Month: August 2009

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for high school football.

Back in Kansas, I covered the Osage City Indians for my high school newspaper, The Pow Wow. Yes, it’s still called that, and no, it doesn’t have a proper Web site. 😦

I helped put myself through college at Emporia State University while writing football gamers for the newspaper I had wanted to work at since I was in the third grade — The Topeka Capital-Journal.

And once I got into “new media,” that love of high school sports continued. Sometimes the high school sports coverage we produced found an audience. And sometimes it didn’t.

In our team’s first full year at the Las Vegas Sun, we probably went just about as all-out as you could possibly go in our coverage of Las Vegas-area high schools — live scoreboards available on the web and via text-messaging, gamers for nearly every local high school, big/cool photo galleries, a stats page updated weekly for nearly every varsity player and team in the area, and probably some of the slickest game-highlight videos produced on deadline by a local news organization.

When the season was over, as proud as we were of our efforts, we knew we had to do things differently in 2009 — our overkill high school coverage didn’t get nearly the traffic or the advertiser attention we had hoped it would.

We also knew that we hadn’t marketed it very well, as our newspaper’s president and editor Brian Greenspun has pointed out to us numerous times. (I also should note that because of our unique JOA here in Las Vegas, running lots of “house ads” in our newspaper isn’t an option, so marketing is a challenge for nearly everything we do.)

This summer, we continually talked about how we could/should do really spectacular coverage of the local high schools, but do it much more efficiently, with a bigger bang for our buck and in a way that people would notice.

We also knew we had a secret weapon: Ray Brewer. (BTW — check out this sweet caricature of Ray from Sun illustration god Chris Morris.)

Ray is a true Las Vegas local. He was born and raised in Las Vegas. He even graduated from UNLV.

Ray has been covering high school sports in Las Vegas since 1996.

When the editorial staffs for the Henderson Home News (a weekly newspaper owned by the Greenspun family) and Greenspun Interactive were merged earlier this year, Ray essentially became our team’s sports editor, and it was one of those moves that immediately made us better.

This guy has a true passion for high school sports. If you don’t believe me, just watch this video from Thursday night’s episode of 702.tv:

http://media.lasvegassun.com/media/assets/swf/mvc_video_1.8.swf

This finally gets me to the point of this post: The Las Vegas Sun released its 2009 high school football previews earlier this week, and I couldn’t have been more excited or proud for all of the great work done by our new-media, video and “traditional” newspaper staffs!

We posted nearly 40 preview stories — with Ray writing 12 of them — highlighted by the Sun’s 2009 preseason all-area team. We gave this content great play on our site, including a nice ride on our homepage.

And something is already different from last year — the content actually got some decent traffic. I’m not sure if it was because the content was played really well in the print edition of the Sun or because people now realize how committed we are to high school coverage. We did no outside marketing of the coverage, so I really don’t know why it got solid page-view numbers.

Our main high school football preseason story included a video package/interview with some of the area’s top players produced by Christine Killimayer, a gorgeous photo gallery shot specifically for the package by Sun staff photographer Sam Morris and profiles of each player on our preseason team that included video interviews produced by Katie Euphrat.

Our coverage also included:

* A cool look at local powerhouse Bishop Gorman, that included a great video on the team’s new coach from Alex Adeyanju and a great photo gallery of the coach from Greenspun Interactive photographer Justin Bowen.

* An audio podcast about the upcoming season from Ray and Greenspun Interactive sports journalist Steve Silver.

* Tons of text stories from Steve Silver, Case Keefer and, of course, Ray Brewer.

Packaging all of this goodness together was our team’s amazing utility infielder, Billy Steffens.

And once the season starts, things are really going to get good. I have always — and I mean *always* — hated the term “more with less,” but that’s exactly what we’re going to try to accomplish this fall. Well … kind of.

It won’t necessarily be more content than we produced last year, but I would totally be willing to bet that we generate substantially more web traffic on our high school content with substantially fewer resources than we used last year. We have torn through the traffic log files and have really focused in on what we feel will connect with our audience.

The only problem I see with content like this is that I always wish newspaper content could have been like this back when I was in high school. 😉

This is basically a re-post of a blog that I wrote last Spring, and the reason for the re-post is simple: We’re looking for a few talented interns to join our team for the Fall and through the Winter.

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

What does that really mean? It means we’re looking for at least a couple of people to help us on the news side of lasvegassun.com, as well as a versatile journalist to help us with all of the cool things happening over on lasvegasweekly.com.

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

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Let me answer a few basic questions about these internships:

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

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

* Am I going to 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 do.

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

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

Well, teaching new skills is wonderful and we love to do it, but in 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 and lasvegasweekly.com to have learned other things needed to be a part of our news organization.

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

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

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

To apply, please click here.

When our team at Greenspun Interactive was trying to figure out our sports strategy for the then-very-new Las Vegas Sun website in the summer of 2008, we knew we were dealing with a much different market than we had at previous newspapers.

But one thing was clear: Former kusports.com editor Andy Samuelson knew we needed to cover Ultimate Fighting Championship — better known simply as just the UFC.

I knew nothing about UFC at the time, and what I did know had me raising my eyebrows.

Now that I’ve been living in Las Vegas for a year, I understand it a little more. And I really do believe the UFC is Las Vegas’ major-league sports franchise. As Forbes magazine put it in their cover story from May 2008, it’s the “Ultimate Cash Machine,” with a likely worth near $1 billion, according to the article.

The UFC’s home offices are in Las Vegas. The operation is owned in part by the Fertitta family, which started/controls several Las Vegas casinos aimed primarily at locals in the area. And many of the UFC’s fighters live and train in this area.

More than any of that, when I walk around a mall in Las Vegas or I’m at my kids’ activities, I see folks wearing UFC shirts or TapouT clothing, or just always see these weird random references to UFC. When I am out to eat in suburbia, I hear people talking about the UFC kind of in the same way you might hear folks in Lawrence talking about the Jayhawks’ latest recruit.

Heck, one of the sport’s most popular fighters actually lives in my neighborhood.

A few weekends ago, as my son Johnny and I were videogame shopping at a big electronics store here in Las Vegas, I saw something that completely solidified it for me that the UFC is a big deal to many of the local residents in the Las Vegas Valley:

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There has been a marked evolution in how our team has covered UFC over this last year. It kind of started with UFC 86. It has morphed and expanded to how we covered UFC 100 — the recent “super fight” held July 11 here in Las Vegas.

We pulled out all the stops and by the time it was all over, we had built a full-fledged site for the event, with our team’s utility infielder, Billy Steffens, doing much of the site development.

So, what did the coverage look like?

* Our main MMA/boxing writers — Andy Samuelson and Brett Okamoto — produced nearly 20 stories leading up to and from the event. And that doesn’t include the tons of content about UFC 100 that came from our organization’s other journalists.

* We had a live blog on Fight Night.

* And great post-fight coverage.

* Amazing photos from Greenspun Interactive photographer Justin Bowen and Las Vegas Sun photographer Sam Morris.

* An interactive timeline of the history of the UFC built by our team’s resident MacGyver, Sean Hellwig.

* Andy and Brett produced not one, not two, not three, but four audio podcasts related to UFC 100.

But what really made our coverage stand out was video. Our team’s two sports videographers — Alex Adeyanju and Christine Killimayer — had the competition tapping out.

* They produced an over-the-air, 30-minute television special about UFC 100.

* And on Fight Night, Alex and Christine shot/produced/edited six videos documenting the evening’s events … all posted to our site by the time the print edition of our newspaper was hitting folks’ driveways.

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We’ve watched as our traffic to lasvegassun.com grows with each UFC event.

This week, the UFC makes its first trip to Philadelphia with UFC 101.

And we’ll be there to document it with tons of stories, daily blogs, lots of photos, audio podcasts, cool video, reader-submitted photos and videos … the works.

It’s the kind of treatment that any major news organization would give its major-league sports franchise.

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