With the recent announcement that CoPress is ceasing its operations, the college media community loses an innovative voice. Although they were a competitor, our companies shared many of the same goals, and we are sorry to see them go.

Through June, we are offering a 50% discount (savings of at least $1,000) on data migration for new CMS package customers moving from CoPress. For those publications looking for a new CMS provider, we hope this will make the transition a little easier.

To learn more about what Detroit Softworks’ CMS package can do for your publication, contact us today and schedule a free demonstration.

The Rocky Mountain Collegian, Colorado State University’s student voice, has just relaunched their online presence at Collegian.com with Detroit Softworks. Congratulations and welcome to the staff in Fort Collins.

The Collegian offers a fine example of the flexibility of Gryphon’s templating system. The design of the new site is 100% their own, masterminded by their (now graduated) webmaster Trevor Simonton. Thanks to Trevor for his efforts throughout the development of the site, and we wish him the best in all future endeavors. We’d also like to thank Jenny, Virginia, Larry, and everyone else who had a hand in getting the site rolling — not least incoming webmaster Tyler, who handled the transition like a pro.

If you’ll excuse us a tired cliché, we think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Yes, we’ve got themes — and you’ve got options. One is to let your creativity run wild. Maybe you want total control over your site’s look and feel, or you already have some mockups in the works. Great. Our custom install option is for you.

On the other hand, maybe you want to deploy a great-looking new site fast and with minimal hassle. You can save both time and money with our basic install option. Our new Theme Gallery showcases our growing list of standard template options. Browse live demo sites and choose which of our robust, grid-based designs best fits your publication’s needs.

All of our themes include some basic customization at no extra charge, so you don’t have to worry about being locked in to a completely inflexible design.

What better way to ring in the new year than to introduce a brand-new, entirely redesigned Fotobroker administrative user interface? The release will officially hit the figurative streets soon, but for now we would like to invite you to take the new system for a test drive on your Fotobroker site. Give us some feedback, and we’ll use it to make improvements before the final release.

Check out the new Fotobroker Features page to learn more about what the new UI has to offer. If you decide you want to give it a try, contact us and we’ll set you up.

Don’t forget: Today the sun sets on the era of Context Craft — we are now Detroit Softworks, through and through. Please direct your support queries to support [at] detroitsoftworks [dot] com. Read more about the name change in this post. Happy 2010.

The holidays may be the perfect time for sitting around eating chocolates, but the internet never sleeps. We’ve been hard at work of late, and we bring you these tidings…

E-fulfillment is a reality. It’s long been a feature of Fotobroker, but this year interest picked up for the first time, and we’ve activated sales of high resolution digital downloads on several of our client sites. You can have it too. Just give us the word, and you can jump on the bandwagon with these happy campers:

The Daily O’Collegian
Petaluma Argus-Courier
The Ocala Star-Banner

We’ve been making a big push during the past couple months to expand the scope of our documentation. Now, the fruits or our efforts are available online in our newly-launched Support Center at detroitsoftworks.com/support. There you’ll find instructive screencast videos, downloadable documents, tutorials, and other useful resources. We will be expanding this new section continuously, so be sure to bookmark the page and visit us often.

A few highlights:

• Brand new Fotobroker Admin Guide PDF
• Gryphon tour screencast series
• Tutorials with illustrative screenshots
• Free DSW digital swag!

If you have suggestions for additional resources you would like made available, drop us a line. We’re always in the market for good ideas.

Built-in mobile interface templates guarantee a rich browsing experience for viewers visiting Gryphon-powered Web sites from phones and other mobile devices. Our latest screencast shows the mobile interface in action.

So… you’re curious about how Gryphon works, but maybe you’re not quite ready to contact us about scheduling a demo. No problem: We’ve put together a four-part series of screencast videos to help introduce you to Gryphon’s administrative backend.

We aren’t calling it a “whirlwind tour” for nothing — there’s much more to Gryphon than we had time to cover here. For more information, you can check out our extended list of Gryphon features, or drop us a line and schedule that hands-on demo after all. We would be more than happy to arrange a guided tour for your staff.

Gryphon walkthrough:
Part one – Articles | Part two – Media | Part three – Blogs | Part four – Galleries

On October 29th we traveled to sunny Austin, Texas, for the 2009 College Media Advisers Convention. For three days we joined more than 2,300 students and advisers from colleges throughout the United States and Canada. The weekend was packed full of professional sessions, workshops, and speakers. Their topics focused on all aspects of student media and helped to highlight some of the newest trends and challenges the industry is facing.

There were a lot of great sessions throughout the convention but one that especially stood out was hosted by Chris Poore from the University of Kentucky and Kevin Schwartz from the University of North Carolina. It focused on finding alternative forms of revenue beyond print advertising and helped students see the potential of profiting from their own work. We were extremely proud to hear Fotobroker was one of the main systems they discussed and glad that they viewed it as such an easy and effective product.

The convention concluded with an awards session on Saturday afternoon. It was amazing to see the writing, photography, and design that is being done by colleges across the country. We want to offer our congratulations to all of the schools that had their work nominated for a national pacemaker and extend a special kudos to all the schools we work with. The convention was an incredible experience, and we can’t thank the College Media Advisers and the Associated Collegiate Press enough for all the work they did to make the weekend a success.

We’re happy to announce that The College Heights Herald, of Western Kentucky University, will soon be opening a Fotobroker site at prints.wkuherald.com.

WKU has one of the most respected photojournalism programs in the country (check out their Mountain Workshops), and the Herald exemplifies that tradition of excellence. Check out their A Thousand Words photo column for a taste.

Special thanks to Director of Student Publications Bob Adams for his efforts getting things rolling.

The Iowa State Daily’s Fotobroker site at reprints.iowastatedaily.com is open for business, thanks to the combined efforts of their photo, Web, and editorial staffs.

Their front page displays a great example of our galleries feature — contact us if you would like to learn more about implementing this functionality on your own site.

This year, our company has undergone some dramatic changes. In May, we launched our hosted CMS service, offering for the first time an integrated solution for management of online editorial content, Web advertising, and photo reprint sales. As we move forward into this exciting new territory, our role in the world of news media is shifting.

Where we once concerned ourselves exclusively with reprint sales, we now offer a suite of tools to handle a publication’s entire online presence. In an effort to keep abreast of this expansion, we have decided to change the name of our company. Beginning in January, Context Craft will be known as Detroit Softworks.

Detroit Softworks is our new face, but inside we’re the same animal. The business has not changed hands or restructured. Our existing customers will continue to receive the same high quality of service and support as ever. Transactions related to reprint sales will still be filtered through our Photo Reprint Services wing, and there will be no changes to the processes used to collect online credit card payments from reprint customers or disburse monthly revenue checks to newspapers.

Fotobroker install fee:

Starting in January, 2010 the basic installation fee for a Fotobroker site will be $500. It’s worth mentioning that in 2001, when we first started offering Fotobroker as a service – it was a $500 install fee.

Installation improvements that allow us to launch sites more quickly, and an improved CSS setup that allows us to do customizations more easily, made us able to temporarily reduce the install fee over the last 18 months.

Thanks to the efforts of the good people at ReCaptcha.net, we’re now able to stem the tide of abuse/junk coming in via our Fotobroker request and feedback forms.

To quote from ReCaptcha’s website :
“A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots, “ or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.”

If you’ve got any questions, please let us know. About half of our customers have this in place already on their forms – and we’ll add others as the spammers find them. We were reluctant to make this change – as it’s our contention that anything that comes between our us and our customers (and yours) isn’t good, but the volume of garbage was increasing beyond the level of an irritation, so… Thanks ReCaptcha!

Thanks again to Kevin D., Danny H. and the on-the-ball staff of The Eastern Echo – who collectively pulled off a very smooth transition from their previous web site to the Detroit Softworks service over the holiday weekend. It’s up and running now – take a look for yourself: www.easternecho.com.

Info: detroitsoftworks.com
Detroit Softworks Demo: demo.detroitsoftworks.com

Clients with LIVE Detroit Softworks sites:
www.statenews.com – The State News at Michigan State University
www.dailylobo.com – The Daily Lobo at the University of New Mexico
www.easternecho.com – The Eastern Echo at Eastern Michigan University

It’s been almost two years since we started working with Colorado State University’s The Rocky Mountain Collegian, handling their photo reprint needs through our Fotobroker service. In that time, we’ve really come to appreciate the way they do business – and that makes it a truly great thing that they’ve elected to use the Detroit Softworks CMS package to run their news site at Collegian.com starting later this fall.

Our sincere thanks to the Collegians – especially Larry S., Jenny F. and their razor-sharp web crew. Watch for this site to be a remarkable one. We’re very glad to have these folks aboard.

Almost, but not quite, eclipsed by our Mountain Time Zone happiness is the fact that in the last ten days, we’ve opened several new Fotobroker sites. In no particular order:

We’d like to thank Ryan H., editor at the University of Western Ontario’s The Gazette for helping us put together our first Fotobroker site for a Canadian newspaper. It’ll be opening in the next week or so, and you’ll be able to see it here: reprints.westerngazette.ca. Their site – and their photos – look great, and we’re really looking forward to opening this one. Watch for it.

To give credit where it’s due, we should also thank the folks at our vendor partner EZ Prints for saying “no problem” to our questions about shipping to Canada. Working with the people at EZP has been a real pleasure – and while we’ve made note of their reliability before on this website, we just can’t say enough good things about them. What a difference they’ve made.

In other news, a couple of Fotobroker site openings you may have missed:
The Daily Campus at Southern Methodist University in Lubbock, Texas – photos.smudailycampus.com
the Petaluma Argus-Courier in Petaluma, CA – reprints.petaluma360.com

Browsing through the sites in our Fotobroker client list, you’re sure to see a lot of great news and sports photography. In fact, you might begin to think that’s all we do. Not so; Fotobroker is a great tool for photographers and publications of all varieties, and as a case in point we’d like to highlight the recently-launched site of Naturalist Photographer Mark S. Carlson.

Mark trains his lens primarily on Michigan’s natural environment, from the mixed forests of the mitten to the rocky shorelines of Lake Superior. I must say, our beloved Great Lakes state has never looked so good. For more of Mark’s stunning nature images, visit prints.markscarlson.com.

It is our very great pleasure to announce that the University of New Mexico’s student newspaper – The Daily Lobo – is now using the Detroit Softworks CMS service to host their news at dailylobo.com. We’d like to especially thank Jim and Junfu from the Lobo, as well as our staffers Blake and Patrick – and last, but nowhere near least, we’d like to give a public shout out to the MSU State News” Mike Joseph, the original programmer and architect of the engine that drives this service. If we’re known only by the company we keep and the friends we have, then Detroit Softworks is certainly off to a fine start.

Thanks to everyone involved for what has been a very smooth launch process – and for what has turned out to be a stellar version of the digital Daily Lobo. Don’t take my word for it, though – see the new Daily Lobo for yourself.

Our company originally started in Ann Arbor, Michigan – which sits right next to the city of Ypsilanti, home to Eastern Michigan University… and we’re very pleased to announce that our neighbors at EMU’s venerable independent student newspaper – The Eastern Echo – have chosen the Detroit Softworks service (hosted CMS and reprint service) for their news web site. Their entirely revamped site will be opening in early September – and we’ll post an update and a link or two once the site is open to the public. Thanks to Kevin D. and Danny H. for their help getting this one going. Go Eagles!