Newspapers on Drupal

Hello from the Chicago area. In February, the Sun-Times News Group launched a new citizen journalism site, www.neighborhoodcircle.com using drupal and I am finally getting some time to get on here and tell you all to take a look at our site. I believe Yelvington blogged about it. We are still working through little glitches here and there and trying to find the best ways to get locals involved. We launched this in the far western suburbs of Chicago to get our feet wet, but we would like to grow the sites in other communities.

Hello, fellow Newspapers On Drupal group members, and thanks to Ken for the introduction. As he mentioned, Placeblogger, a Drupal based site I worked on -- with a LOT of help from Drupal shop Bryght -- won some Phase 2 funding from the John S and James L. Knight Foundation, which gives grants to organizations and projects that advance journalism.

The interesting thing about this funding:

1. What gets created with the funding must go into the public domain.
2. The goal of the foundation is to get tools into the hands of newspapers.

I think that's pretty exciting!

For my project, the fact that I'm on Drupal helps me meet both these goals. The project hasn't been completely nailed down yet, but it's likely that much of the funding will go towards creating Drupal modules -- and then using Placeblogger, the site, as a sort of proof-of-concept. I suspect that we'll spend a lot of time on location and Aggregator2, but at this moment we're not tied down to anything.

So help me do some thinking: if you had a little money to fund Drupal module development to aid newspapers, what would you tackle?

I would really like members of this group to consider themselves informal advisers to this project, and to benefit from it directly.

Thursday I flew up to Michigan to see a group of Medill School of Journalism (Northwestern University) students make their final Media Management class presentation.

Each year, Rich Gordon's class undertakes an innovation project, usually in partnership with a media company. This year they did two projects -- one with a Morris newspaper, the other with Yahoo.

Congratulations to both Lisa Williams of Placeblogger and J.D. Lasica of OurMedia.org. Both people/projects are getting part of the $10 million in grants the Knight Foundation is giving to individuals, organizations or businesses with ideas and projects that will transform community news.

Hiya, I'm the "technical advisor" for a small student newspaper that's going to switch to Drupal, and I'll share my experiences up 'till now. When I started out the workflow was almost non-existent: articles spread over word-files, e-mails, corrected printouts and more word-files all in one unstructured heap. So under my guidance we switched to a modified version of TextPattern (I created some hacks for managing editions, workflow for the editors, and last but not least automatic XML export tailored for use in InDesign).

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, take a look at the gorgeous New York Observer site, that just relaunched on Drupal: http://www.observer.com

The fine people behind it did a very nice writeup in the showcase forum: http://drupal.org/node/141187

Help!
As someone said, you can't stop people from using Quark.
Anyone have any pointers of importing content into Quark 6 and getting it out again (could be XML, HTML, etc.) in any kind of script driven way?

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar

I'm "hosting" the weekly Dojo screencast this week. I will be demo'ing the TinyMCE WYSIWYG toolbar. I will be covering the installation process, the new features available in Drupal 5, and answering as many questions as time allows. I will talk a little bit about the dark days of TinyMCE and how I ended up as the maintainer, but I want to spend more time discussing what direction users what TinyMCE to go. What are the biggest problems that still need to be solved.

OCSMS schedule is posted http://2007.oscms-summit.org/schedule. There will not be a "News(papers) on Drupal" session.

But we should still get together. I've set aside an adjunct event http://2007.oscms-summit.org/node/369 but not scheduled it.

Some questions:

1) Should we just have lunch together on Friday?

2) Or a dinner outing on Thursday or Friday?

3) Anyone local to the area want to organize something?