Dear Peter,

Usually, I try to stay out of the forums, because I am very passionate about what we do - and that results in very long forum posts. But since you have been spending a lot of time with Newscoop already, I think it is only fair that I should, too.

Firstly, we failed to communicate on our website that during the time you were trying to get your head around Newscoop, we had our yearly Sourcefabric developer meeting. This meant that nearly 60 people from around the world come together for a week to discuss the ongoing projects as well as look into the future roadmaps of our projects, including Newscoop (as well as Airtime, Booktype, Superdesk and Live Blog). There was meant to be a blog post explaining that we are all busy planning the future and reviewing the presence. But unless you follow us on Twitter, you wouldn't know.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23sourcecamp&src=hash
During Sourcecamp (as we call it), we are really not very fast in replying to the forum posts. But we yet have to find a way to have a proper office wide "out of office" message across all channels :)

Regarding your problems. Before I started writing this reply, I installed Newscoop again on my laptop, just to see if it works. It does.

What you describe in this post is actually not a bug but desired behaviour. Newscoop has 100% separation of business logic and presentation logic - and without any templates will not display anything. This is why we ship with sample templates for people to choose from for a quick start. To learn more about the template engine, take a look at our Newscoop Cookbook for theme development and implementations, especially this chapter:
http://sourcefabric.booktype.pro/newscoop-42-cookbook/gimme-all-your-lovin/

I would be curious to hear from you what made you decide to deploy Newscoop and not Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla. Because Newscoop might not be the right decision for what you are planning to do. Unless you are using the sample templates, the installation does not finish with a "Hey, I am your first post. Delete me and write another!".

Newscoop has a powerful templating engine to allow custom developments ranging from TagesWoche to Brazil 24/7 and others.

We are not in the hosting business as much as you seem to think. We are interested in making money on top of our Open Source development. We are not a hobby community project but a professional company. And as such we pay for the development and explore ways to generate money to do so. But we also deeply care about what we do and take on pro bono projects which need our help and line up with our mission: "We believe in quality, independent journalism". Two examples for such pro bono projects that make me very proud to work with Sourcefabric are Kobinet Nachrichten and Yemen's Women Power - both running on Newscoop.

From an earlier post I remember that you speak German, if you happen to live in Berlin, please come to visit us in the office and explain what you are planning to do. These forum conversations can become easily frustrating.

Regarding your clean installation of Newscoop: you are on the right track. This is where all larger Newscoop projects start. The link to the cookbook above will give you more information. You already created a publications, issues and sections. You created an article type (or more) and you wrote and published an article.

Now you need to create the templates that give you 100% control over what you want your publication to look like (or use the sample templates). You can do this via FTP or using the theme management tools in Newscoop.

Finally, make sure that the issue of your publication is published as well. Newscoop works in a way that you can prepare content in the background and then use the scheduling to publish cued articles on a given time. Or manually publish articles in an "unpublished" issue which can then be scheduled as a whole. You can find more information about scheduled publishing in the Newscoop manual for Journalists and Editors.
http://sourcefabric.booktype.pro/newscoop-42-for-journalists-and-editors/publishing-an-issue/

I want to add that Newscoop is not dead, it is very much alive and growing. We have just completed a totally revamped plugin system built on symfony bundles - which will be announced soon. For journalists this will be exciting, because we plan to create the article edit screen as a plugin meaning that every publication can create and customize their own article edit screen. Together with the inline editor that will be implemented in the coming months (hopefully before the end of the year), we plan to have a writing environment which not only looks and behaves like the front end but also has inbuilt switches showing you what your article will look like on other devices in real time.

I hope this helps. And spend some time with the manual. You might come to the conclusion that Newscoop is not the right tool for what you plan to do. Otherwise you will not be able to avoid diving into the wonderful world of Newscoop theme development - which is what actually sets Newscoop apart from the other tools you mentioned.

All the best and might see you in the Berlin office,

micz