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:

Or on our newspaper’s website:

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:

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

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

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.

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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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:

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

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:

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:

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.:

2 a.m., Feb. 17.

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

10 a.m., Feb. 17.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

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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Convergence wasn’t a buzzword this past weekend — it was the type of journalism the Sun was actually committing.

Even though this blog post is mostly about our weekend coverage, for us this story actually began Thursday as folks waited for tickets to see President Obama speak at a local high school. We quickly posted a story and photo gallery of the spectacle, with hundreds waiting in line for tickets to the presidential forum.

(This was all published online as a constantly developing story that was updated throughout the day. That’s a fancy way of saying we kept updating the same story page instead of having several different stories on our site, this way readers could keep visiting the same story page for the latest news.)

A few hours later we had live updates on slight delays for Air Force One, as two of our local/breaking news reporters (Kyle Hansen and Tiffany Gibson) tag-teamed the day’s text coverage. Photos by Greenspun newsroom photographer Leila Navidi were posted within minutes of his arrival, as our photographers post their shots directly into our online content-management system.

Our homepage was designed to give it all really nice play.

Then in Friday’s newspaper, we had the story from the Sun’s Washington correspondent Lisa Mascaro about what the president’s visit to Las Vegas was primarily about — a foreclosure program that would pump money into areas like Nevada that were hit hard in the housing crisis. Of course, the newspaper also had a teaser to direct readers to lasvegassun.com for updated coverage of Obama’s visit throughout the day.

Here’s what the front page of the print edition looked like that morning:

We had a reporter and a photographer at both locations where the president was speaking — as two of our news operation’s main political reporters (J. Patrick Coolican and Michael Mishak) both fed the Sun’s website with frequent updates of the speech. We also had reaction from D.C. from Mascaro.

That left us with a full story of the visit, five photo galleries (Obama’s town hall forum, his meeting with business leaders, his arrival, his departure and protesters) and embedded YouTube video of his entire speech.

Of course, all of that online coverage then was followed with the Sun print edition’s analytical coverage by Coolican and Mishak in the next morning’s newspaper.

At the last newspaper many members of our online team worked at, a presidential visit wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary. But 2,500 miles from D.C., we pulled out all the stops for Obama’s second visit to Las Vegas while in office.

But just because the Sun had wrapped up its coverage of Obama didn’t mean we were done on that Friday night … well, it was more like early Saturday morning.

The new Cirque du Soleil show — Viva Elvis — had its world-premiere Friday. Our news operation is blessed to have a truly amazing arts reviewer, Joe Brown.

The front page of the next morning’s newspaper told our readers they could visit our site to see his first-look review of the show. (The Elvis photo illustration on the front of the Sun print edition was put together by our online senior designer, Danny Debelius.)

Just check out the prominence of this online refer in the print edition:

And it was worth it because the first Las Vegas publications to have a review of the show were the Sun and Las Vegas Weekly, via lasvegassun.com and lasvegasweekly.com. But this was about much more than just having it first. I know I’m about as biased as they come when it comes to things like this, but Joe’s review was easily the best of the bunch.

But all of this fiber-cyber synergy was nothing compared to the online refer that ran on the backpage of our print edition for our new Elvis section on lasvegassun.com. It basically was a user’s guide to the Sun’s huge site dedicated to the “King of Rock and Roll,” designed (and even written) by our newspaper’s lead print designer, Rachel Perkins.

Building a massive Elvis section on our newspaper’s website was an obvious thing to do; we just needed a good excuse to do it. The new Cirque show gave us the reason and a real deadline to get it launched.

Yes, we have all sorts of stuff in the section about the “Viva Elvis” show — including a great Flash timeline of how the Cirque empire came to be — built by Tyson Anderson and compiled by Melissa Arseniuk.

But just like with the new Cirque show, French-Canadian acrobats aren’t the star of the Sun’s Elvis site. It was built to try to explain Elvis’ unique — and seemingly inseparable ties — with Las Vegas.

The site opens with two incredibly informative and well-done stories by Sun veterans Steve Kanigher and John Katsilometes that explain the bond and history between Elvis Presley and Las Vegas, as well as why the connection continues.

My favorite parts of the site are:

* Memories of Elvis from our readers.

* Elvis photos from the public via Flickr.

* The most kick-ass downloadable Elvis wallpapers you’ve ever seen.

* Tons and tons of Elvis and Elvis-related photo galleries from our archives.

* Video overkill, including a great clip of what Elvis tribute artists think of the song Viva Las Vegas being used in Viagra commercials, as well as what the “blue carpet” looked like for the opening of the Cirque show. (Because of “Blue Suede Shoes,” there was a blue carpet instead of a red carpet.)

* And my absolute favorite part of the site: really fascinating-to-read stories from the Sun’s archives, like the Las Vegas wedding of Elvis and Priscilla. And Vegas’ reaction to Elvis’ death from the summer of 1977.

And then came Saturday … gameday at the Thomas & Mack Center.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I am going to try to post an overview of our UNLV Runnin’ Rebels site and explain all of the strategies we’re trying to accomplish with it, but for the purposes of talking about a weekend full of cross-platform/multimedia journalism, I really can’t ignore our college hoops coverage.

On game day, it starts with Ryan Greene’s live game blog.

I’ve read lots of live coverage of sporting events, but I believe in my heart that Ryan is one of the best live-game bloggers I’ve ever seen. His posts are really insightful, very informative and have a ton of voice. And he’s typically right in the middle of the reader comments on the blog, answering questions and filling in details for our readers right there from press row.

But that’s not all he does during the game.

He’s also updating the Sun’s live Twitter feed.

And writing and publishing our live mobile-phone text-messaging updates of the game.

As soon as the game is over, our team’s sports editor Ray Brewer quickly posts something we call “Instant Analysis” — which gives our readers an almost immediate column about the game. It’s amazing how quickly it gets posted.

There are all sorts of postgame stories and notes packages written by Greene and other members of our sports staff, including Case Keefer, as well as a database-driven box score.

You’ll also notice that all of the players’ names in the stories click-through to their constantly updated bio and stat pages thanks to our evening online editor John Fritz.

Then there’s Christine Killimayer’s killer highlights and interview video package. Christine shoots the video, does the interviews, writes the script, does the opening stand-up and edits the whole package. It is 100 percent and all done on a same-day deadline.

From a photo standpoint, you get images published during the actual game from Justin Bowen, then a large postgame gallery that can be viewed full-screen.

And it’s all wrapped up with a postgame podcast that is produced by our editorial team in the arena.

What I love about all of this is how not only is it all tied together seamlessly (you can find everything I just outlined linked in each of that game’s stories), but also that it’s all produced on “Internet time.” These stories and packages weren’t posted on a print deadline because the print edition of the Sun doesn’t even have a sports section.

This was all content built specifically for the web.

And in the Sunday morning print edition of the Las Vegas Sun, there was a feature we call “Sunday Conversation,” which is about as converged of an effort as anything our team has ever worked on.

It started with Sun political editor Michael Squires working with Sun political writer David McGrath Schwartz to pull together a roundtable interview of several leading political and business organizations to have a very frank conversation that gets to the real guts about what’s going on with the state budget, as well as the future of Nevada.

Once they were assembled in the Sun’s newsroom, Schwartz moderated the conversation while it was videotaped for both our website and to run in parts during our broadcast convergence partner’s newscasts — KVBC/NBC Channel 3.

What’s really cool is that Squires — the print editor — went through the complete transcript of the nearly 70-minute interview to select the five segments that would run statewide on television via KVBC and its sister stations throughout Nevada. The guy even wrote the intros to the clips.

The new Greenspun newsroom has a high-def studio and control room in it. Here are behind-the-scenes photos of us shooting this package, if you’re interested.

Here is how the video appeared on lasvegassun.com:

And here is how the project looked in print:

So, that’s what the Las Vegas Sun did last weekend. We don’t know if it’s the right or wrong way to approach things, but it sure feels a lot closer to right than it does to wrong.

And you know what’s really cool? We have almost equally crazy-huge plans for a bunch of events and stories this coming weekend.

NASCAR is town for a big race.

The Rebels are on the road in a must-win game.

And the Nevada Legislature is still meeting in special session.

This really is a great place to be practicing this type of journalism.

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Other than Brewer, what also makes the Sun’s high-school sports coverage so unique is that it is online-only. As I’ve written numerous times before, because of the JOA in Las Vegas, our print edition only has eight pages each day — with no daily sports or entertainment content, except on rare occasions.

Before the fall sports season began, I posted a blog about our company’s high school sports strategy and how great Brewer is.

But if you want to see just how cool Brewer is, check out this video, or look at our overkill coverage of the state championship game that included: a huge preview section, a pre-game audio podcast with former Sun sports writer Steve Silver, an amazing game highlights video by Christine Killimayer, a great photo gallery from Justin Bowen and a game story that not only integrates all of these different types of content, but also seamlessly integrates lasvegassun.com’s amazing database content for both teams and every player on each team.

The point of all of this is that Brewer helps epitomize one of our news organization’s stated goals, which is not to just publish on the web, but to be *of* the web. From the very top of our organization, new-media publishing is anything but an afterthought.

And Brewer helped reiterate all of this today … as well as showed again just how frickin’ webby he is.

All weekend, Ray has been all over the local recruiting scene and breaking stories left and right. And when I say Brewer has been breaking these stories, I don’t mean that he’s been beating our other local media competitors.

Ray understands that in the world of recruiting news, the other local newspaper and television stations in Las Vegas aren’t our competition. The competition are the other sites dedicated specifically to this type of information — like Rivals, Scout, etc…

Look at the story Ray broke today. What makes it so dang interesting to me from a new-media journalism perspective isn’t just that he had the story first (which he did), but how he integrated so many other online storytelling elements.

There are video clips. There are links to the players’ profile/stats pages. There are links to other relevant stories (picked by an actual journalist, not some haphazard automated process). And then you have Brewer right in the middle of the story’s reader comments becoming a part of the community dialogue.

This is how you pull together live/daily content with smart implementation of evergreen databases and practical use of other related content from your news organization’s archives.

And you don’t just do this for the big stories. You do it for every daily story where it can be accomplished.

He first published a version of this recruiting story at about 11:45 Sunday morning and continued chasing parts of it and updating it throughout the rest of the day, including a major update to the story by about 8:45 in the evening. By that time, the story had been elevated to the centerpiece on our homepage.

The ink was never dry.

What’s really cool is that this is just how Ray Brewer thinks. He did almost the exact same thing with another recruiting story yesterday — and that one had pretty big national interest.

My favorite part is that Ray did all of this on “internet time,” not on “what-is-my-deadline-to-get-this-in-tomorrow’s-newspaper?” time.

At the Sun, we know Ray is going to get beat on a story from time-to-time, but we also really like knowing he’s *our* high-school sports reporter.

And today sure felt like a text-book example of how to cover high-school recruiting in 2010 if you’re a local news organization that — as our publisher at the Lawrence Journal-World used to say — is driving with your brights on.

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Any way you slice it, there have been lots of things going on … with our company, with the holidays, and lots of huge events and big breaking news here in Las Vegas. I’m eventually going to try to write about all of those things.

But for today, I want to quickly focus on how our week began at the Las Vegas Sun.

On Monday morning, a gunman opened fire at the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse. I found out about this story as I was getting ready to head in to work. An alert came across my iPhone via the CNN app.

My first response was something like, “holy crap, I hope we know about this.” But the reality — at least from an online news editor’s perspective — was even better than that: Not only did we know about it, but we had already posted a story about it.

Sometime throughout all of this, I posted a link to our coverage about the shooting on my Facebook and Twitter pages.

Our coverage was not only very thorough, but very multimedia-based. Later that day, I got a question via Facebook about how we went about covering this event and how big our online staff is. My response to that question is essentially below:

Technically, all of our company’s publications — print and online — share one newsroom. But for the most part, folks are primarily assigned to one publication/topic, with lots of overlap.

Our converged newsroom does the content for the print and online versions of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper and the Las Vegas Weekly entertainment magazine, as well Vegas magazine (high-end luxury) and Las Vegas Magazine (which is the tourist magazine found in basically every hotel room in Vegas). In Business, which is a weekly business newspaper, also is produced by the Greenspun Newsroom.

Because of the unique JOA in Las Vegas, the print edition of our newspaper does more news-magazine-type journalism. It rarely does “daily” stories. That means breaking news on our newspaper’s website comes from basically a different group of journalists who focus on daily/breaking news.

But — as I mentioned earlier — there is a ton of overlap on a daily basis.

Our news operation has 12 writers dedicated primarily to the print mission of the Las Vegas Sun. Our online news operation has three full-time reporters, as well as two interns who essentially operate as full-time reporters. We have three online editors — two dayside, one nightside. One designer. One Flash developer. And two dedicated news videographers.

We average almost 30 locally originated “breaking news” stories each day on the lasvegassun.com website and that doesn’t happen without significant help from the writers who also write primarily for the Sun’s print mission. The other side of that is that different versions of stories originally written for our website’s daily news strategies sometimes not only end up in the print edition of the Sun, but sometimes even lead it.

We also have a new-media special projects editor who helps us put together a pay Nevada politics newsletter, writes lots of stories and fills in as our online editor whenever needed.

We have three full-time, new-media sports reporters, along with two full-time sports interns. We also have one full-time sports videographer.

Our converged newsroom has five photographers who shoot for basically every print and online publication our company owns.

So, back to the question …

The news side of lasvegassun.com is basically three full-time reporters, three editors, two videographers and a few interns.

The coverage of the courthouse shooting was handled by our online managing editor, Tim Richardson.

Tim first posted the story about the shooting at 8:43 in the morning after hearing from a reporter primarily dedicated to the print mission of the Sun that something big was apparently happening downtown. Tim called the cops to find out what was going on and then posted four paragraphs.

From that point, we got our online courts reporter involved and sent two of our online interns to the scene.

A photographer and videographer were sent to the scene, as well.

A “print” reporter (and I’ve got to be careful using that term because it will likely get me in trouble with our operation’s leadership) also helped fill in some of the details, as did the editor of our weekly business paper … who also is probably one of the most online proficient “traditional” newspaper people I’ve ever met in my life. He just “gets” the internet, and uses it not only as a powerful and immediate publishing tool, but also in his research and reporting.

(Look, I know it seems a little dated to use a term like “gets the internet” when describing a journalist in a 2010 mainstream-media newsroom, but it still seems appropriate and accurate in this instance.)

The text, photos and videos for the story were updated throughout the day on our site. The updates were constant. As were the comments to the story.

Sometimes updates came via phone calls and text messages from our journalists, and sometimes via e-mail.

As soon as cell phone video of the shooting hit YouTube, we embedded the video into our story.

So, what we got was coverage produced 100 percent for lasvegassun.com. None of the content that you see in the links above appeared in the print edition of the Las Vegas Sun.

The print edition of the Sun had a “second-day” story about how the George Federal Building in downtown Las Vegas was the first such facility in the nation to be designed to standards to withstand the kind of lethal blast that buckled the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

The front page of the Sun looked like this the following morning. Because our print edition doesn’t behave like a paper of record, you’ll notice that our story about the shooting is on the bottom of the front page.

For stories like this, it’s always interesting to be in our combined news meetings each morning. If there is a story that we feel needs to be in our print edition, but we’re certain that our competitor will have something on the same subject, then our thought processes turn to what will be an angle that the other newspaper in town likely won’t have.

That’s why our print story is played the way it is played on the front page and why it isn’t a story about the details of the shooting, but instead about the security at the courthouse.

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