. Please join us again in the future for more Drupal events in the Northwest!

The "best posts" wiki documents listed at the top of the Newspapers on Drupal group page are valuable resources, and from time to time I want to direct non-members to them (including at times entire classrooms full of students). But it seems they are only accessible to logged in members.

DrupalCON Boston promises to be the biggest and (of course) the best DrupalCON ever. How do I know? Well, I'm helping organize part of the "Site Building" track of the conference. I'm also organizing and hosting the first ever News Industry meetup. Do you plan to attend?

There will also be a first-ever Job Fair at this DrupalCON. Sponsoring organizations can come recruit talent at the Job Fair.

Can anybody suggest what the best site search technique might be best for a 30,000+ article site?

We tried using the Drupal search module (indexing words, posts and users in our site's content) about 12 months or so ago. But we had problems, principally due to CCK fields from what I can remember, and so we jettisoned it in favour of Google Custom search.

Google is okay, but we'd like something more customised than they allow.

We currently run 4.7, but are looking to upgrade soon.

Any advice gratefully received.

• Geoff

We are beginning the development of a green building news portal and we are wondering if there have been any further advancements towards creating an install profile that covers many of the aspects of a good newspaper site. We are game to work with other end-users and a development team to arrive at this solution. What about someone who has a decent newspaper site that can have a generic version created to accommodate practically any type of focus topic? Am I over simplifying the task?

Thank you,
Jeff
www.Skysiteproperty.com

La Netscouade, a young yet fast-growing innovative Internet '2.0' agency based in Paris, France, is recruiting a Junior web developer. La Netscouade is specialized in web site development and content management (media, corporate), participative and collaborative engineering (workgroups, social networks, forums), strategic watch on the Internet and social brand communication.

Greetings,

We (rue89.com) are giving a 2-days seminar to 15 african journalist/web project managers.
As the technical manage, I will give a presentation of drupal and why is it good for newspaper. We have used Drupal for 3 newspaper related website, so I am starting to know why drupal is good for that use. As an engineer I also know that I like Drupal for its technical qualities (think modularity, quality of code, performances; extensibility, ...).

One of my developers has put up a blog post explaining how he's using Drupal and Subversion.

http://tinyurl.com/3arfj3

For anyone interested.