Campus papers spend a lot of time creating content. Your paper’s content includes all the articles and media created, edited and polished by staff for each issue and the design you dressed them up in for publication.
Try tracking how much content your paper produces for each issue. After a few issues, that pile will start to add up. After a few years, you’ve got a serious database representing the combined efforts of hundreds or maybe thousands of contributors. While this archive may be of little immediate value to newpaper volunteers, to editors it should represent a publishing tradition, a historical record and, who knows, maybe even a future revenue stream.
Maintaning that publishing tradition and historical record falls on the current management of your paper, typically its editors. That means a lot of former (and future) contributors are relying on your editors’ wits to protect a legacy they helped create. That editor might even be you.
Are you doing a good job? Try really thinking about it.
For the past ten to fifteen years campus papers have been undergoing a gradual shift from paper-based publishing to digital publishing with different parts of the process going digital gradually—piece by piece. We’re left in a world where interviews are frequently conducted by email, edits are managed using Google Docs and the whole paper is sent to print as a single PDF document.
As your paper moves beyond its roots as a static print publication, it’s archiving needs to adapt. None of the blog posts or podcasts your paper created and uploaded last year made it into the bound volumes.
Enter Hot Ink.
Hot Ink is built with state-of-the-art data security from top to bottom. In addition to helping publish content to the web, Hot Ink acts as a secure archive for all the content you upload. That includes your paper’s articles and media, but also its issue PDFs, podcasts, blog posts and other content.
One the primary goals of Hot Ink is to act as a complete archive of your paper’s output and make that archive safe, available, organized and searchable. Over the next few months we’ll be explaining on this blog a whole lot more about how we’re going to accomplish it and why. In fact, this blog will be a clearing house for information both technical and humourous, triumphant and frustrating. We’ll be posting all our new feature announcements and explanations here, along with a few tips and tricks to help along the way.
In the meantime, if you’re interested, check out the Hot Ink source code.
Tags: hot ink as archive, security