Journalism students convergence website

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.

In a nutshell we run a week long course involving around 80 postgrad students where we introduce the web and teach writing for the web, publishing using a CMS, video and audio recording and editing. The students then have a number of weeks to write four stories including images, audio and video and present these on a CMS website.

All this is in good preparation for the local elections in May, where the PG students work all week covering the election in their own disciplines to produce a website, newspaper, and radio and TV bulletins and programmes.

The website is here:
http://jusnews.shef.ac.uk/convergence_08/
The convergence stories are under Featured stories on the homepage, and http://jusnews.shef.ac.uk/convergence_08/lists

Last year's site was made with Joomla! http://jusnews.shef.ac.uk/convergence_07

As developer, the website for me is pretty much a beta site. It's the first time I've produced a Drupal site for students to contribute to and I've learned lots. I'm now working on the next version of this using the experience I gained in the newsroom troubleshooting and helping students.

Yesterday was deadline day for the students and I was run ragged all day! :) What I found was that wysiwyg editors are no use; a good number of students failed to grasp the rigidity of placing items on a page, and ended up with elements clashing and in the wrong place (as you can see if you browse the content, there are some very good efforts and some truly awful ones!). Which kind of defeats the point of having a CMS i.e. house style, uniformity..

Currently the default content type is Story with teaser module, TinyMCE and Drupalimage. What I'm doing next is building a comprehensive content type called "news Story", doing away with TinyMCE, and really going to town with CCK.

The idea is to give the author the least control over style and layout as is possible, and to do this with lots of fields. (see attached image) Currently I have fields for teaser, teaser image, links in teaser (aka bbc news top story) then the body is created using chunks - basically I needed a way of adding images, quote boxes, links or fact boxes into the body without using wysiwyg; I came up with splitting the story into chunks. Each time you want an image or any other item than a par, you use a new chunk where you can have image/fact/quote and text.

It would be really good to get some feedback and discussion on this project!

Cheers
Hadrian.