DISQUS

Yeah, it should be "This SOB is illegally tethering his iPhone." I'd bet that there's another half to the equation of getting this to work well on AT&T's end.

Did a bit of testing on my own. This method unlocks tethering but, for me at least, it breaks Visual Voicemail (or at least I have no indicator of new voicemail). It also, and this is a super huge quirk, doesn't let anyone ring my number when tethering is active. I tried calling my number and got a "your call cannot be completed as dialed".

Comment left via tethering :)

Does this method kill your Visual Voicemail though? Also, what's the link to the site you're referring to?

Thanks for putting this together. This will be my go-to link for whenever someone tries to use that argument.

My opinion is that the ads on the front page of a newspaper would hurt the newspaper's brand. I understand the need to innovate, but this isn't innovating in the right direction, in my opinion. The innovation that should be happening is providing more value to the readers, not making them comment on what placement of advertisements on the front page of a newspaper mean for the newspaper's financial viability. Some would, I fear, call this into question, and I think this type of discussion would harm the newspaper's brand.

First off, it's my prerogative to say this is one of the most wrong, idiotic, and misleading posts I've ever read, and you've done the community a tremendous disservice by writing it. In interest of full disclosure, I'm the Executive Director of CoPress, a project I started because College Publisher was so painful and inhibiting to use. I'll be writing a longer post in response to this, but have several other things to do today so I'm not sure when I'll be able to get to it.

To address your first point in which you claim that "rather than building a CMS", student innovators should build up traffic with content and "multi-media packages," I'm not quite sure where you got the notion that we were advocating for building a CMS. There are many upon many open source CMS options out there that will do the job. In fact, the Knight Foundation has funded one and my friend Max has built another one. What's missing in this equation is that most, if not nearly all, student newspapers don't have the capacity to deploy and maintain these CMSes. I'm not going to name blame for the past, but this is largely due to the mindset of "we don't want our web product to devalue the print product, so we aren't going to put any resources towards it." A print analogy: your web tech talent is now as important, if not more, than your production staff. When companies like College Media Network make statements like "college newspapers are in the news business, not the web business", you're doing a disservice to the entire sector.

Yet you go on to argue that student news organizations shouldn't control their top advertising slots because they might have to hire additional staff to sell those ads. Again, this smokescreen is a disservice to the community. You then say that newspapers, to reclaim this lost revenue, should "build components to supplement the online edition’s offering" which, to me, sounds like a lot more effort than just managing your CMS.

I'd like to suggest an alternative for College Publisher. Instead of using monopolistic weight to force student newspapers into using crappy, closed software, why not provide them with open source software and teach them how to truly innovate?

Any chance we could get an RSS feed with just the podcast as an enclosure? I'd like to subscribe to it in iTunes. Thanks!

Are those advertising numbers at the top based on revenues from College Publisher, or newspapers who are selling their own advertising? Because we all know how bad the revenue is from College Publisher...

IMHO, I think the "paper" should experiment with going online only. It's the "oh we don't have to worry about this right now" type of thinking that got the regional and national papers in the trouble they're in today.

I take it you're for reforming the institution instead of starting afresh?

It looks pretty sweet. I think offering the option of downloading the PDF would be smart too.

[crickets, crickets]

I think Ellington needs an open-source competitor for there even to be a discussion.

I think I'm on the same page as Kevin. The largest constraint to innovation at the moment is the platform, not hosting. Bryan, you might be referring to something else, but you can get hosting for under $5/month. Maintenance is another issue, but that's hopefully where the eco-system would come in.

I'm very interested to see where the UCLA project is at. They do have a significant amount of money to work with, but building an entire CMS (that works better than the other options) over the summer would be a commendable task.

Another argument I've heard for College Publisher has to do with their advertising network. This can't be terribly difficult to set up, though, and there are ad networks out there that I'm sure would love to have placements on student newspaper websites.

1. iPhone
2. Last.fm
3. Podcasting
4. Google Reader for the iPhone
5. Twitter

The ultimate news-consuming machine

What about Remember the Milk?!