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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoroughly.

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

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

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

Then layer in Christine Killimayer’s amazing fight video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he doesn’t need to.

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

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

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

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

There isn’t one recipe.

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

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