Month: March 2010

This is basically a re-post of a re-post that I’ve posted for the last couple of years. The reason for all of this repetition is simple: We’re looking for a few talented interns to join our team at the Greenspun Newsroom for the summer and even through next spring.

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The Las Vegas Sun and the converged newsroom at Greenspun Media Group are looking for interns who want to get real-world, practical experience with coverage of local news and business, and entertainment (yes, that very well could mean The Strip, the celebrity side of Las Vegas and our city’s crazy club scene).

What does that really mean?

It means we’re looking for at least a couple of people to help with development and research for enterprise and investigative stories for the Las Vegas Sun, the news and sports side of lasvegassun.com, as well as all of the cool things happening over on lasvegasweekly.com. And if an amazing/hard-working visual journalist or programmer applied, well, we would have to consider finding someone like that a position.

We want solid journalists who can write their backsides off and who aren’t afraid of multimedia or working directly with a fairly sophisticated online content management system (or CMS, as the kids love to call this sort of software).

Solid grammar knowledge and writing skills are a must. The selected interns must be effective communicators on the phone and in person and be able to conduct interviews, research and write stories with minimal supervision. They must be receptive to editing and coaching and be able to take instruction when working in collaboration with full-time staff members.

Above all else, the students or recent graduates will demonstrate maturity and critical-thinking skills, show exuberance toward the career of journalism, and embrace its values of accuracy and fairness.

These are “fiber-cyber” internships, with equal focus on the analytical journalism featured in the Sun print edition, the breaking news featured on lasvegassun.com and the local-lifestyle journalism that makes up Las Vegas Weekly and lasvegasweekly.com.

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Here are some answers to a few basic questions about these internships:

* How long do these internships last? A minimum of roughly three months and up to nine months.

* Are they paid internships? Yes. But just barely. You aren’t going to get rich. But you’ll definitely be able to get by.

* Am I going to fetch coffee? No.

* Am I going to have to do some data-entry? Yes, just like the full-timers on our staff have to do. And if you get the internship focused on the Sun’s enterprise journalism, this sort of work will definitely be a part of your weekly routine.

* Am I going to work harder than I ever have at any other point in my life? Likely. Unless you’re from Kansas, and then it will be basically what you’re already used to. 🙂

* What skills do I need? You need to be able to write your tailfeathers off, and generally be the most self-motivated student in your J-school. We want to hear from applicants who have taken the initiative to learn more — even if that “more” only consists of basic audio-editing skills, basic video-editing skills, basic HTML knowledge, at least some knowledge of Internet journalism, maintaining a blog, etc.

During our intern interviews, we always hear something like this: “I can write, but I don’t really know anything about Web journalism. I really think this internship would help teach me those skills.”

Well, teaching new skills is wonderful and we love to do it, but in this era, we want students who have learned (and in many cases, taught themselves) at least some skills related to new-media journalism. If all you can do is write — which is a hugely important skill to our team — then you probably aren’t interested enough in the type of journalism that we practice at the Las Vegas Sun, lasvegassun.com and lasvegasweekly.com to have learned other things needed to be a part of our news organization.

And you probably aren’t the kind of self-motivated student we’re looking for.

* Am I going to use a real content management system, work with multimedia, as well as do a bunch of other nerdy news things that will likely make me the most employable member of my graduating class? Definitely.

* Do I need a car? Yes. Your work will take you all around the Las Vegas Valley, and our community’s public transportation isn’t going to be enough to get you where you will need to go.

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To apply, please click here.

Sometime in the future, I’ll probably look back at this post and wonder what I was thinking when I wrote it, and maybe even regret that it’s in my blog’s archives, but who cares?

Live a little. 🙂

Big-time convergence doesn’t have to be reserved for just big-time stories. (If you’d like to see examples of convergence/multimedia journalism that will warm the cockles of your favorite journalism professor’s heart, there is definitely some here.)

A few weeks ago in one of our editorial meetings for lasvegasweekly.com, our nightlife reporter — Deanna Rilling — pitched a story on the extravagant women’s bathroom at the new nightclub inside the Hard Rock Hotel.

As the discussion continued for what initially was thought to be an online-only story about Vegas’ latest preposterous party potty, it was pointed out that there were some other really out-there bathrooms in our town’s nightlife scene. Next thing you know, we’re planning a list of five bitchin’ bathrooms, complete with a huge photo gallery and a video.

Then at one of our weekly group editorial meetings — which includes the top editors from Vegas, our luxury magazine, the Las Vegas Magazine, which is for tourists and is found in most hotel rooms in this city, the Las Vegas Weekly alternative/local lifestyle publication, all of our company’s different editorial websites, and, of course, the Las Vegas Sun — it was decided it would be fun to play a lighter (but interesting) story like this across all of Greenspun Media Group’s titles.

For many of our readers, the story was probably first seen in this morning’s Las Vegas Sun print edition:

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Or on our newspaper’s website:

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The Sun’s take on the story was written by one of our business/gaming journalists, Amanda Finnegan, and was much more about the business of building something like this and how something so expensive is cost-justified in these times of constant focus on ROI.

Online, Amanda’s story included lots of links to photos of the rooms referenced in the story, as well as a huge (and very fun) gallery shot by staff photographer Leila Navidi, with an assist to staff photographer Steve Marcus.

This week’s issue of Las Vegas Weekly also came out today. Here is the cover:

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And on Page 51 was Deanna’s story on the five coolest club bathrooms in Las Vegas. It looked like this:

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On the homepage of lasvegasweekly.com, the story was played like this (with a totally great/appropriate headline for that site):

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The lasvegasweekly.com package also had Leila’s great photos, including a few images that were a little too racy for the Sun’s site.

Both sites also ran this cool and informative video package from Greenspun videographer Trent Ogle on the bathroom at the Vanity nightclub, which is probably the king (queen?) of the overkill Vegas crappers.

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

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The other publications produced out of the Greenspun Newsroom — Vegas magazine and Las Vegas Magazine — also are planning to run at least some of the photos from this package in upcoming issues.

What’s even goofier about this story/package (can you believe that it actually can get goofier?) is that our company’s marketing/PR division got involved with it once it was done and issued a press release about it this morning. As of 5 p.m. today, two television stations had picked it up. The expectation is that more will.

Our readers seemed to enjoy the story, as it didn’t take long for it to break into our Top 10 most-read list today.

Look, I’m not even trying to pretend that this is groundbreaking or a story that matters. It’s not. I know that. And you know that.

But doing something like this on Sin City’s sh*tters was a lot of fun and a great exercise in working together. Finding the different angles that were appropriate for each publication and platform was an interesting exercise for us.

Now, please excuse me, I need to go see what it’s like to “visit the office” with an inspiring panoramic view. 🙂

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Dating back to our online team’s time in Lawrence, I’ve always had a nice friendship with John Temple. And shortly after our decision was made to come to Las Vegas to work with the Greenspun family of publications, John gave me lots of advice.

His advice that keeps proving to be correct time after time is that we should track and benchmark everything. About 15 or 16 months ago, I blogged about how we used that advice to keep tweaking our content strategy. By watching what our readers really do on our site — as opposed to what they might say in some formal reader survey — we continue to refine it nearly every day.

But we use benchmarking for more than just content decisions.

By my math — which, admittedly, completely sucks — the Sun’s homepage design/strategy has gone through roughly four fairly significant changes in the last couple of years.

When lasvegassun.com formally relaunched just over two years ago (under the direction and inspired leadership of Josh Williams, Doug Twyman and Dave Toplikar, along with lots of design love from Bill Gaspard and Tyson Evans), the site’s content closely mirrored the print edition of the Sun. I often describe that version of lasvegassun.com as similar to a very well done, regional version of Slate … not so much the news of the day, but more of what the news of the day meant, along with lots of interesting commentary and tidbits not typically found in a local newspaper.

Because that meant lasvegassun.com had a fairly low daily story count (think around 10 stories or so a day), the main content area of the homepage was essentially designed every day.

And it was a thing of beauty:

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Here’s how that main content area would change from day-to-day:

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After watching the traffic trends for a few months — including the realization that lasvegassun.com’s traffic numbers were actually going down a little after the removal of some national wire feeds that were being read by a small, but passionate national audience — it was decided the content from the Sun’s print edition was great on the web, but couldn’t be the only thing on the Sun’s website.

Seems kind of obvious now, huh?

At that point, local breaking news and other content created specifically for the web became a key part of lasvegassun.com’s strategy. With that additional content, the site’s traffic numbers began growing very quickly.

The problem was the site’s homepage and CMS templates weren’t really designed for that mission. To accommodate this, the site’s homepage design was essentially hacked. That meant the site had its great-looking print content (which was still being custom designed each day) on the homepage with breaking news headlines just stacked on top.

It looked like poop. It looked like this:

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Around this same time (September of 2008), I was asked to speak at an SND conference. I explained this dilemma to the audience and that it looked like we were getting ready to benchmark whether “pretty or ugly” was more practical on the web.

I remember thinking at the time that “ugly” was going to win out because of the amazing traffic that some of the ugliest sites on the web got at that time — think DrudgeReport and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

So our senior online news designer at the time, Tyson Evans, (who also had a very big hand in the design of the site the first time around) began building a tweaked homepage that would hold all of our breaking news.

It looked basically like this:

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So, what was the effect on our traffic?

The numbers just kept growing. And because our marketing and better promotion within the Sun print edition really were starting to kick in, the numbers actually were growing fairly significantly.

The weird thing was that we all kind of missed how the old lasvegassun.com homepage would actually be redesigned each morning. The problem was that on top of our content from the print edition, we now were publishing somewhere between 20 and 40 locally produced online/breaking stories a day.

Some of those online-only stories had art. Most didn’t. Some stories were important. A lot were just “new” news, but definitely not huge news.

We certainly weren’t going to be able to custom design homepages with all of those variables.

But with the help of some very creative template implementation by our team’s current (and incredibly talented) senior designer Danny DeBelius, the problem not only was solved but also helped our traffic grow one more time.

The cool part about how Danny built our homepage templates is that our homepage design actually changes several times throughout the day, always looking fresh … and not just because of the newer stories.

So, here’s a look at how our homepage looked on a recent day — for a 24-hour period beginning at 2 a.m.:

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2 a.m., Feb. 17.

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8:40 a.m., Feb. 17.

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10 a.m., Feb. 17.

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11:30 a.m., Feb. 17.

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12:45 p.m., Feb. 17.

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1:45 p.m., Feb. 17.

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2:30 p.m., Feb. 17.

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4:05 p.m., Feb. 17.

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6:15 p.m., Feb. 17.

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8:50 p.m., Feb. 17.

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9:05 p.m., Feb. 17.

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9:35 p.m., Feb. 17.

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We also have what we call our “holy sh*t” homepage template, which we’ve used only twice since we began changing the homepage design throughout the day. (We started using the multiple-design version of the homepage on Jan. 20.)

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So, what does this all mean?

Well, we learned that a pretty and practical homepage design combined with the right content mix has led to the most significant online traffic gains of any site our online team has worked at.

We even learned that changing up the design throughout the day doesn’t hurt traffic, despite some traditional online-news design thinking/perception being that you should always leave everything in the exact same place. (Which, BTW, is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I mean, look at how the design of the front page of a newspaper changes everyday, yet everyone seems to pretty much get that concept. Give your readers some credit. Heck, it might even open their eyes to content they wouldn’t normally view.)

We’ve been doing the multiple designs of the Sun’s homepage throughout the day for about six or seven weeks, and our traffic continues to trend upward, with the most obvious lesson being that a breaking-news story with a killer photo gets a whole helluva lot of pageviews, especially when you have a design that blows both out.

More importantly, we can be much more agile with our design based upon our daily content production.

(Though I should note that we’re really only changing up the main content area of the homepage. The navigation and other core elements of the site are always staying in the same places.)

And we know all of these things because we’ve benchmarked nearly everything from Day One.

Thank you, John Temple for the great advice.

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