Rob Curley

Halloween in Las Vegas is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be — both the relative normalcy of the haunted holiday for the locals who live here and the overkill craziness that happens on the Strip.

Sarah Feldberg helped lead our team’s coverage of the edgier parts of the haunted holiday in Sin City.

She is our team’s editor for lasvegasweekly.com — Greenspun Interactive’s entertainment site for Las Vegas and the web companion to the Las Vegas Weekly print edition. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Sarah dating back to our team’s time in Naples and she’s easily one of the most talented and multifaceted journalists I’ve ever seen.

Sarah has serious skills. However, as I’ve said a million times: “Skillset is important. But mindset is most important.”

That’s where Sarah becomes so invaluable because she does all that she accomplishes with a positive-force attitude that makes a manager/editor count his/her blessings to have this type of journalist in such an important role. Her formal training may be text-based journalism, but her day-to-day reality is serving our audience in a multimedia, multi-platform world.

She writes for print for the both the Las Vegas Sun newspaper and the Las Vegas Weekly magazine. She blogs nearly everyday. She helps keep our exhaustive guides and calendars and other databases updated. She shoots photos for her stories. She shoots party pics at the clubs for the Weekly’s website. She appears on a local Fox television show nearly every week to talk about things on our site and in our magazine. She helps with our own video. She manages and maintains large evergreen projects.

That’s mindset.

I’m positive that over the next several weeks, I’m going to be showcasing lots and lots of Sarah’s work, but today I want to show how she handled our Halloween coverage.

Like a lot of new-media editors who work for mainstream media companies, Sarah has to balance several issues related to taking our traditional media brands online in a way that makes sense and making sure that we build websites that work the way websites are expected to work and not just as digital archives of print products.

And though the Las Vegas Weekly print edition and the lasvegasweekly.com website share the same name and lots of the same DNA, there are substantial differences to them — many of which are tied simply to the differences in distribution.

(I plan on really going into all of this in an upcoming blog post because there has probably never been a site that our team has worked on that has been thought about and discussed and tested and benchmarked as much as lasvegasweekly.com.)

So, for the sake of this blog, let’s start the look at our edgier Halloween coverage by beginning with the print edition of Las Vegas Weekly.

We had known for weeks (if not months), that Las Vegas Weekly was planning a “death” issue. At that point, Sarah had already begun working with the print edition’s great editor, Scott Dickensheets. We then brainstormed on what pieces our team could add to that week’s content and we came up with a “death map” — basically a look at some of most interesting deaths and murders in Las Vegas. We also lobbied that the death issue be the week of Halloween so it could play into our site’s holiday coverage.

The death map ran in print, as well, but it was really thought of mainly as an online project. The objective was to map out the most interesting deaths in the area, then tie those to a short overview and then lots of stories from our news organizations’ archives.

The map’s look was designed by the print edition’s art director, Ryan Olbrysh. The deaths on the map (as well as their little accompanying brief overviews) were written and selected by Las Vegas Weekly print managing editor Ken Miller. The archival stories were found by online editor Sarah Feldberg and the Flash map’s guts were built by Greenspun Interactive’s Tyson Anderson.

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Now, let’s take a look at the online-only Halloween content that lived on the Weekly’s site.

It started with an amazing guide to basically all of the adult things going on in Vegas. One of the things that we really try to pride ourselves on is building really great calendar and guide information on our sites, and our calendar editor — Allison Duck — is absolutely fantastic at it.

When you pull together all of those event listings from the relational databases that make up our sites — along with the great restaurant and club guides, etc… — and mash it all together in narrative format, what you get is Allison’s incredibly practical “Las Vegas Halloween Guide.”

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Next up, Sarah and one of our news organization’s very talented videographers, Katie Euphrat, teamed up to tell a story of a local design school’s Halloween costume design and runway show. Sarah wrote the story and shot the photos, while Katie handled all of the video responsibilities.

An interesting sidenote to this is that last year, Sarah worked on an amazing project where we documented how two Cirque du Soleil costume designers would build a Halloween costume with about $50 worth of materials. The story’s accompanying photos — which actually show Sarah in the finished costume — and video are really cool.

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Our team is blessed to have a really phenomenal nightlife writer, Deanna Rilling. She’s super talented, really knows her subject matter and is one of the hardest working folks you’ll ever be around.

One of her contributions to our Halloween coverage was really cool — the folks who produce the hugely elaborate “Perfecto” dance night at Rain nightclub in the Palms made her up as a character from Perfecto.

The results were really, really cool. Deanna wrote a behind-the-scenes story about it. And Greenspun Interactive visual journalist Justin Bowen documented it with an interesting timelapse video of Deanna’s transformation and photo gallery of it all.

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One of the more interesting Halloween happenings in Las Vegas each year is the Fetish & Fantasy Ball. One of the newest members of our team — and recent UNLV grad — April Corbin blogged about it and took party pics of the attendees.

(I don’t really remember anything like this happening in Kansas during my life there. Though I once went to a Scissor Sisters concert with Betsy at the Granada back in Lawrence that definitely had at least some elements of this.)

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Of course, we picked our winners for best costumes.

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And there were other parts of our coverage.

Las Vegas Weekly movie reviewer Josh Bell blogged about the three days of Fangoria Trinity of Terrors shin-dig over at the Palms.

Lastly, there was our team’s old Halloween standby: What our local celebrities were handing out to trick-or-treaters — which we’ve been writing since about 1998.

When you pull all of this together, you get a good picture of how a print-based brand can feel pretty dang webby. Some of the content in our Halloween coverage was a little flashy — literally Flash and some video — but other parts were nothing more than an appreciation and knowledge of what kind of content just works well on the web.

That’s where a dynamic online editor like Sarah Feldberg becomes invaluable.

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To comment on this post, or to see comments about this post, please go here.

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.

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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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To comment on this post, or to see comments about this post, please go here.

This past week, the crew at 702.tv produced two videos (well, they produced a ton of videos, but two I wanted to share on my blog) that I think will interest folks outside of Las Vegas.

It seems like for as long as I can remember people think our team has been pushing the envelope. Well, to be honest, when you typically work at a newspaper, it doesn’t take a whole lot to push things.
🙂

But we posted a video (that also ran on our over-the-air television show) that even made me queasy.

The title of the video says it all: Live Lobster Sushi.

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_0.9.swf

Yes, the animal is moving while they eat it.

This video was shot and edited by Scott Den Herder, and the reporter on the story was Las Vegas Weekly managing editor Ken Miller.

Another video that ran last week also was interesting to me, but for a completely different reason.

Videographer Evelio Contreras and 702.tv entertainment reporter Emily Gimmel put together a package on the VIP pool at Green Valley Ranch Resort.

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_0.9.swf

(All summer, Emily has been putting together packages on the different resort pools across Las Vegas. And if you’re just joining us and can’t figure out why we’re shooting pool videos, please read this post that explains the 702.tv concept.)

Anyway …

What makes this video so interesting to me is how it was produced.

It was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II, a still camera that shoots video, which was just recently released. The camera is predominantly used by Greenspun Interactive’s still photographer, Justin Bowen.

But Evelio wanted to take the camera out for a test drive.

So, what did he think?

First off, the video looks great. Many of us in the office feel the clip has kind of a film-like quality to it, and Evelio said he loved its cool depth of field. He said that depth of field made shooting with the camera very fun.

He loved it.

Evelio told me he wonders if this camera could possibly be what many shooters might use in the future — a small, high-quality camera that does video and stills well. He said, as a videographer, he felt the camera’s size made it more welcoming for interviews and access.

I’ve been told that the big knock on the Mark II camera is its audio capabilities, which aren’t really broadcast quality. For this piece, Evelio got around that by using another camera (the Panasonic P2s that we typically use for 702.tv) to capture the audio.

Anyway, both of these videos were really interesting (at least to me) … just for different reasons.

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To comment on this post, or to see comments about this post, please go here.

Shortly after our team had met Brian Greenspun, the Las Vegas Sun president and editor asked us if we could please work with him to figure out a way to inform those who didn’t want to be informed, or who didn’t even know they needed to be informed.

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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Like most newspapers and local news websites, the Las Vegas Sun and lasvegassun.com are more than a little challenged when it comes to marketing.

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:

http://media.lasvegassun.com/media/projects/curley/billboards/gallery.swf

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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One of the coolest things about building a website for the Las Vegas Sun is that the Sun’s print edition is unlike any other newspaper in the country.

(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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Many baseball players dream of hitting a walk-off home run to win the World Series. Some doctors dream of curing cancer. And my guess is there are at least few journalists who dream of winning a Pulitzer Prize.

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.
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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.

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

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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