I only thought to mention this because I’ve never really posted anything about the project — and now is a good time to do so. On Monday, the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors named “Bottoming Out” as the “best multimedia storytelling among newspapers” with circulation between 90,001 and 199,999 in the country in its annual contest.

Earlier this summer, “Bottoming Out” won the EPpy award for Best Web Special Feature - Enterprise. In March, the Sun’s gambling project placed second in the National Headliner Awards in the “Journalistic Innovation” category.

The series began with a pitch from then-Sun video journalist Scott Den Herder, who had found a local man who had been videotaping his life as a problem gambler. From there, we met with the Sun’s print editors and a few writers to go over the how and why of the story.

It ended up being a three-part series dealing with the prevalent, but somewhat hidden, social problems spawned by gambling — the very pillar of Las Vegas’ economy and tourist industry. And multimedia and audience interaction would be integral elements in our storytelling process.

The series revolved around one man’s personal tale of gambling addiction, made all the more interesting and rare in that he gave us access to a video diary of his journey to the depths of financial ruin and back. The series also explained the psychology of addiction and the technology that casinos use, which some say feeds the addiction.

Here were the major components of the project:

MOVING PICTURES

The key Web component for this series was a video diary from Tony McDew, a local gambler who recognized he had a problem and thought he might be able to deal with it and help others by documenting his experiences. More than a year’s worth of struggling ends with Tony “bottoming out.”

It’s very dramatic and powerful to see this actually happen on video.

This video was a huge part of the project because we literally had hours upon hours of this man’s video diaries. Plus, Scott shot new interviews with Tony to help pull it together. But even once it had been edited, an initial cut was more than 30 minutes long. At that point, we had to decide just how long we could let the video go.

Ultimately, we decided the video would run just more than 15 minutes. But it was agonizing to get it that short. Interestingly enough, people watched it.

THAT’S FLASHY, EVEN FOR VEGAS

We wanted to show folks why you are almost always going to lose once you sit down at a slot machine. It’s not about luck. It’s cold, hard math.

Regardless of whether you’ve put money into a Vegas slot machine, the project’s main interactive graphic from Tyson Anderson gave you a chance to see what it’s all about and how the math that powers these machines makes sure you go back to Boise with a lot less in your wallet.

It also became one of the most viewed pieces of Flash content our team has created since the Sun’s site was relaunched back in January 2008.

NEW-MEDIA JOURNALISM IS A DIALOGUE, NOT A MONOLOGUE

Although I loved the storytelling techniques used in this project, this part of “Bottoming Out” was probably my favorite. We asked our readers to submit their own stories and comments about gambling addiction. And they did.

YOU’VE GOT QUESTIONS…

We also hosted a live online chat with Problem Gambling Center Executive Director Krista Creelman, who answered questions about gambling addiction from Las Vegas Sun readers.

GAMBLING ADDICTION RESOURCES

We also provided Gamblers Anonymous contact information, including a Google map of GA meeting spots and a 20-question self-test to decide if you might have a gambling problem.

AND, OF COURSE, THERE WERE STORIES

The Las Vegas Sun’s newsroom wrote three longform stories that showed the dark side of gambling addiction when you live in Sin City and how recovery can occur.

* Part One: The pull of a drug, a push to the brink by J. Patrick Coolican
* Part Two: Illness theory gaining ground for gambling addiction by Liz Benston
* Part Three: Could the game be partly to blame for addiction? also by Liz Benston

The first image I posted on this blog entry was for how the series looked in its Sunday newspaper debut. Here is how it looked in the print edition the other two days:

What was interesting about this project to me was how it resonated with our audience. At one point, all three of the text stories from “Bottoming Out” were in our site’s top-10 most-read list, which was remarkable because they were spread out over a three-day period. As I mentioned above, the Flash slot machine is still one of the most-viewed pieces of Flash-based storytelling elements our team has created while at the Las Vegas Sun.

I’m often asked about what planning and coordination looked like for this project. Planning for “Bottoming Out” probably began three or four months before it was published and we knew after our very first meeting what the core elements would be: text stories, the video diary in some shape or form, a Flash slot machine, specially designed template/page for LasVegasSun.com (beautifully done by Danny DeBelius), and things like the chat, ability for readers to post stories and the Google map of Gamblers Anonymous meetings.

At first we met with nearly the full group: writers, editors (print and digital), photographers, videographers, designers (print and digital), everyone … But as we got further into the project, we met more with smaller groups based upon what we were focused on. I’d say for about a six-week period leading up to the project’s release, we’d meet for about an hour once a week or so.

Despite the large lead-up time, we were working on nearly all of the major elements — stories, the Flash graphic, the video and even the site’s design — right up until a few days before it was going to debut.

It was very coordinated, but still kind of casual. More importantly, it worked. This wasn’t just high-level journalism that other journalists appreciated, it was high-level journalism that our readers appreciated. And interacted with.

It represents exactly the type of enterprise and new-media journalism to which the Las Vegas Sun is committed.

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The list of amazing (and basically “text”) journalists who have not only embraced our newspaper’s mission, but excelled at it, goes on and on. Someday soon, I definitely need to write something about how each of these folks has really made what the Sun does so interesting and special.

But the real reason I wanted to post something today was because there were a couple of really fantastic examples Thursday that show how the Sun’s newsroom works on a couple of very different daily stories.

The first story was one that ran on the front page of our print edition, along with an accompanying online photo gallery and video. It was a cool package about how the Blue Man Group (which has a standing show on the Las Vegas Strip) was holding an open casting call.

With the jobless rate so high in Nevada, this was a story that seemed interesting on several levels.

But from an “inside baseball” journalism perspective, it was interesting, as well. The story was told by Katie Euphrat, who came to our team as an intern just over a year ago. I said “told” because Katie did much more than just “write” the story.

Katie got her degree in print journalism from Northwestern University/Medill, but fell in love with video storytelling when she worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, shooting video to accompany her articles for one of that country’s first multimedia-capable newspaper websites. She went on to a broadcast internship at The Associated Press in Washington, D.C., and moved here to intern with us after graduating in 2009.

After six months as a video intern, she became a full-time video journalist with us, but she’s very eager to keep using her writing degree, too. And she has the chops to do it.

When we hire interns, these are exactly the types of journalists we look for: People who can really write, but have at least one other interesting media skill, like being an avid blogger, or knowing how to shoot and edit video, or having worked at a student radio station, or knowing how to write a little code or even developing a little in Flash.

Anyway, that’s where this Blue Man Group story comes in.

Katie wrote the lead story for the print edition of the Sun (which was edited a little differently for the online version — basically longer):

And she shot and edited the video for the story:

The multimedia storytelling that Katie did for this story was really interesting because she did it while wearing several hats.

Plus, we got an interesting behind-the-scenes photo gallery for the package from Leila Navidi.

Then we got a cool sidebar from Sun newcomer Delen Goldberg, complete with photos from Leila.

But this isn’t the only type of daily, converged journalism that the Sun practiced on Thursday.

An important local story broke …

Former two-term Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn died yesterday after falling from the roof of his home, where he was thought to be cleaning off pine needles.

Shortly after our morning news meeting on Thursday, a rumor began to float through the newsroom that Guinn had died. Several reporters and editors worked the phones for about 10 minutes before we almost simultaneously got two confirmations of his death.

Within those 10 minutes we had prepared a few sentences on the background of the former governor, which was immediately ready to post the second we received confirmation. Several reporters continued to conduct interviews and get reaction while another reporter drove to the hospital for updates from the family.

By early afternoon, about 10 reporters from across our newsroom had contributed with analysis, background and reaction from the top political leaders — past and present — in Nevada.

That was accompanied by a special page of every significant story in our archives about the former governor.

Working closely with all of our newspaper’s editors, online managing editor extraordinaire Tim Richardson skillfully kept all of the updates rolling seamlessly. (I’ve only said this about a million times, but I believe in my heart this guy is the best online ME in the country.)

The feedback we received on this online story was amazing. It started as a breaking online story, then kind of morphed into what would typically be thought of as a fairly in-depth “Day Two” story before it had even gotten dark outside.

And to complement all of that great text, our photo staff put together an amazing gallery of Guinn from our archives.

We also had a recent video of the former governor from a Sun package we had done a few years back when we invited several former governors to our offices to discuss what they would do if they were still in office.

What made all of this so remarkable was this was done before layout had even begun on the next morning’s print edition — which, by the way, had an amazingly well done follow-up story that basically epitomizes how the Las Vegas Sun handles a “daily” story in print.

Interestingly enough, in today’s print edition of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, there was a box that included reader comments from Thursday’s online story:

Also, this morning our newspaper’s senior print editor sent this note out to our newsroom:

Folks,

The Sun’s coverage of the death of Kenny Guinn displayed what we do that nobody else does better: all-hands-on-deck swarming to have the first and most thorough breaking-news coverage online, with second-day coverage in print that stood out from everyone else’s in town for its thoughtfulness and tone.

Add to that our editorial and Ralston’s column, and a marvelous photo gallery (anchored by Sam Morris’ file photo of the Guinns kissing with the McGuire Sisters singing on stage), keen copy-desk editing and great presentation in the paper…

We were one seamless news operation yesterday, and it was thrilling.

Thank you all.

Tom

Yep, yesterday completely illustrated why I love to work at the Las Vegas Sun and am so proud of this newspaper.

Here is a link to the story written about my presentation at the conference.

Before the conference, I was interviewed by Radio Ink magazine as a precede to the conference. It was different because it was an audio interview that was transcribed. I say that it was different because when I’m interviewed now, it seems like it’s usually done via e-mail.

Because of that, as I read my responses, I realized there were some things I wanted to elaborate on or say a little differently. What you see below includes those changes.

Here goes …

>> Why do you think newspapers didn’t take off online as we thought they would?

A very good friend once said to me, “Revolutions are rarely started by the incumbents.” With the Internet and online publishing, the newspaper industry was the incumbent. We had so many opportunities to be the ones who started something like Google or Facebook, and we never got onto that. We were always about our own content and what it meant to our legacy business. In most cases that meant just trying to repurpose print content on a website — content that was never really built with an understanding of how the Internet functioned as an ecosystem.

Some newspapers were way more out front than others. Early in my Internet-newspaper career, I used to adore the website of the Lawrence [Kan.] Journal-World because it had all of this fascinating information. This was probably ‘98 or ‘99. It had really cool and practical things for a college town, like a “Beer-o-meter,” where they would tell you where the drink specials were and other things like what the local bakeries were making that day. Everybody loved it, and I thought, “Man, this is how the Internet should work.”

I was lucky enough to eventually work at that newspaper because I loved the Internet presence so much. But not very many newspapers were thinking along those lines.

>> Can you talk about the reluctance of some CEOs to make a bigger effort on the Internet? They have one foot in each world, and some are afraid to fully commit to either because of the cannibalization of the original product.

It’s not just the cannibalization. Early on, the publisher of a newspaper I loved said, “This is all fine and dandy, but no one has convinced me that this isn’t the second coming of the CB radio.” I remember thinking, “How are we going to overcome something like that?” I’ve met two types of publishers: those who think the most important part of the word “newspaper” is “paper,” and those who think the most important part is “news.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the newspapers that are doing really interesting things online and with new media are family-owned. The Graham family has a controlling interest in The Washington Post, and they’re doing interesting things online. The New York Times, with the Sulzberger family, is doing interesting things online. The Simons family, in Lawrence, Kan., or the Greenspuns here in Las Vegas, are both doing great things with new media.

The publishers of family-owned or family-controlled newspapers are embedded in their communities and they care about them. They think about their businesses in terms of generations, rather than the next quarter. They’re more likely to take the long view and they have the freedom to do so. Yes, they have to operate within economic realities, but it seems to me that they typically try to handle those situations differently than some of their other publishing counterparts.

>> To many radio managers, “convergence” is still about a website and a bunch of banner ads. Do newspapers have the same narrow view?

I’m from a very small town in Kansas — Osage City — small enough that there is no daily newspaper that covers the city. So (recently) when there was a big fire in downtown Osage City, I got all my information from my friends on Facebook. I was in Nevada while this fire was happening and I knew more about it than some of my friends back home. That’s where a lot of this is heading.

How do you integrate social networking and those sorts of things? I think radio stations are poised to do this. Lots of newspapers are all about “community publishing,” where they try to get their readers to submit photos or stories. And that just makes me giggle. I live in Las Vegas now, but even when I lived in Lawrence, how many college students who had an amazing time hanging out with their friends, barbecued, maybe had a few beers, went to a football game, and then said afterward, “You know what, I should upload those photos to the Lawrence Journal-World’s website”?

No one’s ever said that, ever … even for a news organization that is as integrated into its community as the Journal-World is.

But the audience in Lawrence — and every other city in the world — is community publishing. Look at what they’re doing on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and YouTube. All those sites have really amazing APIs [application programming interface] that allow you to pull that content over to your site, if that user has granted permission for that to happen. The Facebook “Like” button is now appearing on newspaper sites across the country, and Facebook has more traffic than Google. I would think a radio station would want to be involved in that. Certainly, newspapers want to.

Or at the very least, our news organization in Las Vegas wants to be a part of that.

The idea is that all of our stories have a “Like” button, and we know your Facebook account so that it can easily put our content on your Facebook page if you want. So when you hit “Like” or “Share” it automatically moves our story over to your profile pages so all the people in your social network see it, along with your “Like.” They click on the story to see what it’s about, and they come back to us.

The problem is that it seems like many people in mainstream media — or at least those in a position of power in those organizations — don’t really understand the rules of the Internet. If you play by the rules of the Internet, you have a much better chance of winning on the web. But so many people say, “We need to do community publishing on our site.” It’s like they haven’t even heard of Flickr, and they don’t realize that the most visited photo site in the world is Facebook. Why would you try to go against that? Why would you not work with them?

Say you’re a rock station in Kansas City. At the Van Halen reunion show at the Sprint Center, there’s going to be hundreds or even thousands of people who take photos on their little camera phones and upload those images to their Facebook pages. Why would you not use that Facebook or Flickr API to pull over all those photos? You can do a great service to your audience because you’re going out and finding the pictures for them, in a fairly automated way.

>> Any Joe in his basement can create a pretty robust news website that competes with a local paper. So why do we need these big media organizations?

We spent a tremendous amount of time building a new local website, which will launch later this summer, based around the idea that where you live is really important. You type in your ZIP code and it gives you all the crime committed in your area, it tells you all the homes that have sold or are for sale or that have been foreclosed upon. It tells you when the high school’s basketball game is. It tells you what news stories have happened in the neighborhood. It tells you if somebody’s got a lost dog. It shows what movies are playing.

But it also ties you to local advertisers who can’t afford to buy a $5,000 full-page ad in the local newspaper. They can’t even afford to buy a big ad on the local newspaper’s website. But targeting the ZIP codes where their service is available, that can be very affordable and effective. And then you tie that into mobile, which we think is really the future.

We talk about people going to websites, but many more people in the United States have a cellphone in their pocket than have a computer at home. Three or four years ago, the idea that you would target your content to cellphones sounded like a joke, and now I’m watching Kansas City Royals highlights on my iPhone.

On my phone, if I could know what deals are happening, or which restaurants are open at this particular moment — this is the sort of data we’ve been collecting at the Las Vegas Sun to build a really, really relevant local website.

>> If you were a radio station today, where would you focus your digital strategy?

Unlike newspapers, which try to be a little bit of everything to everyone, radio stations don’t try to do that. They’re country or jazz or Top 40 or classic rock. If I were a talk radio station that was primarily sports, I would build on that brand and make sure I owned sports in the market. The newspaper websites have been the dominant sports websites in their markets probably since the late ’90s, and then ESPN launches ESPN Chicago and ESPN Dallas. I think the newspaper industry was shocked at how quickly ESPN overtook them.

I would focus on my niche. If I’m all about classic rock, then I’m owning that. If REO Speedwagon is coming to Topeka to do a show, I’m breaking that story. I want to know what my niche is and make sure nobody beats us on that. Because on the Internet, passion is what drives traffic. People go to the Internet for the things they’re the most interested in.

>> For somebody who’s struggling to run a radio station today and fighting the economy, it’s pretty tough to make the commitment to have sufficient staff to do the things you talk about. Is there a way around that commitment?

Let’s say you are the flagship station in your town for the local Division I college team — or let’s go even smaller than that, let’s say you’re in a town that has five high schools and you do a high school game a week. You could partner with your local newspaper so that you both co-own this and can co-sell it. The newspaper is doing part of the heavy lifting, but you are, too. Don’t underestimate the value of your broadcast archives, and the archives of your interviews with the players. You may not have to build completely new content as much as you have to do a great job of repurposing what you’ve already done. When you take what you’ve done and what the newspaper has done and put that together, that seems pretty compelling.

>> What about user-generated content?

We have awesome club photo/party-pic pages on LasVegasWeekly.com, and we have great photos that have come from the actual people partying at those clubs. But our dirty little secret is that we don’t get them from the readers directly; they come from Facebook, Flickr and Picasa. Two years ago, we actually had a snowstorm in Las Vegas. We had tons of photos that we got through the Flickr API.

Don’t feel like you have to invent this technology on your own.

If I were doing video from scratch and couldn’t afford video servers, why would I not just create a channel on YouTube or Vimeo and use the embed function to put that video on my site? That’s the kind of mentality I would be using right now. There are such great tools out there that make this stuff way easier than it was even two or three years ago. I think you can do a lot of this for free. You don’t have to have more people or more resources, you just have to be clever.

>> How do you deal with the privacy and permissions issues?

Well, it’s something you have to pay attention to. With Facebook, the user has to grant you permission to grab the photos, then the site allows you to move them over fairly seamlessly. With Flickr, you have to pay attention to if you are actually permitted to use the images, which we handle in an automated way through the API. If you do have permission, then it’s pretty straight-forward.

We’ve found if the license isn’t granted to let you use the images, you can contact the person who owns or shot the images to ask permission. Sometimes they give you permission and sometimes they just ignore your request. But it doesn’t hurt to ask.

It probably sounds complicated, but it’s really not.

>> A lot of people are saying there’s going to be a resurgence of newspapers, although perhaps not necessarily in print.

I believe in my heart that I’m at a newspaper and a news organization that really could experience this type of resurgence. I don’t think we have it completely figured out, but I think we’re a whole lot closer to right than we are to being wrong.

I spoke at a journalism conference for a bunch of college students, and it was the same day of the big earthquake in Chile. Because of the timing of that earthquake, the newspapers in the United States didn’t have the story in print in that morning’s papers. I told the young journalists in the room, “If you want to know what’s wrong with newspapers, we’ll all get to see it firsthand tomorrow. How many newspaper editors across the country, in their Sunday paper, will act as if you didn’t know about this story until you read it in their newspaper? How many newspapers are going to commit this sin tomorrow?”

And, of course, tons of newspapers across the country committed that very sin in print the next morning. Way too many newspapers are amazingly awesome at pretending you don’t know a story until they run it, and that’s foolish. The Las Vegas Sun takes a much different approach. We don’t focus completely on the who, what, when, where, why and how. If there was a big fire yesterday morning, we assume you already know, and we focus on the how and the why. The editors for our print edition actually realize CNN has been around for 25 years and there is this thing called the Internet.

But online, we do act like the paper of record. If there is smoke on the Las Vegas skyline, within minutes, LasVegasSun.com will tell you where the fire is. It’s a very complementary strategy. You’ve got print explaining why things are happening, and online telling you what just happened. We’re not trying to recreate what each medium does best.

More important is that here at the Las Vegas Sun, we have a publisher who is a realist, who doesn’t say things like, “When this all turns around in two years and our circulation is starting to grow again and our revenues return …”

He talks about five years from now, when our newspaper circulation in Las Vegas has maybe gone from 200,000 to something like 25,000 or 50,000. His view is, instead of working on what that newspaper will look like five years from now, why don’t we just build it now? Why wait?

It’s such an overused quote, but our publisher is basically reiterating Wayne Gretzky’s classic quote that we need to “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

When you look at the Las Vegas Sun’s strategies, they are custom built for each medium. Our strategy in print makes sense in an ever-changing newspaper world. Our strategy online makes sense for a computer that is always connected to the Internet. Our strategy for mobile makes sense for waiting in line at the DMV or trying to figure out where to eat lunch. We didn’t just take our long-form print stories and smash them into our website and call it a day.

And what’s really remarkable is that our readers really understand that. In some ways they may even understand these different strategies better than we do in our own newsroom. To them, the Las Vegas Sun is all of these different things that simply keep them informed throughout the day whether they are at their kitchen table, on their computer or on their phone.

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It’s really nothing more than a video monitor that shows live traffic to LasVegasSun.com. It looks like this:

The system was basically implemented and tweaked by one of our team’s programmers, Tim Thiele.

We have one of these monitors at three different locations in our newsroom.

It basically works like this: A ball falling from the top left to right represents a request to our Python application servers in real time. The bigger the ball is, the longer it took to serve that request. Just by glancing at the monitor we can tell if we’re getting a lot of traffic and if our pages are loading slowly.

But that’s not the main reason we use it. The “wall of balls” is a real-time visualization of what our audience is reading on our site. We can immediately see what the 30 or so most-visited pages are on our site and how many people are looking at each of those pages.

Because LasVegasSun.com’s URLs are built off story headlines, with just a glance we can see what stories people are reading.

We can also quickly see how many people are on our site at that moment, as well as how many are using our mobile site.

It also shows the top ways people are getting to our site at that moment, as well as browser info and ISP info.

Here’s how it looks in video format:

It’s just damn handy. Especially when we’re trying to gauge if we’re playing a story correctly on the home page. It’s always been one of our team’s beliefs that we shouldn’t make it hard for people to get to where they want to go on our site. This helps us achieve that.

Our editors use the “wall of balls” as a tool to determine what stories get the best play on the home page at any given moment. In general, the stories getting the most traffic from visitors via our home page will get the most prominent positions on the page. The “wall of balls” helps us gauge reader interest minute-by-minute.

It doesn’t take long to notice a trend with how our readers react to new stories published to the site. Stories generally get the most traffic in the first hour or so after they’re posted. By the time that traffic begins to die off, we’ve usually got a new story to put in its place in a prominent spot.

Of course, some stories are so big that they require frequent updates throughout the day. Those stories with staying power can maintain a high level of traffic through the next day. While some of these things might seem obvious, the “wall of balls” gives us specific data on every story to help determine how it’s played on our site.

As I said earlier, we get asked about this program all of the time. I probably get a couple of e-mails a month from folks asking about it. Here are the details I typically send in those responses:

Our “wall of balls” is actually an open-source program called glTail.rb.

How we use it is not necessarily how the program works out of the box.

We run our LasVegasSun.com logs to a log server, then we run live filtering on those logs to increase that information’s usefulness to our newsroom, then run glTail on that.

We filter out bots and we filter out requests to our media servers since each page will typically have multiple external assets (images, CSS, Javascript and Flash SWFs). We’re primarily focused on URLs navigated by our audience. The cumulative effect of these filters is that each ball generated at the top left of the display is roughly equivalent to a page view.

To display all of this info, we simply have it all running on a Mac Mini — though you could use just about any computer — then we send the view to big video monitors mounted on the walls of our newsroom.

We love it because it’s functional and cool. More importantly, it helps us better serve our audience.

Here are some links to where you can find more info:

fudgie.org

github.com/Fudge/gltail

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It’s not much different from the other photos from that day, but here’s what the scene looked like at the Apple store at Las Vegas’ Town Square:

(Sidenote in regards to the above picture: I’ve noticed people often are surprised when Las Vegas has something that all other big cities have … like an Apple store. It sometimes feels like they think we only have mega-resorts and slot machines, forgetting that nearly 2 million people live here. That said, of the three Apple stores in Las Vegas, the best one to visit — especially when you need to visit the Genius Bar — is the one in Caesars Palace’s Forum Shops. At least in my experience, it’s typically not nearly as busy as the others.)

Anyway …

Later that weekend, I decided I wanted a different iPad case than the one I originally purchased. This gave me a great excuse to go to another Apple store, this time the one inside Caesars Palace that I mentioned above. More than 24 hours after the initial release of the new device, the place still was hopping:

At the Las Vegas Sun, we wanted to have a presence on the iPad for its launch, but didn’t want to blindly build an app that we couldn’t test.

We also kind of wanted to see what worked well on the device before trying to build something for it. And like many other folks we talked to, we decided that simply porting a publication’s print edition over to something that appears to behave like little more than a crippled, illegitimate cousin of a PDF isn’t really the right strategy. (But God bless all of those who are doing something. There is a special place in heaven for you for not standing still and pretending that 1995 is going to return any day now.)

Anyway, all of this meant that we needed to do something with the Sun’s actual website. Our team already is big-time focused on web standards, so we knew that wasn’t going to be the problem.

The problem was going to be that one of the things the Sun does well and has made a substantial commitment to is multimedia journalism. And like a lot of sites, we deliver lots of those elements via Adobe’s Flash plug-in, which obviously pisses off Steve Jobs.

So, straight to the point, we want to keep serving those elements on the Sun’s site when it is visited by a browser that supports Flash. But we also want them to work on the iPad’s great screen.

So, Greenspun Media Group smartguys Danny Debelius and Elliot Burres monkeyed around with our site’s code and tweaked it so it would know when a reader was visiting lasvegassun.com on an iPad and deliver video and photo galleries that not only work on that sucker, but look fantastic in the process.

We’d actually crossed part of this path before because we had worked to make the Sun’s videos compatible on iPhones almost a year ago.

When something can be done without a Herculean effort, and will help us be where our readers might be, why not do it? Just seems like a no-brainer.

This wasn’t a huge two-week process. It was something that we could do fairly easily without getting our programmers involved, etc…

And it all was done before the iPad was even released.

Here’s what lasvegassun.com looks like on an iPad:

+++++++++

The homepage:

Video player, full screen:

Full-screen photo gallery (with cutline):

Full-screen photo gallery (you touch the screen to make cutline disappear):

+++++++++

So, what do I think about the iPad?

Well, my reaction is similar to what David Pogue wrote in his “two” different reviews. The iPad falls into two categories for me: Rob, the nerd from Kansas who loves gadgets; and Rob, the person at the Las Vegas Sun charged with helping to take our news forward.

On Twitter, I religiously follow several journalism/tech folks who I respect immensely. Each day, I e-mail myself so many of their tweets (or use Instapaper, which is probably my favorite/most-used app right now) so that I can read/visit them later that it might be borderline obsessive-compulsive.

I’m probably going to oversimplify their general thoughts in an almost embarrassing way that’s surely going to get me called out. But it seems to me like some observers (and folks who, as I’ve already said, I really respect) essentially wonder if the iPad, at the very least, is going to be a huge distraction to the many publishers who think it might save our industry. And at most, that it might be something that ties the industry to Apple, which daily slides closer and closer to something that’s more evil than good.

If these are some of the many points/concerns about the iPad from people who care about the future of journalism, I’m right there with them. The iPad isn’t going to magically fix our industry’s woes. Advertising dollars aren’t going to start rolling back in because we can now pay a little more than $200 for an annual iPad subscription to the Wall Street Journal. And, outside of niche publications, it’s hard to make a convincing case for premium-priced digital subscriptions that can replace circulation revenue.

I suspect some publishers are excited about the iPad because they see it as a device that can approximate a print experience in a digital environment.

Those who think like that *are* distracted. And wrong. (Though I guess many of the folks I know in our industry also probably pray that the revenue-returning hope from iPad will turn out to be true. Of course many of the folks I know back in Kansas hoped Bill Self could win another national championship for the Jayhawks this year, as well.)

So, what does the geek in me think?

I’m definitely not an elitist when it comes to technology, although I personally own enough computers, cell phones, gadgets, etc., that it pretty much looks like an Apple store or a Best Buy vomited in our living room at home.

I own a Mac Powerbook, but the computer I use the most is my MacBook Air — which doesn’t have tons of power or a gazillion ports to plug crap in to. Heck, the “computer” I probably use the most is my iPhone. I’d guess that somewhere close to 85-90 percent of the e-mails I write are done so on my iPhone.

When I got my iPad, I never envisioned it as a replacement for my laptop.

Good thing, because it’s definitely not a laptop. If you need or want a laptop, I think there are some good little machines out there right now at pretty decent prices. Just don’t get the iPad.

The iPad isn’t really a glorified iPod Touch either. It’s more of a cool way to surf the web, watch movies/video, read books and magazines, etc.

After having the iPad now for a little more than two weeks, here’s what I use it for:

• I’m on the web with it a lot. As stupid as this is going to sound, it’s just fun to visit sites with this thing and it is quickly becoming my preferred way of surfing the web when I’m at home.

• The MLB “At Bat 2010″ app is amazing. I use it all of the time to follow the Kansas City Royals, who appear to suck again this year. Watching game highlights on the iPad via this app is great, and MLB does a great job keeping info/video/stories flowing in a very timely manner.

• I have recently started using the “Things” app across my desktop computer, iPad and iPhone in an effort to try like crazy to keep myself on task. Early results are that it seems to be helping, and I use it a lot.

• Like a lot of people I know, I prefer the Amazon Kindle app to the Apple iBooks app. The iBook app is slicker, no doubt. But the Kindle app works better for me across different platforms, and when I’m looking for a book, Amazon has it and Apple usually doesn’t. I understand that many of these things could change, but as of April 21, I use the Kindle app way more often than I do the iBooks app.

• Instapaper. Probably my most-used app. I have it tied to all of my browsers on all of my machines, as well as tied to my Twitter apps. Indispensable.

• Netflix. I know I’m a dork because our family never had a Netflix account until we got an iPad. Now, we have a Netflix account via the iPad app and we still don’t have a single movie in our delivery queue, yet it is probably the app used the most by our family. Our sons have watched 10 streaming movies and many of those movies more than once. The movies look surprisingly great on the iPad, despite being streamed.

• We have tons of “traditional” media/news apps on our iPad — Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Time, GQ, Guardian Eyewitness, NY Times Editors’ Choice, NPR, Popular Science, AP News, Maxim, Thomson Reuters News Pro, etc. Just like on my iPhone, the news app I go to the most on the iPad is the USA Today app. I like many aspects about the others, but not enough to use them much. To me, at first blush, the most interesting magazine implementations at the moment are from Popular Science and Maxim. But at least for right now, when I want news, I still go to the web for it. Unless it’s baseball news. Then I go to the MLB app.

• We have several movies loaded onto our iPad via iTunes and they look and sound fantastic. This week, I had my first major travel/flights since I got the iPad and it was a fantastic experience in just about every way.

• We have two younger sons (8 and 3) and they use our iPad a lot. We have numerous drawing and coloring apps (Chalk, Draw, ArtStudio, Color&Draw, etc…), which are all a big hit with them. We also have the free Toy Story eBook, which also has some games and coloring activities inside of it, which they love.

• I also have found that when I am at home, I am more likely to check my e-mail on my iPad than on a computer.

You can write on it (answer short e-mails) but you’re not going to want to do much of that. I tried to write some contest entries on it last week and quickly gave up. And as cool as the “Pages” word-processing app is, it still seems like a total pain to get content in and out of it. My conclusion is I’m definitely not going to want to write anything long on this baby.

The iPad definitely feels like something new to me. Like many folks already have said, it is primarily a media-consumption device. And that ticks some people off. Not me. My expectations were pretty managed.

As my friend and mentor Bob Cauthorn says, it’s an “information appliance.” It does certain things well. But not everything. You don’t get pissed when your toaster can’t bake a turkey, yet it seems like some people can’t get over what an iPad can’t do.

I’m not one of those people.

I’d say the iPad is more like something you relax with in a comfy chair, not sit at a desk or a table with. My initial thoughts are that I really like it. The things that it does, it does really well. And it’s just fun to use — that’s an intangible that goes beyond its power and ports.

But it’s definitely not a laptop or even a netbook. And, outside the obvious of not being able to make phone calls (which I can just barely do on my iPhone, anyway), I’m noticing that I use the iPad much differently than I do the iPhone.

When I use my iPhone, I tend to use apps. In most circumstances, apps seem more practical (and quicker) for me to use than going to the Safari browser on the iPhone. But I’m noticing that on the iPad, I’m much more likely to just use the web.

I have the New York Times iPad app, but unless I’m on an airplane without an internet connection, I’m much more likely to visit the Times’ website.

However, just because that’s how I use it, doesn’t mean that is how everyone will use it. An interesting point from one analyst was that the “power of the iPad is it is multiple things to different people. If you ask five people, you get five answers.”

And I’m fairly certain it’s not the savior for newspapers or magazines. (Though I do think some magazines ultimately will look badass on this baby.)

For newspapers to get it right, especially if they’re going to go the route of an iPad app, I suspect they need to think more like how ESPN appears to think when it moves to a different platform.

Look at how great ESPN is as they design different experiences across so many different media:

• On TV, ESPN means game coverage via traditional live broadcast capabilities and great post-game coverage via “SportsCenter” and “Baseball Tonight.”

• In print, ESPN magazine means great photos, longer features and analysis pieces.

• On radio, lots of talk shows, interviews, punditry and — of course — live game broadcasts.

• Online, ESPN.com pulls together all of these appropriate elements but does it in a way that typically feels pretty webby to me. It does a fantastic job with breaking news on the big, national stories. And though I can’t pass judgment on its local sites because I’m not really a fan of the teams where it has local sites, its numbers are impressive in those markets.

• ESPN on the iPad also feels like their brand customized one more time for a different medium/platform. I have the ESPN iPad customized for the Royals, Jayhawks and UNLV Rebels. And although I don’t go to it daily, I do use it at least a couple of times a week.

I think in a lot of ways, ESPN really “gets it.” It’s an organization that understands that its brand — though always clearly about sports — is defined differently in different platforms/media.

I don’t feel like very many newspapers understand this. Just because you do one thing in print doesn’t mean you do the exact same thing on the web or on mobile devices. Or now on an iPad. (Please don’t read into this that I feel like newspapers should build iPad apps solely around personal customization, like ESPN did with its app. However, I do think newspapers shouldn’t blindly just do the exact same things across all platforms and call it good.)

There is a difference between re-purposing your content and re-imagining your content. Smart newspapers will re-imagine their content to exploit different platforms rather than simply re-purposing.

As I mentioned earlier, the iPad feels like a media-consumption device. And at a minimum, I feel it’s a little irresponsible not to make sure that your news organization’s web content works correctly on it. You don’t have to build a dedicated app if you lack the resources, but at least get your website working well.

In this day and age, our goal at the Sun is to reach our audience wherever it might be. And we’re certain that some of our audience will be on an iPad. Analyst estimates on iPad sales vary, but many fall in the 3 million to 7 million range for the first year and expand to as many as 20 million new sales in 2011. And that’s just the iPad, not the whole universe of tablets that are in the pipeline.

Getting involved early is smart. In 1995, the world’s Internet population was 16 million (that’s less than the number of iPads some are predicting to be sold in 2011 …). In just four years global internet users had grown from 16 million to 248 million.

That’s a lot of change … and you can either participate in it or watch it from the sidelines.

Internet-connected mobile use is hugely important for our industry and it’s a mistake not to be active in this space. In three years, the iPhone and iPod Touch went from zero to 75 million users. In just a few years, the Apple app universe went from zero downloads to 3 billion downloads. When an attractive new platform arrives, people adopt it quickly.

So it’s really not that complicated: If this is where our readers are going to be, we should be there, too.

And the Las Vegas Sun is. We’re just not tying huge revenue expectations to it.

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