Assume you have a workforce. And premises. And equipment. Those are things you don’t have to worry about.
But imagine you cannot spend ANYTHING on your news website? Not a penny. Or, in this case, a cent. You see, I’m about to put the first stages of a news website for Whitireia Journalism School in New Zealand, where I am currently working as a tutor.
There will be a budget for a fully-fledged news site soon, but until then, I wanted to russle up something quick and easy — yet full featured and very interactive — to give our students a taste of online journalism.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
- CMS: Wordpress.
- Video content: Embedded in Wordpress using YouTube. Even if I had a big budget, I think I’d still use this method.
- Audio: Not completely set on this one, but I think Houndbite seems good for both short and podcast-length clips.
- Images: Flickr. No contest here. Offer readers a constant stream of our best photos? Bliss!
By using Wordpress we can use Google Maps, flash or any other exciting Web 2.0ish tools to get the job done.
What else should I be considering, and has anyone else done the same?
Perhaps a widget or two to pull in RSS feeds from relevant sites? I’m not a Wordpress expert but I’ve heard it’s quite good for that kind of thing…
Good luck in NZ, sounds very exciting!
p.s. Keep me posted on this project. This is the sort of stuff I love.
Hey Dave,
As you know by now, we use the solutions you mentioned for http://www.thelinc.co.uk. We don’t use Flickr only for displaying our best images, but also to embed files on the website (in case one of our images gets too much traffic, it won’t use ours, plus it loads faster).
For video, I would recommend also Vimeo, a site that can also do HD video, in case there is a need for it, plus, the player and the branding are less obstructive unlike YouTube.
As for the RSS plugin, there are plenty around for Wordpress, but then again, they might be useful only for aggregating content from the blogs of the site’s writers, as a more insightful view on the content.
Keep on the good work!
For the new cherwell.org (Oxford Uni student paper), we used Joomla, integrating blip.tv for video. Blip seems to be slightly better quality than YouTube and does great stuff like customised “series” players (i.e. all your news reports in a row, all your features in a row, etc.)
H