The first DTH of the year is online and in stands now. It’s a good feeling, looking at the 26-page behemoth knowing how hard all the staff worked last week to put it out and knowing all the hard work they’re still putting in for Tuesday’s 34-pager.

Right now I’m most excited about our recruitment efforts. We manned a booth at Fall Fest, the annual start-of-year celebration where student groups court new members, and have a recruitment page on the Web site, complete with a video about the DTH from our multimedia desk. Editor Alli Nichols is at the journalism school’s convocation right now, making her pitch for the DTH, and I just sent an e-mail to the hundreds who signed up for our listserv. We’ll meet with the first group of interested students this Thursday.

I’m interested in what other student newspapers are doing to recruit this fall. It was a big topic of discussion at the MSCNE conference I went to this summer, and we all brain-stormed ideas for how to best recruit. We’ll be going to various classes to make pitches, we’re holding interest meetings, promoting it heavily on the Web site, using informational e-mails and have even got a few recruits from Twitter. What else can we do?

Welcome to independence, Rocky Mountain Collegian!

After one of Student Media’s most tumultuous years, the CSU department became a private non-profit business called the Rocky Mountain Student Media Corporation on Aug. 1.

… The medias include the Collegian, TV station CTV, radio station KCSU and quarterly magazine College Avenue (“Student media officially separated from university“)

The Collegian of course, got in a little trouble last year after it published this editorial, which in turn prompted their advisory board to look at separating from the university, News Managing Editor Aaron Hedge writes, though not before talks to “partner” with Gannett’s local daily, The Fort Collins Coloradoan.

Best of luck to all the student media groups!

The last part of our day included a tour of UGA‘s independent student paper, The Red and Black. I have a friend who used to be on the R&B and it’s one of the college papers I follow the most, because of the similarities between UNC, UGA and our two papers, but I’d never seen the office.

They own their own building, which is great, but of course presents its own challenges (taking care of maintenance work on your own, for example). It’s a pretty two story building that’s slightly off-campus at the top of a lovely hill. Their ad staff works on the first floor, and editorial staff is on the second floor. You can see the newsroom here.

What amazed me is how clean it was. At the DTH we have Halloween/Christmas/Valentine’s decorations from 2+ years ago that have never been taken down. This in addition to piles of papers (often trash) and general junk. Also, our well loved couch that has had oh so many sleep on it. Even just the individual decorations desks put up, whether it’s cutting out good articles and hanging them, or pictures of staff or whatever. The DTH feels very lived in, and there’s no mistaking it for a college newsroom. Still, I’m sure The Red and Black, when it isn’t the middle of the summer (when even the DTH looks lonely), is a much, much livelier place (is it even possible for a college newspaper to not be?).

The sad news of this endeavor was the disappointing news about College Publisher 5 from Ed Morales, the Red and Black’s editorial adviser. College Publisher 5 has basically been promised to us (and all the other college newspapers who host with them) as a sort of Web Jesus. It’ll post stuff for you! You can click and drag! It’s so flexible! It’s amazing.

Apparently not (No surprise – they also said we’d be switched over this summer … which is now this scheduled for the fall … which surely will be pushed back even later before it’s all over). But everyone was so excited about CP5 because really, there is a lot of room for improvement. From what he said, their experience testing it out, they found that it took almost 4 times as long to post because all of the automation has disappeared. The automatic posting apparently isn’t there yet.

Only one paper in the country, as I understand, is on CP5 now fully, and I’d really be interested in hearing their experiences. Most of the papers here are on CP, and as Morales pointed out, that’s really because there is no other good option now for college papers. Juliette Mullin, the Daily Pennsylvanian managing editor and I talked about this, and we’re both frustrated, but also don’t see switching away from CP as an option. The DP has talked about switching to Drupal, but her concern is continuity, and finding staff year to year that can maintain a site on their own without the system in place with CP. And as Andrew learned, learning Drupal isn’t easy either. The Savannah Morning News Editor, Susan Catron (a DTH alum!), said their paper has been hosting on Drupal and is very happy with it, but again, I don’t see our staff now having the skills to build and maintain our own site. And hosting on WordPress, as some papers do with great success, isn’t practical for a paper like us in the event we get huge traffic one day (Taheri-azar, Eve Carson, etc).

So for anyone who’s working with it now, how’s CP5? Is it as bad/good as we’ve heard? Can it walk on water, or does it sink?