World Series of Poker coverage from the Las Vegas Sun

I’ve started and stopped writing probably five or six blogs over the last few months, but just couldn’t find the time or focus to finish them. Lots of reasons for that, but the bottom line is that I sure wish I would have.

I have always prided myself on being a “glass-half-full” kind-of-guy — and any way you slice it, the Las Vegas Sun, Las Vegas Weekly and Greenspun Interactive crews have created some of the coolest and most interactive new-era local journalism I’ve ever seen over the last few months. Because of that, someone needs to not only be congratulating these people for practicing some amazing multimedia/cross-platform storytelling, but also be telling the world about it.

So here I am about to shout it from the top of the Stratosphere what exactly is happening in the world of local journalism around our company’s campus. And I fully plan to post several items over the next few months (some old, some new) that I hope shows just how dynamic and interactive local journalism can be. Of course, I started writing this particular entry on Wednesday morning and just now got around to finishing it.
😦

Anyway, here goes Entry No. 1.

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Let’s not even discuss whether poker is a sport or not. Just turn on the TV (even — or especially — ESPN) and see if poker gets much attention. It does. And the granddaddy of poker events concludes this week here in Las Vegas: the World Series of Poker.

To explain just how big the World Series of Poker is to our readers, a story on our site back from July saying who the final nine players would be has received nearly a thousand pageviews a day, every day since it was posted.

Yesterday, we unveiled our first wave of coverage for the final table of the event.

The package led with a great story from our newspaper’s print edition by Jeff Haney. Haney is our news organization’s gambling writer and he has forgotten more about gambling — and poker in particular — than most know. The guy is an authority and his story shows it.

Sun video journalist Christine Killimayer produced a killer behind-the-scenes video about all that goes into the ESPN television production of the event.

http://media.lasvegassun.com/media/assets/swf/mvc_video_2.1.swf

Then you layer in the uber-cool Flash graphic produced by our team’s senior designer, Todd Soligo. Yep, it looks cool, but what makes it really great is how much information is in the graphic, and that’s all thanks to one of our team’s new-media sports journalists, Case Keefer. Case put together great bios on each of the final nine players.

Case didn’t just do the bios. He wrote a great story for our site about the interesting mix of players at this year’s final table, as well as the huge amount of skill sitting at it.

And that wasn’t it.

Our World Series of Poker site also includes tons of historical info on the event — both recent and not-so-recent — including a great historical perspective on the event written by longtime Sun reporter Ed Koch specifically for our site.

And what’s really cool is that we have a few tricks up our sleeves in how we’re going to cover the actual event over the next few days. Should be fun!

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BTW — at one point yesterday, it seemed like lasvegassun.com had what has to be an “only-in-Vegas” homepage: Our top story was about hookers “trick-rolling” their johns at an even more rapid rate than usual and our centerpiece was poker. And what made that coverage even more interesting is that both story packages were also played up very prominently in our newspaper’s print edition.