It was one of the noblest things our team had ever been asked to accomplish.

Our answer to his request debuted a few weeks ago. It’s called 702.tv.

I would love to tell you we planned it on purpose, but it was just a coincidence that 702.tv formally launched on the exact same day that analog TV died in the United States.

702.tv is currently a twice-weekly, 30-minute show on a local television station with repeat runs on the local 24-hour news cable station, along with downloadable versions for HD over IP (think AppleTV), segments on our constantly updated YouTube channel, and clips on all of our Greenspun websites here in Las Vegas.

We also are close — knock on wood — to finalizing some other interesting, national distribution deals, as well.

We called this project 702.tv because 702 is the area code for Las Vegas phone numbers. We also wanted the name of the program to be the show’s URL.

Along with its broadcast component, 702.tv also has a very cool website that allows viewers to watch the whole show, parts of it, browse by topic, search, etc.

The 702.tv site was designed by our team’s design genius, Todd Soligo.

Most of the front-end coding and CMS integration was handled by one of our team’s newest members, Elliot Burres — along with some assist from our team’s resident redhead, Levi Chronister, and Greenspun Interactive’s amazing utility infielder, Tim Thiele.

The video player for the new 702.tv site was developed/tweaked by our group’s Flash guru, Tyson Anderson.

And on the programming/back-end development side, all sorts of heavy lifting was done by Kevin Graves, with a lot of nice help from Kit Dallege.

On the QA side, new lasvegassun.com senior designer Danny DeBelius helped us find problems and fix errors.

There are/were more folks than this involved in the launch of 702.tv, including some amazing leadership from former Greenspun Interactive great guy Josh Williams. To see an even more in-depth list of those who helped develop 702.tv, please read this blog entry from project anchor Denise Spidle.

Though many of the elements of 702.tv are similar between the television show and the website, they were designed to be very different experiences that embrace the attributes of each medium.

From Day One, this project has been about building a cool broadband web experience that works the way the Internet really works.

On the television side, 702.tv runs on a station that is partially owned by the Greenspun family. It’s also the perfect TV home for this program.

This is probably stating the obvious, but the audience for this show is *not* journalists or journalism professors or journalism think tanks.

Between 6 and 8 p.m., VegasTV (KTUD, Channel 14) has some of the most-watched television shows in Las Vegas across the exact demographics that Brian Greenspun wanted us to try to inform. With “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy” and “King of the Hill,” VegasTV is at or near the top in the 18-34/18-49/25-49 demographics every night — the exact demographic we are aiming for with 702.tv.

Currently, 702.tv runs at 10:30 p.m. on VegasTV/Channel 14 on Tuesday and Thursday nights. This fall, it will run daily, Monday-Friday. And because of some upcoming changes in programming at VegasTV, our lead-in for the fall will be reruns of “The Office,” which seems about as perfect as it could get.

It is all being marketed as a daily entertainment/lifestyle show/website, and I will try to go into all of our marketing efforts for 702.tv in an upcoming blog post that I hope I can get done in early July. I think the marketing for 702.tv is both aggressive and creative. And probably unlike anything another traditional newspaper company has ever done.

We often describe 702.tv as a bowl full of Skittles — very colorful, sweet, fun to consume, etc. Except that we’re going to sneak some vitamin-filled Skittles into the bowl. Our goal is to make you a little healthier (well, more knowledgeable) while you think you’re watching/eating candy.

The show is reverse-engineered from web videos we produce mostly for our company’s entertainment sites. On the Internet, the segments are longer and edgier. On television, segments typically run about 90 seconds.

The segments are light and featurey: cool people, cool clubs, cool restaurants, cool places to visit, cool houses or suites, cool shows, celebrity sightings/interviews, and a sports segment that doesn’t feel like most local sports segments at all.

Then at about halfway through the 702.tv show we give you four very quick minutes of news. Then, right back to the lighter stuff.

And all of this also includes a local weather forecast that could only be done in Las Vegas. (We knew we could never duplicate the resources that local television stations throw at the weather, so each episode of 702.tv has the weather forecast given by Strip performers. Yes, that includes the topless shows. This is Sin City.)

We sometimes try to be funny or clever with the news segment, but we don’t have Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert on our staff. Nor do we have their shows’ writers. I mention this because, for obvious reasons, we’re not trying to be the local version of “The Daily Show.”

As good friend (and former Lawrence Journal-World colleague) Joel Mathis recently pointed out to me, 702.tv is a lot like an updated version of the old PM Magazine television show. Only for Las Vegas. And for people who grew up watching MTV and South Park.

We wanted 702.tv to look very different than other local television productions.

* The show’s studio was built to look like a high-roller’s suite here in Las Vegas It’s actually a replica — or at least a close cousin — of the Whiskey Suite at the Green Valley Ranch resort, except our “suite” has a pool table in it. (Well, a pool table that we bought for a hundred bucks on Craigslist.)

* The graphics look fantastic — unlike anything you might typically see on local television.

* The segments are shot to look more like HGTV or the Food Network.

* Our anchors are amazingly talented and extremely hard-working young video journalists who shoot most of their own stuff, edit nearly all of their own stuff, write all of their own stuff and appear on camera.

I tell people all of the time that it’s hard for me not to feel a little insecure around the 702.tv folks because they’ve won the genetic lottery.

There are some obvious similarities between 702.tv and our team’s old Studio 55 project from the Naples Daily News: Denise Spidle is our main anchor; Alex Adeyanju is our sports anchor; it’s a show produced by a predominantly newspaper-based media company; it has a number in the name.

But there are more differences than similarities. We all learned so much from the Studio 55 experience, and someday I should probably go into all that we learned.

One of the biggest things we learned was that we needed a real, honest-to-God TV person running this thing. Not a newspaper nerd from Kansas.

That’s where Chris DeFranco fits in.

Chris is one of the most talented and grounded folks I’ve ever met. He is a long-time Las Vegas television producer and the former creative services director at KLAS-TV here in Las Vegas.

He added a level of polish and professionalism that we’ve never really had when it comes to our team’s videos. Plus, as one of my mentors, Ralph Gage, used to say, Chris knows how to “run a railroad” and keep the trains on time.

Another thing that we did earlier this summer/spring was shoot seven weeks of prototype episodes (or I guess in the TV world, they’d be called “pilots” but I’m not even going to pretend to know the right terminology). We then had an amazing group of broadcast professionals, Internet nerds, web journalists, print folks, academic types, and generally just super smart people from across the nation critique each episode.

The feedback we got from that group was invaluable.

So, that’s it. That’s 702.tv.

The idea was simple: Inform people who don’t know they need to be informed. Or something like that.

And do it one way on TV, another way on the Web, another way on VOD, and another way via HD over IP.

Now, the question is, will it work?

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And because of our unique JOA here in Las Vegas, running lots of “house ads” in our print product isn’t the best option for us. (Not that it would be our best option even if we weren’t in a JOA.)

So, as former Greenspun Interactive publisher Chris Jennewein and I were putting together our 2009 budget last year, we worked hard to keep some marketing dollars in there.

About three months ago, the first part of our marketing campaign debuted: Billboards.

I know that doesn’t sound very innovative, but I think we did billboards with a cool twist.

The main goals for our billboard campaign were to inform locals in Las Vegas about lasvegassun.com’s huge commitment to breaking news and to show local advertisers that we aren’t monkeying around and they should be doing business with us.

Yes, we did some “traditional” billboards. We have three billboards around the Las Vegas area that look like this:

But the coolest part of the billboard campaign is having 18 digital billboards across the Las Vegas Valley that we update on the fly with our latest breaking news headlines.

And we don’t just update them on the fly. Our team’s longtime managing editor, Tim Richardson, literally updates these billboards from his desk in the Sun’s newsroom using a Web-based interface. We update them several times a day — and sometimes in the middle of the night.

Let’s look at some of Tim’s handy work:

Here is a look at one of our digital billboards after it was announced that the Las Vegas Sun had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize:

In addition to promoting breaking news, we’ve also used the billboards to highlight our live coverage of big-time events in Las Vegas. Here is a look at one of our digital billboards during the weekend of the Pacquiao-Hatton fight:

All of this was no simple task. Chris Jennewein and our marketing folks had to negotiate with multiple billboard companies, and we even had to sign an indemnification contract to be able to update the billboards ourselves.

The results have easily been worth all of the difficulties.

To be fair, since we’ve launched our billboard campaign, we’ve had some of our biggest web stories ever, so our increase in traffic in that timeframe can’t be solely attributed to the billboards. All that being said, in the last three months, our traffic has increased 32 percent on lasvegassun.com. Potential advertisers have also taken notice.

But more than just helping with marketing, the billboards have served one of our organization’s other missions: To help inform folks who aren’t reading our newspaper. Or any newspaper. Or even turning on the TV for news.

It’s not often that you get to combine content with advertising in a way that also helps to inform the community, and this does that. And more importantly, it’s helping to establish our brand as a media organization that delivers frequent news updates, as opposed to the more analytical stories the community is used to in the Las Vegas Sun print edition.

The billboards put our content and brand in front of lots of new people every day. And they are constantly changing, just like the lasvegassun.com home page.

What’s also really great about the billboards is that the folks on the advertising side of our operation credit them with a lot of our recent success on the revenue side of things.

In a time when we have benchmarked everything, it seems to me that the Sun’s recent digital billboard campaign has helped us move the needle and accomplish some of our goals in the form of increases in traffic, revenue and exposure of lasvegassun.com.

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(I’ve gone into some detail about the uniqueness of the Sun’s print edition in this blog post, if you want more specifics.)

Each morning, typically, an eight-page Las Vegas Sun with no ads lands on driveways throughout this very sparkly part of the Mojave Desert.

Because of that limited amount of space in the print edition, think for a second about what’s not in our newspaper. Let me answer that for you — lots of the things that nearly every other newspaper has. And that means that as we were building lasvegassun.com, we got to ask ourselves “what do we really need?”

That led us to build a local news site based upon things what would grow traffic and serve the community the way the web does, not necessarily how a print edition or a print-based news organization would because of its legacy content.

In print, the Sun doesn’t have a daily calendar. Online, we do.

In print, the Sun doesn’t a have sports section (though, it does have one of my favorite local sports columnists on the planet). Online, we have a *huge* sports section, Las Vegas style: high school, college, boxing, UFC, rodeo, NASCAR and golf. And if you consider poker a sport, and we certainly do, we have a section for the World Series of Poker.

I could go on and on. And usually do. But my brain hurts tonight, so let me get to the main point of this post.

One of the things that is absent in the print edition of the Las Vegas Sun is a metro columnist.

And after about a year on the job, we began to wonder if it was a hole we should try to fill.

One of the things that Brian Greenspun asks us all of the time is to try things like we were starting all over in 2009, not waking up in 1969 and doing what’s always been done. Which is a good thing because I wasn’t even born in 1969.

That meant when we decided that lasvegassun.com needed a metro columnist, we asked ourselves “What if we were to completely dream up this position right now? What would we have this person do?”

Meet John Katsilometes.

Here’s a little history on John. He had worked as a sports writer for 14 years in California and Las Vegas when he was hired at the Sun 11 years ago to be a features writer and editor. In 2005 he became the around-town columnist for two years, then moved to Greenspun Media Group as the company’s writer-at-large, serving the Las Vegas Weekly entertainment magazine and Las Vegas Life magazine and contributing online pieces for GMG’s new interactive operation. He was briefly the editor of Las Vegas Life, a monthly city magazine, then moved to our team early last year.

John’s versatility in a town as diverse at Las Vegas makes him perfectly suited for this gig. He can write a serious story on local politics in the afternoon, then blog live from the Motley Crue concert that evening. And regardless of the topic, it’s obvious this guy knows his stuff.

In many ways, John is our team’s insider. I can’t imagine planning for New Year’s on the Strip, trying to do a profile on Donny and Marie, or making coverage plans for the next big event in Vegas without getting John involved.

John blogs nearly every day on lasvegassun.com. Sometimes twice a day.

He tweets throughout the day. Even when he hasn’t had Mexican food.

He records a weekly interview show that runs on our site and on a local NPR station.

He is a part of many videos for our site and our sister television station. (Here’s one of my faves: Goodman Gets Waxed.)

When our weekly sports show isn’t on hiatus, he does a weekly segment with our newspaper’s sports columnist.

He frequently comments on stories and blogs throughout our site.

And here’s where it gets really good (at least as far as I am concerned) …

Lots of what John writes for the online version of the Sun often gets tweaked/edited/repurposed for our company’s print products.

He has a weekly column or story in the Las Vegas Weekly print edition:

He has a weekly, front-page column that runs in our company’s weekly community newspapers:

When Las Vegas entertainer Danny Gans died earlier this month, the front-page story in the Las Vegas Sun was by Johnny Kats:

And here’s really the best part — Johnny K (as the kids around the office like to call him) is easily one of the most-read writers on lasvegassun.com. We’ve seen the guy be in our site’s Top 10 so often that we just take it as one of life’s few certainties.

I’m not sure if John Katsilometes is the columnist of the future, a workaholic, or the life of the party, but whatever he is, we love it at the Las Vegas Sun and Greenspun Interactive.

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Certainly journalists at the Las Vegas Sun shared those dreams, though they wouldn’t dare whisper it.

Those dreams were realized last week when it was announced that the Sun’s amazing investigative journalism into the construction deaths on the Las Vegas Strip had earned the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

But what made the award even more significant to me was that it was vindication of Sun president and editor Brian Greenspun’s vision for our news organization.

Brian loves what newspapers represent (and I mean that in the most honorable sense), and wants to do everything possible to save them. Even if that means blowing them up to rethink every aspect of them.

I remember him telling me a couple of summers ago that we might be able to figure out a new model for newspapers here in Las Vegas … and that model might be applicable to the rest of the industry.

That might sound like crazy talk, but it’s not. Especially since the Las Vegas Sun doesn’t own a press.

Because of the unique JOA that we’re a part of, the Las Vegas Sun is a daily newspaper with no ads in it — so none of our strategic decisions have to be based upon defending that print revenue. We’re a family owned newspaper. We don’t own a press.

And because the Greenspuns’ initial online strategy had been Vegas.com — a highly successful travel site, and not a newspaper site — we could essentially start with a clean slate on the news side of our company’s Internet strategy.

All of the sudden, the idea of figuring out a possible new model for local news organizations, while working at a newspaper in Las Vegas, didn’t sound so looney.

What if we could start over? What if you could envision what a local news organization might look like if you were going to start it now? And you didn’t own a press.

What if you could rebuild the print edition of the newspaper and focus on people who love to read newspapers?

What if you could build a local news website that used the Internet the way folks really used it? What if you could build a news organization from scratch that would focus on local breaking news, the topics the community was the most passionate about, and then layer on some of the most practical guides any local newspaper had ever tried to develop?

And when it came to video and broadband, what if you were willing to try something that had never been done before, and build it with both your feet firmly planted in the present while your eyes were looking toward the future?

The idea was simple:

* Build a print edition for those who love newspapers, that is loaded with Journalism with Capital J;
* Build a local news website that is really webby, and not just a digital record of what was printed last night;
* And use video like video is really used (on broadcast, cable and on the Internet) — not the way newspapers have traditionally used it.

Then try like crazy to come up with some of the most creative, diverse and effective ways a local news organization has ever gone about trying to get all of this paid for.

The goal was straightforward: Unencumbered by legacy, we would work to create news strategies that serve the community and be self-sustaining through profits. And do it all like you would do it in 2009. Not 1989. Or Even 1999.

And that brings me to a video that I’ve wanted to post for a long time, but never have gotten around to doing it.

It was shot this past fall for the APME conference that was in Las Vegas. At that conference, three newspapers were nominated for the title of most innovative. The Sun didn’t win.
:(

Each newspaper was asked to produce a five-minute video to explain why it was innovative.

What I love about this video is that Brian Greenspun’s vision for what we’re doing here is so evident with every word he says. And it shows why the Las Vegas Sun’s Pulitzer-winning journalism was part of a bigger vision.

Being able to work with Brian Greenspun is just one of the reasons I am so proud to work at this newspaper.

And even though I’ve congratulated them on Facebook (and in person) like crazy, I want to get it out there again: I am so proud to work with the crew at the Sun directly responsible for the courageous journalism that won the Pulitzer.

Alexandra (Ali) Berzon, Mike Kelley, Drex Heikes — as well as so many others who added to the construction-deaths project — are not just some of the best journalists you’ll ever meet, they’re also some of the most grounded.

I can’t even tell you how cool it is to work at the Las Vegas Sun.

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I know I am more than a little biased in regards to this subject, but I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb when I say the Las Vegas Sun is easily one of the most interesting and innovative news operations in the United States. Maybe even the world.

So, how would you like to be a part of it? Even if just for the summer?

Our team at Greenspun Interactive is getting ready to staff up one of our “legendary” intern crews, and we’re hoping to find a few of the right people to come hang out with us in the bright lights of Vegas, baby!

(OK, our offices are really in Henderson.)

So, what are we looking for? Journalists with the right mindset. As I’ve said a gabillion times: Skillset is important. But mindset is most important.

I’ve had a long-held belief that some of the most conservative and traditional journalists in the world (and likely unemployable in this day and age) are recent J-school grads. And a recent trip to a relatively big college of journalism here in the western region of our country has solidified those thoughts for me.

Sorry for that little rant. My point is, we’re looking for folks who are committed to journalism and to informing people, not folks who are committed to a particular medium. There’s a difference between celebrating the past and dying with it.

With that, let me get back to the original intention of this post …

Greenspun Interactive needs interns who want to get real-world, practical experience with coverage of local news and business, entertainment (yes, that means The Strip, the celebrity side of Las Vegas and our city’s crazy club scene), sports and video.

So, what does that really mean? It means we’re looking for at least a couple of people to help us on the news side of lasvegassun.com, a journalist to help us with lasvegasweekly.com, a sports journalist to help us across all of our sites, and a video journalist to help us with our upcoming, new daily television show.

We want solid journalists who can write their backsides off. (Unless you’re applying for the videographer position, and even then you should still be able to write well, as well as be able to shoot and edit your backside off.)

We’re also looking for programmers with an understanding of Django. And if you’re a designer with killer Flash or motion-graphics skills, we want you.

Let me answer a few basic questions about these internships:

* How long do these internships last? A minimum of roughly three months, or the length of your summer vacation, and up to nine months.

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

* Am I going to have to fetch coffee? No.

* Am I going to have to do some data-entry? Yes, just like the full-timers on our staff have to.

* Am I going to work harder than I ever have at any other point in my life? Likely.

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

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

Well, teaching new skills is wonderful and we love to do it, but in 2009, we want students who have learned (and in many cases, taught themselves) at least some skills related to new-media journalism. If all you can do is write — which is a hugely important skill to our team — then you probably aren’t interested enough in the type of journalism that we practice at lasvegassun.com to have learned other things needed to be a part of our news organization.

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

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

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