“NewsTools2008: A concept/design mashup for journalists, technologists and entrepreneurs”
DRUPAL DAY at NewsTools2008
“Technology and the New Ecology of News
How will technology innovation support journalism and participatory democracy?”
“WHERE:” Sunnyvale, Calif.
“WHEN:”
Friday, May 2, 2008
DRUPAL DAY SEATS
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation provided special support for “Drupal Day” breakout activities on Friday. The foundation is seeking worthy Drupal development projects through the Knight Drupal Initiative and digital news and information projects through the Knight News Challenge. Both programs aim at helping citizens be
better informed to participate actively in their communities. Knight believes that open-source content-management platforms and digital innovation can help build online news resources that have an impact in real communities. Knight was a supporter of DrupalCon in Boston.
A small number of seats are reserved for participants in — “Drupal Day at NewsTools2008,” on Friday, May 2 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. A one-day registration fee of $50 includes lunch and end-of-day reception. REGISTER HERE,choosing the “Drupal Day FRIDAY ONLY” button. You will receive a confirmation email with details about location and schedule.
What to expect
A set of extended, focused breakouts, part of the overall NewsTools2008convening sponsored by Yahoo! and others. The “Drupal Day” breakouts are responsivle to those NewsTools participants who want to convene around Drupal, and useful to journalists who don’t know much about the open-source content-management platform and would like to learn more.
PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS
Proposed breakout sessions
Integrating Drupal and Mediawiki
The Center for Media and Democracy operates two main websites, PRWatch.org(powered by Drupal) and Sourcewatch.org(powered by Mediawiki, the same software that runs Wikipedia). To facilitate cross-posting and linking between the two sites, they use an module for Drupal. They also use an extension to Mediawiki called “Emu” which enables both sites to share the same user registration system and are using RSS feeds to automatically display information from PRWatch.org within Sourcewatch articles. More recently, they have developed a third, Drupal-powered website, FrontGroups.org, to support collaboration between CMD and Consumer Reports Webwatch. This session will explain how these customizations work and could serve as a prototype for similar collaborations between other journalism websites. Convenor: Sheldon Rampton, research director, Center for Media and Democracy, sheldon@prwatch.org
Finding the right interface for web-based journalism: what I learned by writing the ePublish module
PR Watch began as a print publication and later moved to the web. In the course of that transition, it retained some of the features of traditional print publications, such as publishing periodic “issues” and wanting to group all of the content from a single issue together where readers could find it. After PRWatch.org moved onto the Drupal platform, editor Sheldon Rampton also studied the example of various news websites, including the New York Times and Google News, to see how they organize their content by topic (“International News,” “Politics,” “Sports,” etc.). This became the basis for the the ePublish modulefor Drupal. He could talk about what he noticed while comparing news interfaces from studying various websites, explain how ePublish works, and also discuss some newer features that other people have added to Drupal (such as the Views module), which provide similar functionality with possibly more options and a more user-friendly interface. Convenor: Sheldon Rampton, research director, Center for Media and Democracy, sheldon@prwatch.org