Rob Curley

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last few months. Things have been crazy busy and crazy cool here at the Las Vegas Sun and Greenspun Interactive, and my attention has been on the tasks at hand for our team … as well as moving the Curley family to the desert.

We’ve got a lot of really cool projects cooking right now, and I’m hoping to post a few things over the new few weeks and months to discuss not only how we built them, but why.

But that’s not why I’m writing today.

We’re now in the process of making the last few hires on our team as we head into the fall, and I figured I’d mention some of those openings on this blog. If anybody out there is interested in working with our new-media team, we’d love to hear from you!

We’re looking for folks who want to work hard, have fun and try to figure out what the future of local journalism might look like.

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New-media journalist

We’re looking for someone who can juggle all types of content and content mediums on deadline assignments. One day you’ll be shooting breaking news photos and sending Web updates from the scene, the next day creating a Soundslide feature on a local music festival, the next day shooting video of a political rally for the presidential election.

You’ll also be writing your backside off, so strong writing skills are a must.

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New-media sports journalist

For this position, we’re looking for a great writer who can help us cover the local high school and rec-sports scenes with breaking news, daily features and game stories. We’d also like for this person to help us put together and maintain a network of local sports bloggers.

If you’ve ever seen one of our team’s local sports sites, you know we love local sports statistical databases, and we’re expecting this position to help us put together these sorts of features for the new lasvegassun.com site.

And you have to have not just a willingness but be excited to work with multimedia, such as producing and editing audio podcasts, and possibly shooting and editing a little video, but also be completely cool with appearing on camera.

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Visual journalist (still photography and video)

So, why add a still shooter to our web staff?

Because of the nature of the Joint Operating Agreement here in Las Vegas and how The Sun print newspaper basically now functions as a daily magazine, there are many things we feel our new-media team needs to cover as a news organization that the Sun newspaper newsroom no longer covers (such as high school sports and UNLV sports), as well as stuff the Sun just wouldn’t cover on a regular basis, such as red-carpets, etc …

We don’t want to send an intern. We want to send someone with proven skills.

We also want someone who totally rocks at lighting and is good at fashion/portraits photography. And then there’s breaking news stuff that is becoming our bread-and-butter.

And, oh yeah, there’s this thing involving moving pictures, I think it’s called video, that we think might have an interesting role in new-media journalism.
🙂

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Video/multimedia journalist

We’re basically looking for a kick-ass videographer who shoots well and knows how to edit his/her butt off. And do all of that on deadline on a daily basis.

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Video journalist/on-camera

Folks applying for this position should have great on-camera reporting skills and the ability to effortlessly go between serious news presentation and edgier entertainment-driven stories. Applicants need to be fluent in multimedia reporting — including writing copy, operating camera and audio equipment and producing video from non-linear editing software.

You’re going to need to be able to meet daily deadlines, work independently, have familiarity with web video and audio, and experience
with producing media in a digital environment — meaning familiarity with non-linear editing tools such as Final Cut Pro or Premiere.
We’re looking for someone who is equally at ease working both as part of a team and independently.

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Web-applications developer

For the most part, I pretty much just winged those last few descriptions. I’m not going to do that with this position. Here’s what our uber-smart senior-programmer dude, Doug Twyman, wrote:

Greenspun Interactive is now hiring a Web Application Developer to design and develop features for media publications and take part in conceptualizing, designing and developing applications. Applicants should be highly organized with experience in a team programming environment and computer-science fundamentals. Knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python and Django are a must.

Especially that Python and Django part. (I added that last part.)

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So let me cut to the chase: We offer pretty dang competitive pay, our benefits kick ass, and our work environment rocks. (In fact, you aren’t going to believe our offices.)

More importantly, if you come to Las Vegas, you’ll get to practice great local journalism with folks who love to come to work every day and who are honestly excited about the future of our industry.

Plus, you can drink all the free Red Bull you could possibly ingest. And you’re never going to be bored. Ever. I promise.

If this sounds good, please contact our HR folks at this e-mail address: jobs@gmgvegas.com.

Or send me an e-mail.

Or e-mail us both.

When I woke up Wednesday morning in sunny Las Vegas, I knew there was a pretty good chance there would be a story in the Wall Street Journal about our team’s work on LoudounExtra.com.

I first read the story on my mobile-phone’s browser. I didn’t even see the article’s headline; I just dug straight into the story. When I got to the end, I thought it was basically a fair overview of our site’s strategy and shortcomings.

Then later that morning, I saw the same story in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal. There was no way I was going to overlook the headline this time.

Big Daily’s ‘Hyperlocal’ Flop

Gulp.

I’m used to the things our team builds facing criticism, but it was the first time a major business publication had called something we had built a “flop.”

From the second I was contacted by the Wall Street Journal for the story, I knew exactly what I wanted to say in the interview, which was to point out that I thought the two biggest problems with LoudounExtra.com were poor integration of the site with washingtonpost.com and not enough outreach into the community … ala basically me speaking with every community group that would have me.

And that both of those problems were my fault. Completely.

And, more importantly, I had learned from those problems and wouldn’t make those mistakes in Las Vegas, especially since I planned to make entirely new mistakes in Las Vegas.
🙂

For as long as our team has been building sites, we’ve been trying to do the same basic thing: serve our audience.

We try like crazy to give our readers content that is relevant to their lives, and give them other services in any way that they want them in order to help them live their lives better and be more informed.

And do it all in entertaining and interesting ways that keep them coming back.

Some people call that “hyperlocal.” We call it doing our damn jobs.

So, when I read the Wall Street Journal story, was I upset? Well, I thought the headline was pretty rough, but — as I mentioned earlier — I thought the story was basically fair.

And about that headline …

Russell Adams, the writer of the story, talked with me on the phone the morning the article ran. He was definitely upset (and even sounded a little embarrassed) about the headline. He said he sent an e-mail to the folks at the WSJ who wrote the headline as soon as he saw it.

I can tell you I’ve worked in enough newsrooms to know how that headline got written. It also was interesting to find out that reporters at big newspapers get just as pissed off at the headlines that end up on their stories as reporters at smaller newspapers.

Ultimately, what was fascinating to me wasn’t so much the story as the reaction to it. (OK, so maybe “fascinating” and “reaction” are not the right words.)

And then there was the reaction that our team had to all that was being written about us in regards to the WSJ piece.

I’d like to share some of our team’s thoughts with you.

I can’t even tell you how damn lucky I am to work with Tim Richardson. He’s one of the best editors — print, online, whatever … — out there. And I get to work with him every day.

Here’s what Tim posted on the bivingsreport.com blog titled: “The Struggles of LoudounExtra.com.”

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I get the sense that some are assuming the journalists involved in creating and maintaining LoudounExtra.com didn’t understand Loudoun County.

I’ve worked with Rob Curley for eight years and was on his team at washingtonpost.com/LoudounExtra.com. I think Rob would agree that more could have been done to get the word out about the site. As Rob told the WSJ, he probably wishes he would have spoken to any community group that would have listened to him discuss the site.

Providing links to LoudounExtra.com from washingtonpost.com will help, too. There’s no doubt: We should have done more to get the word out.

But it wouldn’t be accurate to say that the journalists involved are “outsiders” and don’t understand the county. The editors and reporters at the Loudoun County bureau of The Washington Post have played an important role since the site’s inception. Post reporters who were covering the ins and outs of Loudoun County long before Rob’s team came into the picture are still contributing to the site on a daily basis.

Members of Rob’s team, myself included, immersed themselves into Loudoun County months before the site launched. We logged thousands of miles gathering content from all corners of the county and met with countless people in Loudoun beginning six or seven months before the launch. Once the site launched, the online staff continued covering stories with text and multimedia that complemented stories originating from the print staff. This offered readers a great deal of additional coverage of Loudoun that wasn’t available in the Post or on washingtonpost.com.

From Day One there was constant coordination between the Loudoun bureau journalists who have covered Loudoun for years and the online staff that lived and breathed Loudoun on a daily basis months before the public ever saw LoudounExtra.com. While there were issues related to how we should tell the public about the site, I don’t think that takes anything away from the journalism.

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Even our team’s senior programmer, Deryck Hodge, had things to say. Here is what Deryck posted to a blog titled “Hyperlocal hero fails, finds new job.”

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I am a programmer who worked with Rob at the Post and worked on the Loudoun site, and I’d just like to take issue with your assessment that Loudoun Extra was a “large and costly flop.” First, even though the headline on the WSJ article uses the word flop, I don’t think that’s really the heart of the piece, and second, the article certainly doesn’t describe our work as large and costly.

In fact, I would say one of the failures of Loudoun Extra is that it was only one small part of a lot of other things we were asked to do. We were one part hyper-local dev team and one part try-new-things team. We were never really able to settle in on one project with our whole attention for more than 3-6 weeks at a time. The Post most know this, too, creating two teams in place of our single unit after we leave — one for experiment development and one for hyper-local.

So I have no idea how you can determine that Loudoun Extra was “large and costly.” It was a small little site built at the same time that many other projects were built. The WSJ article focuses on that site alone, without any context of the other work we were asked to do. While I think the criticisms are relevant and worth considering, it’s also useful to know the greater context in which that one site lives.

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And this last post came from probably our team’s most interesting member, Levi Chronister. Levi is one of those geniuses who can basically do anything. Well.

But don’t try to find this post. The site where Levi posted it still hasn’t allowed his comment to be published.

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Mark,

I just wanted to make a few thoughts/clarifications on your post:

— The Fast Company article came after Rob had already been in Naples for months, not before Naples/Scripps hired him. Also, I’m 99.9 percent sure the photo idea was from their people, not Rob himself.

— Rob did not take “most of his online staff” when he left Lawrence for Naples. In fact, I was the only full-time Journal-World employee to go to Naples. Two interns also went, but the very large majority of full-timers stayed in Lawrence.

— I can’t speak exactly to Naples revenue numbers, but I’m again 99.9 percent sure that the sites/projects we built were financially strong. I will readily admit that revenue there had every bit as much to do with having a publisher (John Fish) who was a master salesman and a hard-working ad staff as anything Rob or the rest of us did, if not more (which I’m sure Rob would readily admit also).

— “Hyperlocal” was not a buzz word Rob created (or thought of) for the Post job. It’s a term that’s been around since at least the time we were in Lawrence (based on this article). I can’t remember the first time it was used to describe the work we were doing, but I know it was before we came to Washington.

— To say that the Bivings Report blog post was “abandon(ing) his teachings and pointing out his flawed plan” is a large amount of
hyperbole. Mr. Zeigler points to three takeaways, only one of which (the first) can be placed squarely and solely on the shoulders of
Rob/our team (and which Rob takes the blame for at the end of the WSJ article). The other two are organizational issues that share blame all around.

— Similarly, your “reporting today the emperor has no clothes” link goes to a blog post that is, a day later, responded to by the original writer, who admits he “inaccurately noted that LoudounExtra.com hadn’t yet rolled out high school sports”. His original post also mentions the lack of community-publishing tools, which the WSJ article explains. I don’t see where Mr. Krasilovsky points out anything along the lines of Rob being a fraud or any such thing. I might be to close to all of this to see the forest for the trees, though.

— I’ve said this in response to other blog posts, but saying that Rob “took most of his staff” is pretty darn offensive (accidentally so, I have no doubt) to those of us who have chosen to go to Las Vegas as well. We have all given a lot of thought to our options, which included staying at WPNI or looking for a job somewhere else entirely. We are leaving on our own terms, not just blindly following or being brought to Vegas on leashes.

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I’ve been trying to tell people for years that this isn’t the “Rob Curley Show.” It’s the reason why I mention the people I work with so often. They’re amazing.

They’re not only incredibly skilled, they’re incredibly passionate. Some people work at newspapers or news sites because that’s their job. Others do it because it is their passion — and that’s what drives the folks I’m lucky enough to work with.

Some might call LoudounExtra.com a “flop.” But with the amount of things our team learned from building it, I guarantee no one on our staff would.

Even if the site is eventually re-tooled, it’s hard to call something a failure if you’re a journalist and you figured out new and better ways to connect to your readers from it.

We did.

And we can’t wait to try like crazy to inform the folks who live in Las Vegas in new and lively ways.

One last thing: I’ve seen (and received) comments from several people questioning whether staying with a local strategy is the way to move forward. For most news organizations, I think it’s still the only way to go.

No one knows our communities better than we do, and if we don’t provide this content to readers in whatever way they want to receive it, someone else will. And then we’ve lost them. Likely for good.

Building a site for a small geographic region of the Washington Post’s readership area came with its own set of challenges. But our team learned a lot with LoudounExtra.com, and I’m just as convinced as ever (if not more) that serving your local community with local information is the right move.

Taking good care of your readers will always be the right answer.

Just make sure you do whatever it takes to let them know what you’ve built.

To that point, our team has a few new tricks up our sleeves that we can’t wait to try out. And to say that we’re motivated is the understatement of understatements.

We’re going to Vegas, baby!

… and in just a few weeks, I’m still going to join several of my friends from Kansas, Florida and Ohio in the Nevada news oasis known as the Las Vegas Sun and Greenspun Media Group.

I’ve blogged about the great work being done at the Las Vegas Sun on a couple of occasions — and offered more than a little advice to the place whenever I’ve been asked.

And now I get to join what I think is easily one of the most interesting local media operations in the nation.

As well as what has to be one of the most stacked new-media news organizations in the world.

As Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell mentioned subtly in her column last Sunday, I will be joined in Las Vegas by several members of our skunkworks team here at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive — including Tim Richardson, Levi Chronister, Deryck Hodge, Cara McCoy and Sean Stoops.

Some of our team’s longtime interns also will be joining us — Melissa Arseniuk, Amanda Finnegan, Cydney Cappello and Scott Den Herder.

This was by far one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. My respect for The Washington Post, and especially Don Graham, is immeasurable.

I’ve worked for some inspiring and visionary people in my career — most notably Dolph Simons Jr. and Ralph Gage in Lawrence — but I don’t think I’ve ever worked with someone quite as inspiring to me as Don Graham.

This is a guy who helped spec out a Facebook app. How many other leaders of traditional media companies even have a Facebook account? And there was Don Graham helping to build a piece of software for it!

As we were developing LoudounExtra.com, Don even drove out with me to talk with the superintendent of schools when we hit a snag in working with the school district.

More importantly, Don Graham is genuinely one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Ever.

And since Katharine Weymouth took over as publisher at The Washington Post, she has been so supportive and helpful that oftentimes our family couldn’t believe it.

The two of them — along with folks like Bo Jones, Steve Hills, Sandy Sugawara, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, Jacob Weisberg, Jon Meacham, Phil Bennett, Joe Elbert, Caroline Little and too many others to mention — make it hard to leave a place like this.

Getting to work side-by-side on our WPNI skunkworks team with Jesse Foltz (who is not only an amazing designer, but one of the smartest Internet nerds I’ve ever met in my life) and Dan Berko (who is one of those extremely rare journalists who can write code and sentences) is something I will always be extremely proud of.

Working at The Washington Post Company taught me a valuable lesson: Sometimes it’s OK to love and revere something, and not have to be a part of it. I love The Washington Post and all that it stands for, but I probably wasn’t the best fit with the organization.

Yet, I still love The Post with all of my heart.

As many of you know, I also love the rock band Kiss as well — but I won’t be accepting that band’s offer to replace Ace Frehley if it ever comes. I’ve learned my lesson. (I can still play Detroit Rock City note-for-note. I know … that has to solidify anyone’s doubts as to just how big of a nerd I really am.)

Working at WPNI also allowed me to work side-by-side with folks I’ve always respected, like Jim Brady and Tom Kennedy. I also got to work with extremely talented and smart people like Henry Tam and Jen Crandall. (I even forgave Jen for going to school at Missouri.)

But all of that being said, what’s in store for our team in Las Vegas has me humming Elvis songs in my sleep.

Due to the JOA in place in Vegas, the Las Vegas Sun’s role within the community is very different than most daily newspapers. It acts much more like a daily magazine, focusing on the “How” and the “Why.”

(I don’t know if that strategy represents the future of print journalism, but it sure feels like a radical step in the right direction in keeping local daily, printed newspapers relevant to readers. It was not only that different kind of focus that made this place so appealing to all of us, but also the willingness that strategy represents to take significant risks.)

And it’s all done with a newsroom that includes former staffers from the LA Times, Washington Post, Dallas Morning News, SF Chronicle and Seattle Times, as well as one of the nation’s most famous editorial cartoonists.

So, the Journalism with a Capital J is there. The commitment to excellence is there.

Then layer on the company’s award-winning weekly newspapers, which will play a central role in nearly everything our team wants to accomplish in the Las Vegas Valley.

Then add all of the Vegas-related magazine titles that the Greenspun Media Group publishes, including the uber-cool Las Vegas Weekly, and it’s clear that entertainment and lifestyle content are there.

Then you have Greenspun’s involvement in local television stations.

In Las Vegas, our team has a chance to help shape an entire organization. Not only that, but also have a hand in a far greater range of publications and media outlets, which means more options as we continue to try to shape the local news organization of the future.

And when you look at all of those assets and top it off with the private ownership of the Greenspun family, it begins to feel a little like Lawrence. Only with showgirls.

So, what happens when a bunch of news nerds from Kansas converge on the Nevada desert?

We’re about to find out.

Over the last week or so, there has been a really interesting discussion on the Poynter online news listserv about local news, which has bopped all over the place from discussing what is local news to does anyone really care about local news? And, as the listserv’s recent activity proves, you know we’ve hit a new level of industry jargon when local news is referred to as a “niche vertical” or something to that effect.

Still, I’ve enjoyed reading it. (I wish I could link to it, but I can’t find an archive of it anywhere on the Poynter site.)

For me, one of the best lines in this discussion came this morning from Paul Swider, and — man oh man — does this quote work on so many frickin’ levels:

“… if we don’t ask what the customers want and respond, we’re done. Right now, we’re in a limbo between that and some idealistic view of journalism as art form produced for its own sake. I don’t think that when the readers ask for french fries we can insist they take brussels sprouts. We could offer nutritious french fries.”

Amen, Brother Swider.

For years, I’ve been saying we shouldn’t be ashamed of serving our readers, which is why I talk all the time about the need to produce both “Big-J” and “little-j” journalism. It’s the reason why on LoudounExtra.com, we build huge local election guides and cover high school proms.

It’s not an “either-or” option. You’ve got to do both.

When I was back in Kansas, we would sometimes treat the family to a night at the Hereford House steakhouse. Holy crap, does that place rock. Anyway, believe it or not, there’s an important lesson about journalism to be learned from eating at the Hereford House.

When you order steak and potatoes from that place — and I would recommend you order the twice-baked potatoes with cheese on top when you’re lucky enough to eat there — you get exactly that delivered to your table.

But, as you look at your meal, you’ll notice that there also is some broccoli on your plate. You didn’t order the broccoli, but the chef knew you needed it. You wanted the steak; you needed the broccoli. So, you got both.

At every newspaper I’ve worked at, I’ve seen this to be true. If you give the readers their Kansas Jayhawks basketball story — even on the front page if it’s a big game — then they’ll also find the story on corruption in the police department. You give them what they want and you give them what they need.

Yet it seems to me that the problem with a lot of newspaper editors is they’d much rather feed you broccoli for every meal, without the steak and potatoes. And when they do try to serve up something a little more palatable, it sure tastes a lot like broccoli. It’s like they’re trying to impress the other chefs instead of trying to please the folks in the restaurant who actually pay their salaries.

(Sorry to mix metaphors here — or is it analogies? — but if you would like to hear the audio equivalent of most traditional newspapers trying to be relevant, click here.)

I know this is probably going to make me a little unpopular — or maybe that’s more unpopular — with some of the traditional journalism folks out there, but I actually agree with a lot of the things that Sam Zell has been saying lately.

We need to become more relevant to our audience. We have to make ourselves indispensable to our readers. We shouldn’t let a false sense of self-importance get in the way of trying to make news organizations matter to most folks again. Zell is absolutely correct on these points.

And to be honest, I’m not all that against someone saying “fuck you” to a reporter from time-to-time. I know when I was a beat reporter back in Topeka, I had at least one editor say that exact thing to me. Actually, more than once. The problem with Zell, at least as I see it, is that these extra little comments he’s been making all too often likely hurt the credibility of his core message, which is that we shouldn’t be ashamed of serving our readers. And he’s right.

But I digest …

I don’t have the answers to all of the dilemmas facing the newspaper industry. And it’s obvious from reading the current posts on the Poynter listserv that there aren’t a lot of easy answers there, either.

I know our team at The Washington Post is not giving up or burying our heads in the sand. We’re looking for new ways to connect with our readers, and we’re not afraid to fail.

And while we’re working through all of this, I’m going to look for a good steak and some nutritious French fries on the LoudounExtra.com restaurant guide.

On Friday, I was having a late lunch with a colleague from the business/advertising side of The Washington Post. We were talking about how our company’s hyper-local strategies should evolve. It was a great conversation that I wish could have lasted all day.

As we were talking/eating, I noticed the TVs in the restaurant all showing live video of one of the mega resorts in Las Vegas on fire. I have several friends who now work at the Las Vegas Sun, so this story was interesting to me for at least a couple of reasons.

When I finally got back to my computer at the Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive offices and saw how my buddies were covering the fire at the Monte Carlo hotel, my jaw nearly hit the ground. And every time I checked back, they continued to add layers and layers to their newspaper site’s coverage.

It started with a live blog updated by several members of the newsroom staff. I’m not sure how often the blog was updated, but it had new content every time I looked at it. Obviously, tons and tons of updates to it throughout the day.

Then came the photos.

Then came the overview of the Monte Carlo hotel and this incredibly well-done historical context of the fire.

Then came the videos. Here is another. And another, which seems to go with this very funny blog post.

And what made this so impressive was that with the exception of the videos, which I thought were pretty dang good, all of this coverage came while the hotel was still burning.

This was a local newspaper covering a breaking news event as it was unfolding.

The Sun’s site even had an easy way for readers to submit photos through Flickr and YouTube, as well as reader comments all over the place.

To me, this was a nearly textbook example of how a local newspaper should cover a big breaking news story in its community in the iPhone era.

But is it how most local newspapers would have reacted?

(And don’t try to tell me the Las Vegas Sun has a huge newsroom, especially for a newspaper in a town with 2 million people. Dave Toplikar, the newspaper’s online managing editor and a very good friend of mine, tells me the newspaper’s newsroom is probably around 30-40 people total.)

It seems to me that in 2008, there are probably about five ways a local newspaper might cover a breaking local news event like this:

• No. 1 — Throw some resources at it in real-time, becoming the definitive source online for the story as it is happening. Constant news updates. Great background info. Multimedia that is worth looking at — at the very least, some decent photo galleries if you’re not going to do video. I’m talking about web reports that combine speed, accuracy and compelling visuals with overwhelming comprehensive coverage in a way that creates something that shows your readers that your newspaper’s website is the only place to go for information on this story.
• No. 2 — At the very least, keep the web site updated. Even if in kind of a half-assed way.
• No. 3 — Run a big story in print with a big photo. The next day. After the story is over. Treat it like your print predecessors would have back in 1978, pretending that no one knows about the story until you tell them about it in print. The next day.
• No. 4 — Go apesh*t in print. The next day. But in the midst of the overkill print coverage, there are thoughtful analysis pieces that treat the story like a Day Two story. Which in 2008, it is.
• No. 5 — Do a mixture of No. 1 and No. 4. Treat the web and print like they’re both important, with print coverage that acknowledges that we live in a world where both CNN and the Internet have been around for at least a few years. Or maybe even a few decades.

So, the question is simple: How do you think your newspaper would cover a big-time, local breaking news story in 2008?

Would it be 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5?

If it’s 2 or 3 (and possibly even 4), I’d be thinking about getting that resume ready if I were you.

When a story in your hometown is all over CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, it’s best not to let cable news organizations who are only going to be in your town maybe once or twice a year (if even that often) to kick your ass.

Do you really want your local audience saying: “Well, I tried to look on the newspaper’s website, but it was loading so slow. And when it did finally appear on my computer, the newspaper’s site didn’t really have much on it. I turned on CNN, and they were all over the story. So, I just kept it on CNN for the rest of the day.”

If you are a newspaper publisher, right now — and I mean right this very second — go ask the people who are in charge of your website if they are ready for 100 times the normal traffic that your website would typically get.

When our team was in Naples and Lawrence, we had alternate templates that we could deploy on our sites for just this very reason.

Yep, you read that correctly. We didn’t buy tons and tons of back-up hardware and servers for emergencies — though that’s not a terrible gameplan. We simply had another version of our site ready to go on a moment’s notice that was built to be very low in graphics.

In Naples, the alternate templates were used for our coverage of Hurricane Wilma, while our site was getting killed with traffic.

In Lawrence, the alternate templates were used for a big breaking news KU basketball story (such as Roy Williams leaving, a player leaving early for the NBA, etc…) or when the Drudge Report would link to us, which happened a surprising amount of times on LJWorld.com back in the day.

When a local story becomes national news, the local newspaper must own it. As it is happening.

That’s how people now expect to get their news.

Back in 2005, when Hurricane Wilma was about to smack the Naples area, our news organization made a commitment that when it came to real-time coverage, we were not going to get beat on this story by CNN or The Weather Channel or any other news organizations.

And that commitment came from the highest level of not only our newsroom, but from the highest levels of our entire organization. The newspaper’s publisher and even the folks at Scripps’ corporate offices in Ohio were doing everything they could to ensure that we were the definitive source for information during this important time for our community.

In today’s world, it’s irresponsible on about 20 different levels for a local newspaper to get its ass kicked by CNN on a local story. Yet, we’ve seen it already happen several times in just the last few months.

Now more than ever, newspapers have to show our communities that we are as relevant now — if not more — than we have ever been. Yet, as an industry, does it feel like we are doing that? Or does it seem that many in our ranks are just yearning for things to be like they used to be before that damned Internet?

Which is all the more reason why I want to throw some love to all of my friends at lasvegassun.com (and the Las Vegas Sun’s newsroom) for their remarkable work in covering the Monte Carlo fire.

On Friday.

As the story was actually happening and mattered the most to their local audience.

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Post Script:

It’s now about 7:50 on a cold Saturday evening here in Washington, DC. As I was getting close to posting this blog, I decided I would take another look at the Sun’s site.

And there’s already an updated blog on the site about the magician who performs at the Monte Carlo that was just posted. I don’t give a crap how good the web team at your newspaper is, if the newsroom doesn’t have real buy-in, your newspaper’s new-media strategy will never work.

With a quick look at the site’s blogs on the homepage, it looks like the newspaper’s newsroom has published at least five blogs today, three of which have been posted in the last hour.

Read this story from Saturday’s print edition of the Sun, and you can see how creative the newspaper’s print coverage was. (My favorite part of this story — at least the online version of it — is actually how a few journalists from other newspapers around the country are commenting on how good the story is.)

You now have the biggest answer as to how the Las Vegas Sun really pulled all of this off on Friday.

The latest issue of the Harvard Nieman Reports addresses the question: “Is Local News the Answer?”

I was asked several months ago by Reports editor Melissa Ludtke if I would write about LoudounExtra.com for the edition.

I received a copy of the latest issue in the mail before Christmas, but noticed at that time that the website hadn’t been updated. Yesterday, through a post on my Facebook newsfeed from TribLocal‘s Kyle Leonard, I saw that the Reports’ site now had the latest content on it.

Granted, I have a pretty big interest in local news on the web, and have already read several of the site’s articles, which are pretty informative. For instance, Kyle wrote an interesting piece about TribLocal for the issue that you all should check out.

The link to the story that I wrote, which talks a little bit about how I grew up around local newspapers, is here.

Or feel free to read it below (links have been added to all of the things referenced in the story):

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I grew up in a three-newspaper household. In the morning, my family got the regional daily out of Topeka, Kansas; in the evening, we got the even more regional afternoon paper from either Ottawa or Emporia (depending on who had the best deal) and, once a week, we got the hometown Osage City Journal-Free Press. To this day, my newspaper sensibilities are directly related to the papers I read as I was growing up.

Overkill sports coverage for my beloved Kansas Jayhawks came from the Topeka newspaper. Coverage of our local high schools and obits for our town were in the Ottawa newspaper. And the Osage paper had great local letters to the editor, as well as the reports from local nursing homes about who had visitors that week, as well as pictures from the Osage County Fair and parades.

When the team I was a part of was asked to build Web sites for the newspapers I worked at in Kansas (the Lawrence Journal-World and The Topeka Capital-Journal), we basically pulled from the news menus of our childhoods. It’s what we knew, and even though most of the journalism we’ve created during the past decade has been delivered via the latest technology instead of with ink on paper, the content has not been far removed from the newspapers I grew up reading in Osage City.

In today’s world of labels for everything, people call this “hyperlocal” journalism and tend to act like it’s something very new. Trust me, this ain’t new. If anything, it’s old school local journalism.

Hyperlocal Goals

In the fall of 2006, when our online team walked through the newsroom of The Washington Post — the paper that hired us to create a venue for local news on its Web site — we knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore. In front of us sat some of the world’s most talented journalists who were watching government’s every move, while overseas their colleagues were risking their lives to tell their readers about the Iraq War. Especially in this age of corporate journalism and big newsroom cutbacks, I have a deep admiration and respect for what it means for an organization like the Post to have bureaus all over the country and world to continue our essential role as a member of the Fourth Estate.

Each morning, it’s amazing to me to see all of this journalism with a capital “J” coming from the newspaper where I work. But even at the Post there needs to be journalism with a lower-case “j” since it is still also the local newspaper for millions who live in the D.C. area. And it turns out that responding to this obligation doesn’t look dramatically different than what we did at our local newspaper Web sites in Kansas.

What I’ve come to realize is that what is important to people is basically the same no matter how long their daily commute is. And that’s where LoudounExtra.com comes in. It is washingtonpost.com’s first step in creating hyperlocal sites that readers connect to in much the same way I related to the newspapers I grew up with in Kansas, which means that relevance and relationship are at its core.

Our goal was never to build a traditional local newspaper site. We were determined to give readers an online experience very different from the typical one of simply finding stories that appeared in the newspaper. Since as far as we can tell no one seems to know what “hyperlocal” really means, we took a stab at what we thought it meant as we built the site.

We knew that news, lots of news, had to be at its center, regardless of whether that news came from Post reporters or online reporters or from bloggers. There are big-time local stories on LoudounExtra.com, the kind readers expect Post reporters to give them. But there also are truly local stories, like police reports about stolen iPods — just like the stuff I might have read in those small Kansas newspapers.

But our goals for the site weren’t just journalistic. There was a fair amount of capitalism being discussed with every move we made. The site needed to be an affordable and very targeted advertising vehicle. We wanted the ads on LoudounExtra.com to feel as relevant to our readers as they do in print.

Let me explain: For years, I’d watched how my family looked at the ads in newspapers as content. Ads mattered to them. They looked forward to the ads as much, if not more, than they did the stories and photos in the newspaper. And this sentiment hasn’t changed.

Recently I saw folks buy the “bulldog” Sunday edition of The Washington Post on a Saturday morning at a local grocery store and throw away the news sections right there at the newsstand and keep the ad inserts. We knew the local ads on LoudounExtra.com had to feel this way: lots of desired deals from lots of local stores.

Our basic strategies to accomplish these hyperlocal goals at LoudounExtra.com consisted of the following:

Constantly updated news: We knew LoudounExtra.com had do be updated all the time with local news. We thought this could be a chore with a five-person Washington Post bureau in Loudoun, Virginia, which had to serve a population of over 250,000. To our surprise, it’s going much easier than we expected. The site has incredible buy-in from these reporters, who do a fantastic job of getting us a surprising amount of breaking news. Our online team also does some basic blocking and tackling for the site by doing all of the cop calls throughout the day and updating the site when press releases are sent from local agencies.

Our litmus test for a breaking news story on LoudounExtra.com is very different than both The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com. It’s not unusual for one of the site’s breaking stories to be about something as small as local mailboxes destroyed by kids putting fireworks in them or for our lead story to be about how a local high school’s cheerleading team did at a regional competition.

Most telling about the local audience’s reaction to the site is that often the most-read story on our site will be something that doesn’t even make it into the next morning’s newspaper as a brief.

Databases galore: It took our team’s two multimedia journalists, and one part-time intern, a little more than two months to gather the information, photos and panoramic images needed to build these five custom databases:

• Restaurants: Our team called every restaurant in Loudoun and created a database with their responses to about 15 questions ranging from things like are they vegetarian-friendly to their hours of operation to if they are locally owned.
• Religious institutions: We visited every church and place of worship in Loudoun we could find to create a searchable guide to more than 150 churches and places of worship in the county with information about congregation size, service schedules and contact information.
• Schools: We talked with every principal at the 85 schools in the county to develop profile articles and links to state report cards. Parents can learn which schools have full-time nurses, if foreign languages are taught, or how many special-education teachers are on staff.
• Calendar: It is intensely local, huge and inclusive, ranging from Bible study groups to band appearances at bars.
• High school sports: Using information in the box scores from coverage of local high school football games by The Washington Post, we created a database with detailed stats pages for every team and every player. This means that any player whose game performance shows up in the Post’s box score has a personal page on our site that contains game-by-game as well as cumulative stats. It is then easy to do side-by-side statistical comparisons for any two players or teams in the database.

An interesting attribute of these local guides is that the entire LoudounExtra.com site is built essentially as one huge relational database. This means that all of the site’s parts can “talk” to each other. When a band is performing at a restaurant on Friday night, that information appears on the restaurant’s detail page and in the calendar. Similarly, with more traditional content, if a news story or review is posted about a restaurant, those same words appear on the restaurant’s page.

Location is also a shared piece of data on the site. Called “geo-coding” and used with places and calendar events and with news stories, we often tie a Google map and driving directions to items appearing on the site. Such geo-coding gives us the capacity to group all of these different types of information — news stories, events, stories, advertising deals, high school sports’ results and church information — and display them geographically on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.

Multimedia overkill: Using photo galleries, video, audio and other multimedia tools, we’re focused on telling the stories of the Loudoun area in innovative ways. As with the breaking news, the buy-in we’ve received from the Post reporters in the bureau has been impressive. Along with our stories of the county fair, we had daily photo galleries and videos. And we shoot four videos for our high school game of the week: a highlights’ video, an interview video, an analysis video with a Post reporter, and the halftime show.

My favorite multimedia packages are done by former Washington Post photo editor (and former Lawrence Journal-World managing editor) Bill Snead, who puts together weekly packages, which are a huge hit on the site. (His stories and images often end up running in the print edition of The Washington Post.) He’s done a story about being a first-grader in Loudoun, being a woman police officer/member of the SWAT team, being a life-long resident of rural Loudoun, as well as elaborate pieces featuring photos from nearly every high school prom in the county and even local weddings.

There are not many journalists who understand what Washington Post journalism and 20,000-circulation newspaper journalism tastes like. Snead does, and he shows this sensibility while using several multimedia tools from his storytelling tool belt. But not all of the multimedia on the site comes from journalists. In some cases, video arrives directly from one of the many Webcams we have positioned near Loudoun highways.

Evergreen content: Put together once and given some rare care and feeding, this content can basically last forever. Our site has big sections on the history of Loudoun, a moving-in guide for new residents, and a “Loudoun 101” overview. These sections also relate to editorial topics. For example, there is a massive guide to AOL with a detailed financial snapshot of the company dating back to 1992, lots of multimedia (including 360-degree panoramic photos of the AOL campus in Loudoun), and stories about the company — and its predecessors — dating back to 1989. A similar section exists for Dulles Airport, including hundreds of Post stories gathered since 1957. (Four people spent a week copying, pasting and in many cases typing in stories dating back to when the idea for “Chantilly Airport” was first conceived.) There’s a virtual tour inside and outside the airport and a gallery of historic and current photos, links to flight information, coverage of the Metrorail extension to Dulles, and a traveler’s guide to the airport. This means that when these topics become headline news, these huge sections exist to give our readers more perspective and information.

Platform-independent delivery: We want our site’s content to work in any format—video, text, audio—and on every site and device our readers might use, whether it be on mobile phones, iPods, MP3 players, game consoles, iGoogle, MyYahoo, Facebook, or on a desktop through customized widgets. Schedules can be downloaded to Microsoft Office calendar or iPhones. And we’ve spent lots of time building mobile versions of our site with the latest news, movie listings, calendar information, or info on where to get dinner. We also do a lot with text messaging to mobile phones. We send game updates for local high school football games or reminders to people that they wanted to attend an event listed in our calendar. We often joke that if we could figure out how to beam content directly to your brain, we would.

Audience dialogue/community publishing: On nearly every page of the site, readers can comment. Without going into a ton of detail on how the proprietary system was built, it recognizes a registered washingtonpost.com reader, then takes it from there. There are a lot of blogs, anchored by a staff-written blog called Living In LoCo, which is Tammi Marcoullier’s take—and she seems to know everyone and everything—on interesting things in Loudoun County. Our audience loves her, easily making her blog the most-read thing on our site nearly every day. Because she is a well-connected former AOL employee, she’s even broken some pretty big news on her blog. When AOL announced that it would lay off 2,000 employees, the e-mail sent to employees from CEO Randy Falco was first posted on her blog; the breaking news story on the home page of washingtonpost.com linked to Tammi’s blog.

The Linked Up in Loudoun blog is a continuously updated look at interesting items published on other sites by newspapers, news organizations, local homeowners associations, area volunteer fire departments, other bloggers in the region, and any other sites that discuss noteworthy happenings in Loudoun. The site also has a fairly lengthy local blog directory, and we do lots of live chats with community leaders, such as with the superintendent of schools or with local candidates. We’ve been blown away by the quantity and quality of the questions that come through those chats.

One of the custom pieces of software that we’ve worked on the most is our community-publishing tool that integrates content from YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. Though lots of other newspaper sites have their own community-publishing tools, as we did when our team was at the Naples (Fla.) Daily News, on LoudounExtra.com we decided to go a much different route — this time building a site that works the way the Internet really works, instead of how many news organizations wished the Internet worked.

Turns out that when people have shot great photos or video, they are much more likely to share those through sites like YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. So we’ve built software that allows us to get local content from those sites and move it to ours. YouTube, Flickr and Facebook allow this; they even encourage it.

Using these strategies, we operate LoudounExtra.com, a constantly changing news site that was designed so its day-to-day workflow can be maintained by essentially one highly trained (and very motivated) editor. Even so, there will be times when we dip into our team’s intern pool for help, such as covering high school football games or on Election Night.

Will The Washington Post’s hyperlocal strategy work? We just don’t know, but that does not mean we are not going to try. The early results have been promising, as traffic and revenue numbers have exceeded our early projections and content initially created for the Web site continues to find itself more and more in the print product. Now we’ve started work on other regional hyperlocal sites to be released soon by The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com.

By any measure, we believe LoudounExtra.com — at least in these early stages — has been a success. And in a lot of ways, it seems a whole lot like how journalism felt to me when I was just a kid in Osage City.

First off, let me apologize for the lack of updates to my site.

For the last few months, things have been hopping around the Curley household and at the washingtonpost.com offices, and I haven’t had a lot of extra time. And when I have had some time, I’ve been going to Disney World and seeing some shows I’ve wanted to see.

(Betsy and I have a list of bands/artists we want to see before they die. Stevie Wonder, Genesis, Van Halen with David Lee Roth and Ozzy Osbourne are now no longer on that list.)

I do have to admit that I came dangerously close to posting something here about the Kansas Jayhawks’ win in the Orange Bowl, then decided it was probably better content for Facebook than here. Especially since I work with so many folks who went to Virginia Tech.

I’ve got three or four blogs close to being ready to post, but they all either are related directly to academia (which I’m waiting for college to get back into session before I post), or they are related to things that our team is working on at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

I’m hoping to post a blog about some of the new The Washington Post stuff we’ve been working on by the end of this week or early next week.

Anyway, back to the point of today’s blog …

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I want to congratulate my friends over at The Las Vegas Sun for the release of that newspaper’s new site. It is awesome.

And I feel a bit of personal pride in it, as well.

You see, several months ago, I got a call from Drex Heikes, who is an editor at The Sun. He told me how the family-owned newspaper — which is in what has to be the strangest JOA in the country with its much-bigger rival, The Las Vegas Review-Journal — had by design essentially become a local daily magazine that is inserted into the Review-Journal each morning.

(If you don’t know what a JOA is, you should read this wikipedia entry for a good primer on the subject, along with this story from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for an overview of cities that still have JOA newspapers.)

The Las Vegas Sun isn’t like any local newspaper you’ve ever seen. There isn’t any news in it about shootings or the vote from the previous night’s city council meeting. And the newspaper has no ads in it.

Heikes told me that since the newspaper’s format change about two years ago, it had really begun to find its place and voice in print. And with things starting to click, the newsroom’s top editor — Mike Kelley (another Midwesterner from the Kansas City area who has made good) — and the newspaper’s editor/president Brian Greenspun, wanted to begin focusing on building a new type of local newspaper website.

So, after all of this was explained to me, I was asked if I knew of an online editor who could lead a local news site like that.

I didn’t even have to think about it. I told them they should hire Dave Toplikar immediately. Dave was the long-time online managing editor at The Lawrence Journal-World before I got there, including being our sites’ top editor for the three years while I was in Lawrence.

I loved working with Dave in Kansas.

Dave is smart, hard-working, understands the Internet, and is a real journalist. (I’ve blogged about Dave in the past.) Yet, some time after I had left lovely Lawrence for the sunny beaches of Naples, Dave had been transferred from being the new-media editor to being a regular reporter at the newspaper.

Believe it or not, I kind of understand this. When new leaders come in, they sometimes want change. Either way, Dave was now pretty unhappy in Lawrence.

The timing was perfect for him to make the jump from Lawrence to Las Vegas.

So he did.

For the first few months, Dave and I would talk on the phone at least once a week to chat about how things were going. At one point, both Dave and Mike Kelley asked me if I could come out to Las Vegas to give a talk about what a local news web site could be and where things might be headed.

I told them there was actually a weird time available in my schedule in mid-June right before my family headed to Scandinavia (which I blogged about here). So instead of flying to Europe from Washington, D.C., our family’s trip detoured through Las Vegas.

After speaking with the staff of The Las Vegas Sun and its sister publications (the company owns/operates several weekly newspapers and glossy magazines in the Vegas area), Brian Greenspun asked me who else he should hire to do the things I talked about in my presentation.

I gave The Sun several names. To my surprise, the newspaper hired every single person on the list. Not some of them. All of them. They even added a few folks to the list who I hadn’t thought of. This new-media team at The Las Vegas Sun is full of friends of mine, as well as several other folks whose work I’ve always admired.

Dave from Lawrence. Doug Twyman from the Hannibal Courier-Post. Josh Williams from the Smithsonian Institute. Zach Wise, who worked Brian Storm and a cast of others on the amazing Soul of Athens project. Trent Ogle, a video journalist from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Andy Samuelson from KUsports.com; as well as a handful of other really talented new-media journalists.

You gotta give the company credit for investing heavily in a new-media strategy in 2008. Lots of newspapers were investing (at least a little) back in 1998, but how many are still investing now? From an online perspective, this newspaper seems to be going from zero to 100 miles-per-hour almost overnight. It’s impressive and refreshing to see in this time of doom and gloom in our industry.

The Sun’s new site was designed by former LA Times’ers Bill Gaspard and Tyson Evans, who were already on The Sun’s staff. (Yes, that Bill Gaspard — the former president of SND.) These guys have done something that I’m not sure I’ve seen another news site do — the area for the lead story changes design everyday.

I don’t mean the lead art changes. I mean the whole area changes everyday. It is designed to be “designed” everyday.

Will that work? I don’t know.

Is it cool? Damn cool.

Here are screenshots of how the lead story has looked on homepage for the first four days of the site:

The site has features that work well despite being in a JOA that forbids The Sun from posting any of its content online before it appears in the print edition of the newspaper: lots of web-only blogs produced by the newsroom; emphasis on local opinion, with the ability for readers to comment on everything; a ton of slickly produced local multimedia content.

I love the full-screen video and photo galleries. And it’s not just the technology that powers these features that impresses me. The actual videos and multimedia on the site look great and are about interesting things that the people who visit the site might actually want to watch.

(BTW — Zach Wise is going to be the next online newspaper rock star.)

I love how it seems like everything can be downloaded. I totally love the crazy 360-degree steerable photographs that also include 360-degree audio captured at the same moment as the image.

Some of the little attentions to detail on the site are really cool, as well. Check out the current-weather conditions graphic that is in the header of every page. Now look really closely at it. There are airplanes taking off and landing in the skyline.

The whole thing just feels very fresh to me, kind of like a local version of Slate.

While I was in Las Vegas for CES last week, I got to spend some time with my friends on The Sun’s web staff on a couple of different evenings after the conference. I’ve seen some of the other new things they are building that will launch over the next few months, and it’s some of the coolest shit I’ve ever seen a “newspaper” do.

I put quotes around “newspaper” because these folks aren’t acting like any newspaper I’ve ever seen, and that’s pretty dang interesting.

For more information on the new Las Vegas Sun site, you should read Dave Toplikar’s note to readers.

Or read the story that ran in The Sun this weekend about the new site, complete with lots of quotes from Brian Greenspun — which I’m guessing will make it must-read material for a lot of Tribune employees around the country.

I’m mentioned in that story and don’t deserve it. I simply told them to hire great people and then stay the heck out of their way. Trust me, that’s harder to do than you think it might be, but this new site feels like they’ve done it.

Again, congratulations guys! I am proud of you!

And never, ever hit on a 17.

If you haven’t read about the things the San Jose Mercury News is doing to try to make itself more relevant to readers, you should.

It’s fascinating. And, I know some of my friends might blow milk through their noses at this next comment, but I find it very admirable.

Here’s a link to the PBS MediaShift blog about it. And here’s a link to the newspaper’s ongoing blog about the project.

Normally, I don’t write about things like this on my blog, but this evening I got a message through a friend on Facebook that I should install a new app called “Rethinking the Merc.”

I rarely install Facebook apps unless they either mean something to me professionally or they mean something to me personally, which means I only have a handful of Facebook apps on my profile. And though I’m not sure where this app falls under those guidelines, I installed it anyway.

I love that the San Jose Mercury News is reaching out to readers this way.

As of right now, it’s too early for me to tell whether the app is any good or not. I just haven’t spent enough time with it. My first impressions are that it’s basically just a Flashified RSS feed of recent blog posts about the subject from the Merc’s site, which isn’t probably the best use of a Facebook app I’ve ever seen … but not the worst, either.

Just as I feel The Mercury News’ “Rethink” project seems admirable, I also find it admirable that the newspaper has tried to reach out to its readers via Facebook.

Good or bad, at least they’re trying and there is a whole lot to be said about that.

About ten days ago, I started writing a blog post about my updated thoughts on recent J-School grads and what skills I think aspiring journalists should be acquiring.

I promise I’ll finish that badboy soon (mostly because I’ve already got a ton of work in it), but I wanted to comment on a somewhat related post that I saw this morning on PJNet. I encourage you all to read that post.

A lot of what I’m blogging about today I also sent in an e-mail to Leonard Witt at PJNet.

Here goes:

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My message to young journalists hasn’t changed in years:

Be able to write and report your ass off, and have a great mindset when it comes to how we might need to tell those stories — regardless of the current technology or methods of distribution. I believe in my heart that the key to being a successful journalist now (and in 25 years) will rest in a reporter’s ability to write well.

I would encourage you to read this old post I wrote earlier this year, which is basically an answer to an e-mail question Bryan Murley sent requesting thoughts for collegiate journalists for a piece on Murley’s great “Innovation in College Media” site.

I think you’ll see my message is quite strong about being very good at the core journalism skills:

“Know how to write. Know how to tell a story. Know how to conduct an interview. Know how to research your ass off.

“When you combine strong traditional journalism skills with a great mindset, you’ve got a journalist who’s going to be fine regardless of what new things or technologies come our way.”

When a J-School that I worked very closely with a few years ago changed its curriculum to be more “converged,” the most distressing thing I noticed in the school’s students was a deficiency in basic writing and editing skills … and I wasn’t quiet about it.

My biggest problem with a lot of young journalists is that so many of them have the crappiest attitudes on the planet. So many of them are so close-minded that it’s shocking, especially if these folks represent the future of our industry.

To be honest, I’d love to give them all the writing test that all members of our new-media team have to take just to show them that they’re not nearly as hot as they think they are.
🙂

But let’s get back to the post on PJNet that started this ramble: I’m not really sure today’s journalists have to pitch and catch. I honestly don’t know.

My best guess is that it’s about them knowing how to do one of those things extremely well, and then understanding how important the other positions on the field are.

And that’s where most of them seem to fall flat.

My biggest question to J-Schools now is why are your students so dang close-minded? Where was that instilled, and what are you going to do to help them graduate with a degree and a mindset that will keep them employed as long as they want to be members of the Fourth Estate?

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Well, I gotta go now. I’ll try to come back later today to look over this post again to make sure that I haven’t embarrassed myself too much.

Besides, the Jayhawks are on TV right now. Priorities.

Our company’s chairman, Don Graham, is probably as big of a Facebook fan as you will find.

Though he’s only had a Facebook account since probably July or August of this year, the guy knows more about how the site works (and more importantly, what it means) than probably any other traditional media executive in the country. And he hasn’t just jumped on the bandwagon — he’s been talking up Facebook for at least two years that I know of.

The guy flat-out gets it.

So, as our team here at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive was building our company’s first Facebook app — The Compass — back in May, there was no bigger supporter of the project at The Washington Post than Don Graham.

And he really liked The Compass, probably as much for the risks we took in building it as for what the app actually did.

But Don is a news guy. And he really wanted our team to build a real, honest-to-God news app for Facebook. He even had a concept for it.

I’m guessing the first call or e-mail about it came from him in September. He wanted us to build what he called a “news tracker” that would be powered by the content from The Washington Post, but integrate seamlessly into the Facebook environment.

We learned a whole lot about the Facebook universe with The Compass, and our biggest misconception was that the Facebook crowd wouldn’t want news content.

Though I still believe it’s true that the vast majority of those who turn to Facebook multiple times a day aren’t going there for traditional news content, I didn’t fully understand that you don’t need the vast majority of the Facebook community to like something in order for it to really work. It’s such a big place, you only need some of them to want or like it in order for it to still be quite effective.

Kind of like a newspaper.

You see, the monthly numbers to Facebook are so massive it’s hard for most newspaper sites to grasp them. A recent story in Wired magazine said the site is signing up nearly 1 million new users a week, and currently has more than 36 million users. More importantly, the story said, “the fastest-growing segment of Facebook users is over 35, a group that represents 11 percent of all site users.”

I’ve often heard that Facebook generates more than 40 billion page views a month. And you only need a fraction of those folks to want news in order for something like a “news tracker” to make a difference. So, we set out to build one.

The premise was simple: Enter one or multiple search terms and the app will search not only washingtonpost.com, but hundreds of other news sites to see what’s out there right now. The app would also show a search cloud of your Facebook friends’ search terms, and then throw in some breaking news from The Washington Post just so you’d know the latest.

And because it’s a social-networking site, we’d make sure all of those elements could be shared and commented on throughout your Facebook network.

Then, after having been blown away by some of the things that Bob Cauthorn is working on with his suite of CityTools features, I knew I wanted to ask him for help on the app, which he graciously provided.

Though Bob did so much behind the scenes to help us on this app that I’m a little embarrassed to list all that he did, one of my favorite parts of his CityTools site became one of the features of our news tracker. He calls it “ambient” news. On our app, we call it “Hot News Topics,” and what it essentially does is look at the most common words that are showing up in news stories around the world and then builds a tag cloud from them.

The actual “newsTracker” app was built by WPNI programmer extraordinaire, Deryck Hodge, who did an amazing job with it. In all the years I’ve been lucky enough to work with Deryck, this is one of my favorite things he’s ever built.

The design, which I think is amazing, was done by Jesse Foltz, who once again has shown that he’s a master at making something look really elegant while keeping things imminently usable. Jesse is a genius at building intuitive user-interfaces.

One of my favorite things that these guys accomplished in building the “newsTracker” app is that it’s simple to use, but if you’re a real news junkie, it has lots of other cool features to help you.

But my favorite part of this app is that it’s not done.

Once we launched The Compass, our team had to move directly to another project. It only took about 24 hours for us to realize we wanted to make several tweaks to that app, but we simply didn’t have the time.

For the “newsTracker,” we’re going to continue tweaking this badboy and we aren’t going to stop until it’s exactly like we want it.

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You can add the “newsTracker” app to your Facebook profile by visiting this link.