Wordpress
Wordpress(████)
Wordpress is a tool for creating showcase sites for text, visual, or audio content.
Design is template-based. There is very little built-in engagement with
other Wordpress users, so it’s important to share links to stories
on Facebook and Twitter.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Good for showcasing media | Little to no built-in engagement |
| Custom domains for starting at $4 a month | Limited customization |
| Plugins allow for flexibility in functionality. | Not all templates are automatically optimized for mobile--though there are some ways to get around this. |
Metrics
In order to track metrics, you’ll have to install Google Analytics.
There are numerous Wordpress “plugins” for this (here’s one: Google
Analytics Dashboard for WP). You also can install plugins to help protect against referrer
spam (bot traffic that shows up as confounding data in your analytics report).
See Web Metrics Guide: Basics for
Journalists for more info on Google Analytics.
Case studies
Classroom
City Newsroom.
In Dody Tsiantar, Mike Hoyt, and Simon Surowicz’s City Newsroom class,
students were encouraged to experiment with media unfamiliar to them, and
produce a combination of print, photo, video, audio, and data pieces
about New York City for the class website. In addition, in 2016, the class used Wordpress plugins through a subscription to The Divi Builder to produce a website dedicated to the topic of guns in New York.
Students were introduced to tools for editing mobile video, Rebel
Mouse for posting live to the class site from the field, and
Hootsuite for managing social media postings. They tweeted out their stories themselves
and via the class twitter account, and used a class hashtag
(#nycitylens) when posting to their personal Instagram accounts. Selected images are
then posted to the class site.
Project Wordsworth. In Michael Shapiro’s 2013 long-form storytelling class, students sought to
find out what would happen if they posted their stories online and asked
readers to make a contribution—as much or as little as they liked. One
of the students designed a class Wordpress site to
present their stories. Students were charged with promoting their work themselves.
In total, the site garnered $3,700 and 140,000 page-views in about ten
days. One story, Caroline Chen’s piece, “The Paradox of the
Proof,” about a mathematician who proved a problem that had long been
inscrutable (and still was, to his colleagues) received the largest
share, by far, of all page-views and contributions. Google Analytics
revealed why: One of the mathematicians Chen interviewed had linked to
the article in her blog, and the math world quickly picked up on it.
For more details on the project’s analytics, see James Robinson’s
Project Wordsworth Recap.
Additional resources
Tutorial\/help: How To Create a WordPress
Site