‘One of the most helpful things’: Pilot program provides tech help to NJ News Commons members
Three-month project paired a local Wordpress developer with New Jersey publishers to tackle tech problems
It’s hard to find good help — especially when you’re a small, independent news organization that needs technology advice.
Developers are expensive, and finding someone you trust can be tough.
That’s why the Center for Cooperative Media launched a three-month pilot project earlier this year to provide technology and web development assistance directly to members of the NJ News Commons, thanks to support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
This kind of shared-support assistance is often something that dues-paying members get from an association or trade group. But many of the NJ News Commons members we work with are small, independent publishers that aren’t members of those groups. The goal of this pilot program was to help those New Jersey partners improve their digital skills and resolve some of the tech issues they’re facing.
We also wanted to get a deeper idea of the kind of help NJ News Commons members need so we can figure out how to keep shared, back-office support programs like this going in the future.
For this project, we partnered with Martin Halo, an adjunct professor at Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media and owner of Percy Cole Media LLC. Halo worked directly with a handful of our partners on a wide range of technology-based requests and issues. He also dedicated roughly 40 hours to helping the Center and its partners fix basic-to-intermediate Wordpress issues.
Those issues included, but were not limited to:
- Site repair and protection after hacking incidents.
- Installation of SSL certificates.
- Successfully indexing sitemaps for inclusion into Google News.
- Data recovery and loss prevention.
- Site design and plugin management.
The feedback we received from the partners who participated in this program was overwhelmingly positive; they told us the program improved user experience on their sites, mobile navigation, security and Google indexing, and gave them boosts in web traffic.
Here’s what Jay Lustig of NJArts.net had to say about the program:
[Marty] helped me with a few things: First, he helped fix my Google News ranking. I applied a couple of times and hadn’t been approved, wasn’t sure the problem. He was able to identify the issue and fix it quickly, which led to me getting approved. I was also having a problem with my searches – when someone goes to the site and searches for something it wasn’t searching the whole site — and he was able to figure that out as well. … I would actually say that was one of the most helpful things I’ve done so far with the Center.
Elinor Comlay of Route 40 News had a similar experience:
The program was extremely helpful. Our website was down and we had no ability to recover it and [Marty] saved the day. … The big thing for us was just having a recommendation for somebody. We had shopped around trying to find people locally who could help us, but most of them had no idea what we were trying to do, so having a recommendation from the Center was really helpful.
So what’s next?
We know this was an important service for the local journalists we work with, so we’re exploring ways to keep it going in some capacity. And we are also in the process of collecting feedback from our NJ News Commons members about their needs for 2018 so we can ensure our programs accurately reflect what our ecosystem needs; that assessment includes questions about technology.
If you have any ideas or help to share related to WordPress and technology assistance, or are interested in supporting a program like this, let us know: info@njnewscommons.org.
Joe Amditis is the associate director of the Center for Cooperative Media. Contact him at amditisj@montclair.edu.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. The Center is supported with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Democracy Fund. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
