Month: November 2009

For a kid who grew up in Kansas with beef, basketball and Bob Dole, things like boxing and UFC are a little out there for me. But I have to admit that I enjoy them. And it’s obvious that a whole lot of lasvegassun.com readers love them, as well.

As I have written about before, UFC seems very much like Las Vegas’ major-league sports franchise to me.

And though its relationship is different with the city, boxing absolutely has the same vibe to it.

I know that with just about 18 months under my belt I’m very much a newbie to Nevada, but I still love to go to the Strip on Fight Night because the atmosphere in Vegas when a championship fight is in town is a little like being in Lawrence during the Final Four — only it’s more than just kids who grew up in the Great Plains.

The diversity you see in Las Vegas for big fights is amazing and completely cool. And the diverse ways we try to cover Fight Night in Vegas is equally cool to me.

We definitely pull out all the stops, and the traffic numbers to this content are through the roof.

For this past weekend’s Pacquiao-Cotto fight, lasvegassun.com broke every weekend record we had and even through Monday evening our fight coverage was still the most-viewed content on our site.

I’m going to go into our pre-fight coverage in more detail a little later this week with a blog entry about video on newspaper sites, so, for the purposes of today’s post, I’m going to focus more on the 12 hours before the fight and the 12 hours after last weekend’s big boxing title fight.

Along with Las Vegas Sun print reporter Jeff Haney and photographer Steve Marcus, we had three new-media journalists at the fight: Brett Okamoto, Ryan Greene and Christine Killimayer.

On the new-media side, Brett and Ryan handled the live coverage duties — Brett kept the live blog updated (which was the most-read story on our site all weekend) and Ryan kept our Twitter feed humming.

Here is a look at the blog page where you can see how we referenced our Twitter feed:

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Here is a look at how we integrated the live Twitter feed directly into our live blog page:

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And here is a look at our fighting page on Twitter:

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But it was the Sun’s post-fight coverage that really kicked some serious backside. And it worked on all levels — the right stories along with extremely well-done multimedia (video, photo, audio) that crossed platforms, with great reader interactivity (poll, comments, etc…) … all done in an incredibly timely fashion.

This was news coverage that was “of” the web, not just posted “on” the web.

First, there was Brett Okamoto’s amazing lead story — which wasn’t really a traditional post-fight story. In the print world, it would likely be called a “second-day” story, but because Brett had been live-blogging the entire fight, the fight had been covered.

Thoroughly.

The real story was what would happen next, and Brett instinctively knew that was the story we should be telling.

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Now, look at the above story’s online story page and see how all of the multimedia elements are so prominently played on it:

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So, you have Brett’s very well-done story.

Then layer in Christine Killimayer’s amazing fight video.

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http://media.lasvegassun.com/media/assets/swf/mvc_video_2.1.swf

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Then layer in that the Sun probably has one of the best boxing photographers in the country with Steve Marcus, and you have photos that really help tell the story. Plus, they just look frickin’ cool.

And finally, layer in the Sun’s post-fight audio podcast — which was posted hours before anyone actually received their Sunday newspaper and featured Brett, Ryan and Christine talking in-depth about the the fight.

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I’m no futurist. That being said, no one can tell me that in a world where ESPN is now trying to take over newspapers’ local sports franchises that our industry’s online coverage shouldn’t be looking a helluva lot more like what is outlined above.

Or at the very least, like KUsports.com’s coverage of the Kansas Jayhawks, circa 2004.
🙂

As Las Vegas Sun president and editor Brian Greenspun said about a year ago, in the future he hopes people might say “My God, the Las Vegas Sun was so much closer to right than they were to wrong, and we all better jump on board.”

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Our team has always been known for building lots and lots of databases. Or at least we get asked about them a lot.

Though we’re probably best known for our sports databases, some of my favorites from the past have been things like our restaurant health-inspection reports and state legislature voting records from our time at The Topeka Capital-Journal in the early part of this decade.

Don’t try to find those DBs — they’re long gone from cjonline.com. 😦

I’ve long said that five things really push traffic on the web: content that people are passionate about, practical information, playful/fun things, personal communication and porn.

The databases that we build that typically get the best traffic fall under the category of practical information — things like a great local calendar, killer restaurant overviews, huge club guides, the biggest and best casino guides out there, etc…

But one of the problems that we have with these databases is that it’s sometimes hard to call attention to them.

One of the ways that we now try to play them up on lasvegassun.com is with something we call the Guest Gauge.

The Guest Gauge was originally going to be called the Strip Gauge, but after lots of talk with lots of people, it was decided that it was more than about the Strip and that name might actually tick off the LV locals — and the people who live here are actually part of the target audience for this feature.

One of the reasons we wanted to have this was so people who lived here wouldn’t be surprised if they ventured over to the resort corridor with visitors or to go to a restaurant or something like that, and then be hit with a huge crowd when they know CES isn’t in town. We also built it because Las Vegas fills with folks from Southern California every weekend and many of those people decide at the last minute if they’re coming or not.

And the biggest reason we built it was because content like this is right in our sweet spot. When we write about things like this, we get traffic because people are interested in it.

Then layer in that something like this didn’t take a lot of technical resources to build and it helped us indirectly point to our databases, well then you can see why we did it.

As for the narrative content inside the Guest Gauge, Amanda Finnegan — who focuses on developing content related to the gaming industry that doesn’t necessarily have a home in our company’s print editions — does it by checking daily hotel rates, combing through our calendars, researching which conventions are in town and how big they are, and checking in with people who can tell us how busy they think Vegas will be for the upcoming weekend.

In addition to noting the biggest conventions and providing deep links to our casino and calendar databases, we provide weekend room rates at some of Las Vegas’ major luxury resorts, as well as budget properties.

Using this data from several sources, we determine whether we think the city’s resort areas during the weekend will be very busy, busy, average, slow or very slow. We also note in a disclaimer that a “slow” weekend in Las Vegas would still indicate occupancy levels that any other city across the country would love to have.

The design for the page and the homepage implementation was done by the Las Vegas Sun’s online design guru Danny Debelius, while the back-end integration was done by Greenspun Interactive’s extremely talented Elliot Burres and software developer Chris Mason.

The Guest Gauge isn’t on the Sun’s homepage every day. It’s just there Thursday through the early part of Sunday. And while it carries a disclaimer stating that the Guest Gauge isn’t scientific, we do have evidence that we think shows it’s mostly accurate: a major casino executive recently told us we’re right on.

We’ve been doing this for nearly two months. So far, the traffic to it has been good but not great … and probably lower than we had hoped.

On the other hand, this kind of falls under the idea of “fail often and fail fast” and try to do it on-the-cheap. We don’t have a ton of resources invested into it and the potential for upside is definitely there.

We’ll see.

Either way, the Guest Gauge definitely helps us get attention to our immense evergreen databases and guides.

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Here is how the Guest Gauge looks on our homepage — look in the right-hand rail:

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And here is how the actual Guest Gauge pages have looked over the last three or four weeks, showing what it looks like when Las Vegas is both busy and not so busy.

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When I originally started writing this blog entry, I typed “U2 comes to the desert: Covering a mega-concert via new media” as the headline in the WordPress title box. And that’s what this post was going to be about — how John Katsilometes covered U2’s recent concert in Las Vegas.

To say I was impressed with how Johnny Kats covered it is a huge understatement. As I have written before, this guy impresses me a whole lot of the time, and I literally think he represents a major facet of how local journalism can/will survive.

But as I looked at his coverage of the U2 concert, I realized something else was going on there.

Our web team at the Las Vegas Sun is typically associated with mega-huge databases or over-the-top multimedia packages or the biggest breaking-news event coverage you’ve ever seen. However, lately we’ve really been focusing in on how to use new media to tell daily stories. On deadline. In real-time.

That’s how John covered U2 — using lots of new-media tools and philosophies and never once opening Photoshop or Final Cut Pro.

It was simple, effective and extremely webby. And it wasn’t published in a print edition three days after the concert was over.

It was for, and — more importantly — of the web.

John had posted a couple pre-concert blogs about the U2 show, including this one on some of the band’s previous shows in Las Vegas.

Then Kats’ gameplan was to cover that evening’s U2 show by spending lots and lots of time with the folks at UNLV who were in charge of the show, via Sam Boyd Stadium.

He was armed with his notepad, BlackBerry and digital camera.

His coverage began — and continued through the entire night — with constant updates on Twitter.

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Throughout the entire night, John was taking photos on his phone’s camera. They were oftentimes immediately posted, like this shot of UNLV’s stadium director Daren Libonati as the final touches are being placed on U2’s stage.

So after all of the tweeting and reporting was done, John began writing his story. When that was completed, he posted the story himself into our organization’s online publishing system.

This kind of stuff does not freak out John. He gets right into our site’s content management system to not only post the story, but to add and move around the story’s other elements — like photos.

Yes, it’s a certain amount of technical acumen, but it’s more than just being comfortable with computers. John can write. He loves to tell stories. It’s that love of storytelling that is at the core of what he does.

What makes what John does so brilliant is that he can do it so effectively and in such an entertaining way whether he’s writing a quick four-paragraph blog for one of our Web sites or a 5,000-word story that ultimately ends up in print or 140 characters in Twitter.

And it all works. Each element can work singularly or as a body of work — doing it mostly with words. Not Flash. Not self-shot and self-edited video. The guy couldn’t write a line of programming code if you held a gun to his head.

But he doesn’t need to.

He’s a storyteller who not only isn’t afraid of new-media, but embraces it.

John Katsilometes is proof positive that you can still be extremely effective in this new world with old-school skills. I know I must sound like a frickin’ broken record, but it really is all about mindset.

I have seen this before. Back when I was at The Washington Post, I posted a blog about Post sports writer Barry Svrluga (then the Nationals beat writer and now the Redskins beat writer) and how he was navigating all of the change in our industry incredibly well.

So, how can a traditional print journalist stay relevant through all of this crazy change?

There isn’t one recipe.

But my gut tells me the soup tastes a whole lot like what these guys are cookin’.

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Halloween in Las Vegas is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be — both the relative normalcy of the haunted holiday for the locals who live here and the overkill craziness that happens on the Strip.

Sarah Feldberg helped lead our team’s coverage of the edgier parts of the haunted holiday in Sin City.

She is our team’s editor for lasvegasweekly.com — Greenspun Interactive’s entertainment site for Las Vegas and the web companion to the Las Vegas Weekly print edition. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Sarah dating back to our team’s time in Naples and she’s easily one of the most talented and multifaceted journalists I’ve ever seen.

Sarah has serious skills. However, as I’ve said a million times: “Skillset is important. But mindset is most important.”

That’s where Sarah becomes so invaluable because she does all that she accomplishes with a positive-force attitude that makes a manager/editor count his/her blessings to have this type of journalist in such an important role. Her formal training may be text-based journalism, but her day-to-day reality is serving our audience in a multimedia, multi-platform world.

She writes for print for the both the Las Vegas Sun newspaper and the Las Vegas Weekly magazine. She blogs nearly everyday. She helps keep our exhaustive guides and calendars and other databases updated. She shoots photos for her stories. She shoots party pics at the clubs for the Weekly’s website. She appears on a local Fox television show nearly every week to talk about things on our site and in our magazine. She helps with our own video. She manages and maintains large evergreen projects.

That’s mindset.

I’m positive that over the next several weeks, I’m going to be showcasing lots and lots of Sarah’s work, but today I want to show how she handled our Halloween coverage.

Like a lot of new-media editors who work for mainstream media companies, Sarah has to balance several issues related to taking our traditional media brands online in a way that makes sense and making sure that we build websites that work the way websites are expected to work and not just as digital archives of print products.

And though the Las Vegas Weekly print edition and the lasvegasweekly.com website share the same name and lots of the same DNA, there are substantial differences to them — many of which are tied simply to the differences in distribution.

(I plan on really going into all of this in an upcoming blog post because there has probably never been a site that our team has worked on that has been thought about and discussed and tested and benchmarked as much as lasvegasweekly.com.)

So, for the sake of this blog, let’s start the look at our edgier Halloween coverage by beginning with the print edition of Las Vegas Weekly.

We had known for weeks (if not months), that Las Vegas Weekly was planning a “death” issue. At that point, Sarah had already begun working with the print edition’s great editor, Scott Dickensheets. We then brainstormed on what pieces our team could add to that week’s content and we came up with a “death map” — basically a look at some of most interesting deaths and murders in Las Vegas. We also lobbied that the death issue be the week of Halloween so it could play into our site’s holiday coverage.

The death map ran in print, as well, but it was really thought of mainly as an online project. The objective was to map out the most interesting deaths in the area, then tie those to a short overview and then lots of stories from our news organizations’ archives.

The map’s look was designed by the print edition’s art director, Ryan Olbrysh. The deaths on the map (as well as their little accompanying brief overviews) were written and selected by Las Vegas Weekly print managing editor Ken Miller. The archival stories were found by online editor Sarah Feldberg and the Flash map’s guts were built by Greenspun Interactive’s Tyson Anderson.

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Now, let’s take a look at the online-only Halloween content that lived on the Weekly’s site.

It started with an amazing guide to basically all of the adult things going on in Vegas. One of the things that we really try to pride ourselves on is building really great calendar and guide information on our sites, and our calendar editor — Allison Duck — is absolutely fantastic at it.

When you pull together all of those event listings from the relational databases that make up our sites — along with the great restaurant and club guides, etc… — and mash it all together in narrative format, what you get is Allison’s incredibly practical “Las Vegas Halloween Guide.”

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Next up, Sarah and one of our news organization’s very talented videographers, Katie Euphrat, teamed up to tell a story of a local design school’s Halloween costume design and runway show. Sarah wrote the story and shot the photos, while Katie handled all of the video responsibilities.

An interesting sidenote to this is that last year, Sarah worked on an amazing project where we documented how two Cirque du Soleil costume designers would build a Halloween costume with about $50 worth of materials. The story’s accompanying photos — which actually show Sarah in the finished costume — and video are really cool.

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Our team is blessed to have a really phenomenal nightlife writer, Deanna Rilling. She’s super talented, really knows her subject matter and is one of the hardest working folks you’ll ever be around.

One of her contributions to our Halloween coverage was really cool — the folks who produce the hugely elaborate “Perfecto” dance night at Rain nightclub in the Palms made her up as a character from Perfecto.

The results were really, really cool. Deanna wrote a behind-the-scenes story about it. And Greenspun Interactive visual journalist Justin Bowen documented it with an interesting timelapse video of Deanna’s transformation and photo gallery of it all.

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One of the more interesting Halloween happenings in Las Vegas each year is the Fetish & Fantasy Ball. One of the newest members of our team — and recent UNLV grad — April Corbin blogged about it and took party pics of the attendees.

(I don’t really remember anything like this happening in Kansas during my life there. Though I once went to a Scissor Sisters concert with Betsy at the Granada back in Lawrence that definitely had at least some elements of this.)

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Of course, we picked our winners for best costumes.

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And there were other parts of our coverage.

Las Vegas Weekly movie reviewer Josh Bell blogged about the three days of Fangoria Trinity of Terrors shin-dig over at the Palms.

Lastly, there was our team’s old Halloween standby: What our local celebrities were handing out to trick-or-treaters — which we’ve been writing since about 1998.

When you pull all of this together, you get a good picture of how a print-based brand can feel pretty dang webby. Some of the content in our Halloween coverage was a little flashy — literally Flash and some video — but other parts were nothing more than an appreciation and knowledge of what kind of content just works well on the web.

That’s where a dynamic online editor like Sarah Feldberg becomes invaluable.

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I’ve started and stopped writing probably five or six blogs over the last few months, but just couldn’t find the time or focus to finish them. Lots of reasons for that, but the bottom line is that I sure wish I would have.

I have always prided myself on being a “glass-half-full” kind-of-guy — and any way you slice it, the Las Vegas Sun, Las Vegas Weekly and Greenspun Interactive crews have created some of the coolest and most interactive new-era local journalism I’ve ever seen over the last few months. Because of that, someone needs to not only be congratulating these people for practicing some amazing multimedia/cross-platform storytelling, but also be telling the world about it.

So here I am about to shout it from the top of the Stratosphere what exactly is happening in the world of local journalism around our company’s campus. And I fully plan to post several items over the next few months (some old, some new) that I hope shows just how dynamic and interactive local journalism can be. Of course, I started writing this particular entry on Wednesday morning and just now got around to finishing it.
😦

Anyway, here goes Entry No. 1.

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Let’s not even discuss whether poker is a sport or not. Just turn on the TV (even — or especially — ESPN) and see if poker gets much attention. It does. And the granddaddy of poker events concludes this week here in Las Vegas: the World Series of Poker.

To explain just how big the World Series of Poker is to our readers, a story on our site back from July saying who the final nine players would be has received nearly a thousand pageviews a day, every day since it was posted.

Yesterday, we unveiled our first wave of coverage for the final table of the event.

The package led with a great story from our newspaper’s print edition by Jeff Haney. Haney is our news organization’s gambling writer and he has forgotten more about gambling — and poker in particular — than most know. The guy is an authority and his story shows it.

Sun video journalist Christine Killimayer produced a killer behind-the-scenes video about all that goes into the ESPN television production of the event.

http://media.lasvegassun.com/media/assets/swf/mvc_video_2.1.swf

Then you layer in the uber-cool Flash graphic produced by our team’s senior designer, Todd Soligo. Yep, it looks cool, but what makes it really great is how much information is in the graphic, and that’s all thanks to one of our team’s new-media sports journalists, Case Keefer. Case put together great bios on each of the final nine players.

Case didn’t just do the bios. He wrote a great story for our site about the interesting mix of players at this year’s final table, as well as the huge amount of skill sitting at it.

And that wasn’t it.

Our World Series of Poker site also includes tons of historical info on the event — both recent and not-so-recent — including a great historical perspective on the event written by longtime Sun reporter Ed Koch specifically for our site.

And what’s really cool is that we have a few tricks up our sleeves in how we’re going to cover the actual event over the next few days. Should be fun!

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BTW — at one point yesterday, it seemed like lasvegassun.com had what has to be an “only-in-Vegas” homepage: Our top story was about hookers “trick-rolling” their johns at an even more rapid rate than usual and our centerpiece was poker. And what made that coverage even more interesting is that both story packages were also played up very prominently in our newspaper’s print edition.

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