The minds behind CoPress, the first organization to offer a viable option for college newspapers looking to go online without corporate control, discuss the announcement that they’ll be halting operations next month. The 37 college newspapers already running CoPress will have the option to keep their sites intact while paying someone else to host them.

“Going forward, we also intend to reopen our list serv as a place for the community to ask and respond to more general support questions. We also hope to put together a list of WordPress consultants you can hire to help with more technical issues or extended projects. Lastly, we’re going to open source our database conversion script which makes it a lot easier to get archives of various form into WordPress.” (from the CoPress blog)

Executive Director and co-founder Daniel Bachhuber started CoPress while working for the Oregon Daily Emerald. He is currently an intern at a collaborative Web journalism site called Publish2.

Team member Andrew Spittle attends Whitman College and is the former Webmaster for the Whitman Pioneer.

Why did you start CoPress?

Daniel: “I was working for the Oregon Daily Emerald as a freelance Web developer. I spent five minutes with College Publisher and decided that ‘I’m not working with this,’” says Bachhuber. “For student newspapers, the solution isn’t College Publisher. It’s too restrictive, poorly developed, and proprietary, locking innovative students to a platform that limits creativity. Page load times are atrocious because of far too much Javascript, and if they go out of business, your website goes down. The answer, instead, is open source,” wrote Bachhuber in a blog post from fall, 2008. Bachhuber set his sights on creating a “better technological ecosystem for college newspapers.” “It’s about a network,” he says, “I wanted to be able to set up something so that people all across the nation could collaborate with one another. Any news organization that wants to succeed must innovate and come up with new business models. You just can’t do that with College Publisher.”

Andrew: I actually wasn’t one of the original team members but I can answer why I started working for CoPress. While I was working as the Web Manager for the Whitman Pioneer during the Spring of 2009 I became aware of what CoPress was doing. I started taking part in discussions on the forum and wrote a couple guest posts on the blog. I didn’t start officially working for CoPress until sometime in the early summer but was drawn toward doing so because I shared many of CoPress’ goals. It was refreshing to find a group of people as frustrated with the current state of affairs and who were working toward enacting real change. (via email)

Why is CoPress shutting down?

Daniel: “On a daily basis, we had maxed-out the number of support requests we could handle while still doing other things. The introductory hosting plans that we offered were extremely competitive because we didn’t want price to be limiting factor. However, it’s always difficult for any business to raise its prices and we’ve had to do that twice in the past year.”

What’s next for you?

Daniel: “I’m currently working for Publish2.”

Andrew: I graduate from Whitman in May and at that point a full-time job becomes a necessity because of student loans. While college journalism remains a passion the reality is that the business side of CoPress just doesn’t scale to what it would need to in order to support a full-time staff. To be honest I’m not entirely sure at this point. There are a lot of opportunities out there right now. I would love to stay connected to journalism, whether that means working at a news organization or getting involved with a undergrad or graduate program. For now I still have a senior thesis to finish and once that’s done plan to start thinking about what’s next more seriously. (via email)

What are the biggest challenges that college media face right now?

Daniel: “Proprietary content management systems are a drawback. So is hosting, as Bryan Murley from the Center for Innovation in College Media mentioned early on. Having a staff that knows Web stuff is pretty important — we need people who want to experiment. The culture of the newsroom should be more experimental, especially when it comes to using new tools for reporting. Newsrooms should be more open, participatory and collaborative.”

Andrew: The single biggest challenge I think is the development of in house talent for web production. Each news organization has staff members who have mastered the requirements for print production. Skill in InDesign or an equivalent program is seen as a necessity for the news organization. For college media to really progress online the web side of things needs to be taken as seriously as print. Speaking from my experience at Whitman the print side of production out-staffed the web side by 2 or 3 times. That needs to change. For college news organizations to get over the hurdles that are presently facing professional publications they will have to dedicate themselves toward making the web the focus of their operations. (via email)

What would you recommend for those folks who were about to switch to CoPress?

Andrew: Don’t stop, go for it. We’re open sourcing our conversion script for archive transfers and are building a network of WordPress consultants to help with larger projects. On top of all that there is already a tremendous community around WordPress and its associated themes and plugins. Even though CoPress is closing there are still active communities to help with WordPress-related questions. The whole process can seem incredibly intimidating at first but with some hard work and trust in the software it can be done. Furthermore the huge benefits outweigh the short-term uncertainty and hard work. Switching to an open source platform may mean a couple rocky months at the beginning but in the end you’ll have a professional-level publishing platform that you are in complete control of and which will be developed for many years to come. (via email)

What’s the future of journalism look like in your opinion?

Daniel: “Yelp, Google, Twitter etc. There’s tremendous potential for niche local news and niche advertising but the technology is behind. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ‘big data’ — mining articles for their specific data and structuring it so it’s easy to reference and access. I like Jay Rosen’s idea of putting question boxes at the end of articles so that readers can ask for clarifications on things they didn’t understand.”

Andrew: See the blog post Andrew published today on this topic.

What will you always remember about this experience?

Daniel: “It was a great learning opportunity. I learned a lot about starting and running a business — accounting, invoicing, logistics and management. I also learned to keep in mind the ‘big picture’ — the vision of what you want to do. Our success was a qualified success because we were never able to pay people for all the hours they spent.”

Andrew: The people. The entire CoPress team provided for incredible experiences and conversations. Furthermore, talking to all of the people at the various schools we worked with provided great perspective on where college news organizations are at in their process of adjusting to the web. There’s something about getting a small group of people with shared goals together to work on a project that I think is unique to running a startup. It’s something that I wish were true of college but I’m glad that I got the experience with CoPress. (via email)

The race is on to fill the void that the shuttering of CoPress will create. Large players such as Alloy Marketing and Crystal Tech have reportedly been in contact with Bachhuber with one hosting service offering a 60% discount on data migration for those who still want live technical support.