A College Online Newspaper Suite as Open Source? 33
Gurami asks: "I'm a part of a student run team at my school that develops a student website, like those found at many schools, that offers news and services to the college community. Recently, we agreed to create a web based set of apps for a new online student publication. It allows the editors of a publication to manage assignments (articles and media), layout, advertising, workloads, contact information, and some other neat things related to online newspapers/publications, in PHP. Our question is: Is there a market for this sort of web suite, would we be able to package and sell it, or open source it, and sell setup and maintenance services for it to college and university student groups?"
You're thinking too far inside the box (Score:5, Interesting)
You're not thinking about it *big* enough.
Not only do I think you could find a market, I think you're selling yourself short thinking of only student-run university/college newpapers, and of the scope of what your application could do.
First, consider this: While there's a lot of generic content-management solutions out there in PHP, Cold Fusion, etc..., (I know. I wrote one myself.) There are few, if any that are geared towards and encompass the workflow of news publishing -- assigning stories, investigation/reporting, submitting stories, editting, fact-checking, etc... (I'm sure I'm missing a lot, because I never worked for a school paper. I'm a conservative; they wouldn't let me.
Second, consider this: A newspaper's online product is usually secondary to their print product. But a lot of smaller places, like a college or university, probably doesn't have an application to manage the print production. With the appropriate process change at the organization, and the proper sales spin, an app such as the one you wish to create could be used to manage the print creation process as well.
Third, consider this: There are a number of other potential buyers for this type of product: from High Schools or local School Districts, to small-to-medium hometown newspapers, local radio or TV stations (that are not owned by someone HUGE.) that offer their news online, Catholic Diocesan newspapers... virtually *any* organization that creates a printed newspaper and/or offers a news product on the web.
I do wish you luck. All I ask is that when these Ideas of mine *do* make you a few bucks, you send a big fat check to me at:
Ed Zahurak
121 Barnhart Street
Johnstown, PA 15905
*grin*
short answer: YES, there is a market... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not to say that it hasn't been done before. Many CMSs can be made to manage tasks, etc. if they haven't already.
Some people complain about the amount of content management systems. I say bring 'em on! I want to see the differences for my own eyes of Vignette, Interwoven, Zope, Bricolage, OpenACS, OpenCMS, and YES, even your php suite of tools.
Managing content is getting easier and easier these days. But running a publishing process is much more than helping computer-dumb writers publishing their stories to a HTML template. It's assigning stories, moving revisions from each step in the publishing process: legal, art, editor's desks, fact-checking, etc.
Whether it's for a university or Time magazine, I think that having CMS tools address these traditional publishing processes is a good idea.
and yes, I think you *SHOULD* open-source it!
Please Yes (Score:2, Interesting)
I would have loved something built from the ground-up for our purposes, particularly if it offered similar features (article submission/review/revision process, for example) without all the nonsense College Publisher gave us.
Re:You're thinking too far inside the box (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact even that is limiting, as there are also sorts of organization that produce news-like publications. Most decent sized non-profits have some sort of newsletter (heck, even my fraternity in college hada an internal newsletter). Also, any organization that uses a collaboritve effort to produce a text product might be able to benefit.
I work for an audit organization and our work consists largely of drafting workpapers, reviewing documents created internally and externally, drafting a report - revising the draft, and issuing a final report based on comments from those who read the draft. (I often think of my job as analogous to a journalist, though on a longer deadline.) There are proprietary solutions to help auditors manage their documents, but I don't find them very satisfactory and since they are closed source they can't be tweaked to accomaodate the ideosyncracies of my organization.