newspapers

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.

Benjamin Birkenhake details how Die Zeit is using Drupal "for almost all user centered projects we will be launchin in the near future."

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?

I mentioned when this group started that we had written a simple module called Tearsheet. Its purpose is to let editors search for content and export plain-text formatted for pasting into a front-end system.

The original module is 4.6 and relies on a custom module that is unreleasable. But I was talking to Tim from Maine this week and he's trying to do export using Views and having trouble.

Hi, all. I'm Jay Small, director of online audience and operations for the newspaper division of E.W. Scripps Co., and an occasional consultant on interactive media strategies.

Thanks for allowing me to join. I'm here because Scripps has a number of pilot development projects in works for which Drupal appears to be a good fit. Recently I've been building prototype product sites for internal consideration using first 4.7 and now 5.1, and believe Drupal has come a very, very long way since I first tried it a couple of years back.

Hi, I am Engel Sanchez from Solunion Group, based in Dominican Republic and working for several online newspapers in Latin America en USA Latino. I am a fan of Drupal. I am just waiting for the 5.0 general release version so I can start playing with it for some sites. All current newspapers use another solution, and I want to evaluate our direction, going with drupal or keep our current cms.

Engel Sanchez
Solunion Group

I just posted this comment, here http://groups.drupal.org/node/2026#comment-5612, but it may deserve it's own thread.

Fresno Famous is a Drupal-powered site (http://www.fresnofamous.com) that was just purchased by the Fresno Bee (http://www.fresnobee.com/).

How will the two integrate? What does this mean (if anything) to us?

Thank you, Nikolai, for setting up this group.

My name is Jason Erdahl and I'm Director of Technology at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Like Andy, my paper is a part of the McClatchy Newspaper chain as well.

We recently rolled out our first Drupal site, buzz.mn, a community site for neighborhoods/cities in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area.

Given that YourHub.com has built a nice business out of reverse publishing (or "multi-purpose publishing", as we call it here) its online products to print, we're very interested in the discussions here on using Drupal to drive content to our print system, DTI. We've had some success in driving content from vita.mn to its companion print product, but it's not pretty. :-)

This is an open thread to discuss module contributions that benefit newspapers.

Geoff mentioned that:

Our biggest challenge was creating a module that displayed articles by section (news, music, Movies, etc.) for a given issue. Teething problems mostly now aside, things seem to be just fine.

Please limit comments to descriptions of and links to released Drupal modules that have been GPL'd or are in development.

As the introductions continue I'd like to start a substantive discussion: What roles can/should Drupal play as a content management system for print output?

Here's some context: I've been involved for the last couple of months in a background conversation in which one of the memes is the need for a single, unified system that can output to Web, print, audio, video and as-yet-to-be-defined channels.

I'm going to quote (without attribution) from a private email:

"It would be wonderful if a one-person weekly newspaper journalist could cover the news and write it up (with photos, video, audio clips) in a clever content management interface that would, in some wonderfully automated way, result in not only the production of a Web site, but also the creation of packaged files from which a low power FM broadcast can run, a community access cable TV program can air and, of course, a newspaper can be printed."