Knight-Batten Symposium 2004 Transcripts

“AOL Election Guide 2004”

Gary Kebbel: Thanks Jan, I appreciate it. This speaking invitation frankly is a hoot because I’m always going to remember the fact that I was asked to submit an entry. We submitted an entry, we won nothing, absolutely nothing. And then I’ve been asked to speak about it. So all week I’ve been telling people that we’re losers. I like “notable entries” a lot better.

So in this category of notable entries we wanted to point out the fact that one of the things that we tried to do is to build upon everything that we did in our previous election guide, which was election 2000. So in that we had all the functionality, we had the Zip code lookup that allowed you to put in your Zip code, find your congressional district, match it to anyone running in your district, match it to your voter services, have a link to women voters and democracy nets, issues guides on the election, and all of that in one place with the Zip code lookup.

So we wanted to build upon that and try to do something different and distinct and unique so what we decided to do was to focus on what everybody’s sort of lamenting, the 18-to-35-year-old vote, and the 18 to 35 year old core. What will attract them? What will help them get interested in politics, educate them a little bit, and where can we go to get them? We decided that the place to go is where they are—comedy. And consequently we made a deal with Comedy Central and with the Onion.com for our election coverage.

You’ll notice from the site map here we have lots of the other stuff. We have all of the serious stuff: we have the presidential page, we have deals with Congressional Quarterly, a national journal. Anything you need about the election, you can look it up here. But what we felt we wanted to do was to try, in the idea of civic journalism to see what we could do for the 18-to-35-year olds. So our first attempt was a little comedy. We hope we can both educate as well as make people laugh or visa versa, and let’s hope it works. If it doesn’t, you will understand why I’m a notable entry.

And then there’s that sound issue.

[AUDIO: … and what I can only assume is a warm-up to the frogs and locusts. Our streets are swarming with suburban Republicans. But at least I know these Republicans hate being here as much as we hate having them. But if there’s one thing Democrats and Republicans in the other 49 states can agree on, it’s how much they hate New York. Even President Bush is only coming by for one night. If it weren’t for the all-important Ground Zero photo op, I think he would rather just conference call in his acceptance speech: “Sorry folks, I’d love to be there, but the sagebrush on the ranch isn’t going to burn itself.” Anyway I finally bit the bullet and went to the convention today. And get thi, with all the security and crowds, the Republicans have managed to make a trip to Penn Station even more depressing. If there’s anything worse than a bunch of shops selling cheese-stuffed pretzels, it’s having machine guns pointed at you while you’re buying a cheese-stuffed pretzel. Come on. I’m eating a cheese-stuffed pretzel. I already have a death wish. At least I finally got to visit the convention floor and rub elbows with the GOP. What a wacko bunch. And I thought all the zeroes were in the national deficit column. Boy. The GOP saves all its glittery stars for the Wednesday afternoon post-lunch speaking spots. You know if I want to be bored to death in Madison Square Garden I’ll just go to another Emerson, Lake & Palmer concert and fall asleep into my wine skin.]

Gary: So Comedy Central did several of these for us through the primaries, and they’ll be doing it again on election night. So we have a deal in which we can use these. We also made a deal with Bill Maher for audio commentary, and I’ll show a quick one here. Not quite as funny, but perhaps a little more educational.

[AUDIO: Hi, this is Bill Maher with a new, new rule: Deaniacs Unite. Now that Howard Dean has dropped out of the race, everyone is wondering what all the Deaniacs will do, other than return to their parents’ basement and the Lord of the Rings chat room. Will they work for Kerry, Edwards, or just stay home on election day? Well, let me be the first to say, that all the years those Deaniacs, in case you didn’t learn anything from the 2000 election, the big neon-lighted lesson was that you have a choice to make. It may not be the one you like, but that doesn’t mean you should be like the disgruntled right-wingers who won’t vote for Bush because he hasn’t proposed a holiday for the rapture yet. You vote for the person whose platform comes closer to what you believe. There will never be a candidate who will be all things to all people because Bill Clinton can’t run again. So don’t act like idealistic college students, even though most of you are probably idealistic college students. Now for his part, Dean said he won’t endorse Kerry and Edwards until one of them comes up and beats him in arm wrestling.]

Gary: So we had several of those from Bill Maher, particularly through the primaries, and we’re hoping to have more of them. But as we were building the site and deciding to focus on elections, we also decided, you know, a lot of the bare stuff of election coverage is frankly boring. Primary schedules, what do you do with that? And so as we were thinking about our election coverage we thought, what we really need is an 8­year-old to tell us what they like about games. And then let’s listen to that 8-year-old and build the site accordingly. Well, we didn’t have an 8-year-old, but we had executives, and so they were the next best thing. So our executives were like, bells and whistles, bells and whistles—can you get sound? So we ended up doing as much of that as we could and that’s how we ended up with the site that we have. It’s not only comedy, but we also have editorial cartoons, and I, we have animated political cartoonists that use Flash to also make their point.

[AUDIO: … Minister of Fear: Look out. Oh my God. Remain calm. Code Yellow. I repeat, Code Yellow. As you were. You never know where the terrorists might strike. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Florida … Look out, we’re coming, we’re coming. But in a non-specific unsubstantiated way. Still. We might have to disrupt the democratic process because terrorists want to disrupt the democratic process. Minister of Fear. Citizens remain calm. Everything is fine. Oh my God. Oh my God. Go about your business. Remain calm. Code yellow. Repeat, Code Yellow.]

Gary: That’s by Mark Fiore from San Francisco, one of our political cartoonists. To show that we’re not all fun and games, and we do actually believe in the seriousness of the process, we have what many have started to do which is an election guide type of tool that steps you through the issues, lets you vote on where you stand on the issues, and then matches that to the candidates white papers on those issues.

The nice thing about this is that, it allows you to rate the intensity of your belief on any of these issues, and there are social issues as you can see here, crime, education, security, etc., outlaw partial birth abortions—do you oppose strongly, favor strongly, or are you in the middle? Equal rights for civil unions—oppose strongly, favor strongly, in the middle. And we step people through every issue area on that. Then what we think is unique and different in ours is that we allow you to rank your overall opinion on the issues themselves and then all of that is combined together to tell you that you are an 82% match with so-and-so and a 16% match with so-and-so.

This was particularly helpful during the primary campaign when we had—what was it—10 or 11 candidates. We will be retooling this and doing it again very shortly for people as we get closer to the election.

Something else that I wanted to emphasize is our convention coverage, which is a combination with ABC News Now. You might have heard that ABC News Now is their entry into digital television and 24-7 is their attempt to have a cable network without having a cable network. One of the things that they did on that is a lot of convention coverage.

So during the conventions, they would have a four-or-five-hour show, Peter Jennings would be broadcasting, but it was only on either AOL or Real or anyplace that subscribed to AOL News Now. As Tom Brokaw says, the six other people in the country who could get it via TV. What was good about this for us was that it was a combination of AOL and ABC in which we were able to work with them and have one of our editors in New York City at ABC taking questions from the members so that they would be read on the air and then answered by Peter Jennings or any of the others.

So this is Matthew Greenberg, one of our AOL news editors, in New York — you can see he dressed up for this — and within one hour he had 10,000 e-mail questions from AOL members during the Democratic and Republican national conventions. He would go through these on the air and say, “Well, I see a lot of e-mail here from AOL members who are saying, Sam Donaldson, is saying frankly something sort of the opposite of what you are saying. What AOL members are saying about this issue is such and such.” Then that would set up a debate with Sam Donaldson who would basically say they were stupid and here’s the answer, and it would go on and on. But the back and forth was nice and in the fact that AOL was participating with ABC on this was incredibly helpful.

While this was going on and later in the night while ABC News Now was broadcasting the speeches themselves, we would also do this insta-poll. We would send up sometimes up to 24 polls a night, based on what someone was saying and what people had just heard. This is where we made our executives happy. So that’s what people would see. While the video was going on the viewers would be alerted that there is a poll, they would see the countdown clock, they would have 90 seconds to vote, after 90 seconds they would see the results displayed. And it worked out very well for us, and then we would continue the evening with that and on here on the page itself is the place to submit a question for Matthew. So we tied all that together and again tried to do as much of interactivity as we possibly could.

Another element of that interactivity is the delegate diaries. We rounded up six to 10 AOL members who were delegates at the convention and had them in essence blog during the convention, write their opinions, and then we would trail them with our photographers at the convention and have both a photo gallery of their activities as well as their comments about not only what’s going on on the floor but what’s going on after the floor—New York City, the parties, you name it.

Jan: I wanted to ask, what were the traffic patterns? What was the most popular thing that was on this site? What really got people going and conversing?

Gary: Conversing was this combination of the video and the insta-poll, because you could submit, you could vote, and you could listen and watch, and at the same time through other areas of our coverage we had the usual message boards and chat rooms. During the Republican Convention we had more than a million, on-demand streams that we had at the end of the convention each night.

I need to mention that Kathleen Hayden, who runs the site and Andy Kozac, worked incredibly hard to make all this work. It’s two people on this whole site, and they would work with ABC to break the live stream down into on-demand segments, and these on-demand segments we would feature later in the evening along with a lot of votes — you know what did you think about Bush’s foreign policies, domestic policies, overall — we would have audio clips on his “I accept the war on terror” jab at Kerry and then video highlights. Those had about a million streams and for the live on-demand, it grew every night during each of the conventions and was an all-time record for AB. They are so flipping out over it that for the debates they’re now telling us “What can we do for you?”

Jan: Do you feel that people got informed? Do you see people saying, this made me smarter in any way about what I need to do as a voter? No? You’re just following your gut.

Gary: We get feedback in the sense that in one hour we get 10,000 e-mails in an hour and those e-mails are informed questions.

During the Republican convention we are not getting e-mails that say “Thank you for doing this, I now feel smarter.” But the questions that they are submitting were wonderful.

Jan: I want to go to the audience and see if you have some questions.

Question: [Partly inaudible question about how the political comedy featured on AOL is left-leaning]

Gary: Well, it’s not all on the left because I didn’t have a chance to show everything, but you’re right, I mean that is sort of what I showed. We have also a deal with six comics, three from New York, three from LA, who we auditioned and we made them say you got to be either pro or con Democratic or Republican in your jokes. And so I don’t know how they did it, but several of them were on the Last Comic Standing this past time. So we were very conscious about trying to have a Democratic/Republican mix . . . It turns out the clip I have right here now is sort of down on the Republicans because it was made during the Republican convention, but during the Democratic convention [the comics were] attacking them as well.

Question: Do you have the ability to track your users and where they are writing from?

Gary: We don’t have a demographic breakdown. I would kill for that. That would be wonderful. What was going on during the 10,000 e-mails, you’ll be surprised. It was 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. on any night of the Republican convention, because our show, the AOL part of the ABC News Now, was 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. At 7 pm Peter Jennings or Sam Donaldson or somebody would come on to anchor. And so we were the pre-show for that. But again it was the back and forth of letting people know that we were going to take AOL members questions, we will answer them shortly. And we had promos for, you know, submit a question now. But at the convention itself at 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., squat wasn’t going on.

Question: If I was a non-AOL member, could I still access the coverage?

Gary: Yes, and thank you for bring that up, because one of the things about AOL’s election coverage is that the AOL upper management has always felt that this is part of its civic duty. All of our election coverage will be on the Web. The election URL is www.electionguide04.com, free, open on the Web.

Question: What is the impact of your project on a nationwide scale?

Gary: If you had asked this question next week, I could give you a little better answer. I’m leaving tomorrow for Korea, and I’m going to be talking to the Korean Press Foundation there, showing them this, getting their feedback, and learning from them from their portals. So I’ll get a little better sense of that later. Right now the only thing I know is that a certain percentage of AOL membership is throughout the world, number one, and number two we have a very high percentage of members who are in the military. And the military use AOL a lot to keep in touch with their family, whether it’s AOL or AIM. So we do have a lot of users around the world. I don’t have specific feedback from Ghana or Germany.

Question: [Partly inaudible question, re: demographics of AOL’s election coverage readers.]

Gary: AOL News has 24 million unique users a month. At that, you pretty much reflect America. You know it’s that large that we’re not skewed in any noticeable way. Those who go to AOL News are skewed slightly different from the AOL member. AOL News users are slightly better educated, slightly older, tend to be more married, tend to have kids, and own a home and have a higher income.

Question: A little bit — what’s typical?

Gary: If it’s slightly more male it’s like 52/48.

Question: [Partly inaudible question about making news content accessible to non-AOL members]

Gary: Well, with elections we’re always in HTML; in 2000 our elections were in HTML . . . But you’re right, it was only a year ago that AOL news switched to HTML out of our proprietary publishing system called Rainman. Despite being the largest news site on the Internet that’s only based on the at-home audience because we are not accessible at work because business computers, educational computers and government computers are not allowed to download the proprietary AOL client because they are afraid the businesses are going to be charged for it. So we were locked out of the at-work audience until last year when we went into HTML. That’s why we went into HTML. That’s what we are doing is attacking the at-work audience now.

“Canada Votes 2004”

Jan: Sue, let’s see what you do.

Sue Gardner: Okay, we are also one of the “notable entries.” I am from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and I’m going to walk you through a little bit about the broadcasting corporation so you know who we are, because lots of Americans don’t.

I believe the reason I’ve been asked here to talk to is because we had our national federal election June 28, and you are in the midst of yours now. So I’m going to talk a little bit about what we did, which may be interesting for you as you cover your election here. I have a quick PowerPoint. So that’s what our site looked like. I’m not going to walk you through the whole thing; obviously it was a massive endeavor.

Essentially this is our third election campaign that we were covering, our third federal election campaign, and we wanted to throw a bunch things at the wall and kind of see what stuck. So we did an enormous amount of things and I’m going to take you through a few of them.

But I’ll tell you about CBC first. We were founded in 1936, we are Canada’s only national public broadcaster, so very similar to PBS and Public Radio except we are the only one and cover the whole country. We offer radio services, we offer television, and since 1993 we’ve offered online as well.

We are the biggest newsgathering organization in the country. We have more than 800 journalists, depending on how you slice and dice the numbers. And our reputation, not unlike all public broadcasters, our reputation is for credibility and trustworthiness. We are thought to be a little stodgy, a little dry, quite different from the stuff that Gary did. We wish we could do more of that kind of thing—we’re not very good at it. We are best known for our coverage of Canadian federal politics, and political junkies love us. They may not always like what we do, but they love that we exist.

CBC launched in some form in 1993. I believe the first thing we did online was try to sell hats to people. It didn’t go over very well. Our news section launched in 1996, and today we are happily the number-one news site in Canada. That means for news site most visited by most Canadians, ahead of BBC, ahead of all our newspapers, ahead of CNN. We get 2.4 million unique visitors monthly. That’s in a country of 30 million people. We covered our third federal election online on June 28.

So I wanted to talk a little about what’s new since 2000, since our last federal election. We all know about the big trends, 24/7 news coverage, all-news cable channel, CNN, and stuff like that. Even just since 2000 I think all of these have come to pass since then.

… [The] environment has changed a lot and the upshot of it is there is more information available. People are starting to have an awful lot more control over when they get their news, where they get their news, and in what form they consume it. So the big question for the CBC was: coming up on this federal election campaign, what role do we play in that world? What is it that people want from us in this news universe? So we go back to our core principles. Our mandate from the government is to inform, enlighten and entertain Canadians—that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

Our goal in this election, not a surprising goal, is to give people information, to give them news, context and analysis that helps them better understand the choice that’s facing them. We want to give it to them in a way that suits the online media as much as we can. We want to be fast, we want to offer news 24/7 obviously. A big chunk of our audience is the at-work audience, so it’s people getting the news when they don’t have a TV, they don’t have a radio, they want it in the middle of the workday. We want to offer people depth, we want to offer them some control over what they get.

The Internet as we know is good at raw facts and data. Anybody who works in broadcasting here knows broadcasting is very poor at facts and data. It doesn’t convey information, hard information, well. So that’s a new thing that CBC can give the audience.

We want to do that online, and we want to offer a measure of interactivity and we struggle a lot at CBC with how much interactivity the audience wants with us. There are different kinds of interactivity. There is interactivity with the machine, the computer. There is interactivity with the CBC, with the journalists. And then there’s interactivity with each other. We struggle with what to give them there and how much emphasis to put on that. So I’m going to walk you through four things we did that we thought worked pretty well.

The first was candidate-riding profiles. It’s not a new idea, broadcast can’t do it, newspapers can’t do it. It’s too much shelf space. We had 15,000 candidates in the Canadian federal election, and we offered profiles of every single one of them, which was an enormous amount of work. We also offered writing profiles of our 308 Canadian ridings, so this was information if you just moved to a location or whatever, you could look up how many people live in this riding, maps, obviously am I in this riding, yes I am, how many people live there, what’s the ethnic breakdown, how much money do people make, do they tend to own their own home, all that sort of basic information.

Jan: Riding—is that a precinct?

Sue: Yes, you don’t use that word. The British use it too. It’s a precinct. So basically just a lot of information, a lot of context, an enormous amount of work to create one of the most popular things on the site.

We also offered a feature called the Daily Answer. Slate magazine has something very similar, the Daily Explainer. Do you know that? Do you know the Daily Explainer?

Canada CBC radio had a similar thing in the ‘80s. Essentially what happened was you would call in and leave a voice mail on the radio station’s answering machine, asking a question about anything, and then the journalist would go and find you an answer and go and broadcast it the next day. It was okay on radio. It was kind of clunky. You might not be listening when your answer got broadcast. It works a lot better online. It’s a nice use of the medium.

We thought it was a really nice use of the medium for CBC because it meshes together two things. The audience gets to interact. They get to drive the coverage. A lot of this information actually would be driving later stories on radio and television. The audience got to dictate where we went with things, which was nice.

The other nice thing, though, is that it taps into what people like about CBC: that they do find us credible and trustworthy. [When] they ask us something, they get an answer that they can believe. So that was nice.

The Red Book: in Canada, the liberals have been the governing party for quite some time. When the liberals campaign, their campaign promise is the Red Book. So if you look here, there are 17 categories of promises. Within each of those categories there are 5-10 individual commitments made to Canadians. This is an accountability exercise.

One of our journalists spent almost a month and went through every promise made in the Red Book, went back to the government and said “Did you keep the promise?” and then went to outside organizations as well. In this case, on the environment, they went to the Sierra Club and they went to the organization of economic development. They got outside views, they sent people off to links, external links if they wanted to go and find out more information on their own. So it was a massive exercise. Probably 150 separate articles, maybe 500 words long each. A massive endeavor, and a real public service, like accountability. Useful for people.

And then probably the most important thing that we offered is live riding-by-riding results on election night. Our traffic on election night was huge. This is what people came for and we got tons of positive feedback on this more than anything else. I think this is really nice.

All it is, you’re watching the election. Most people watch the election on television, some, very few, listen to radio. What they get there is the overall unfolding narrative of the night, the big story. At the same time they could go onto our Web site [and get results] at exactly the same time that the journalists get them. So we are really opening the door. They can get them instantly. And they can follow it themselves. They can see what’s happening at this second as the results come in my own home riding, in the riding where I went to school, in the riding where my mother lives … I can follow the key races, you can slice and dice it however you want and track it as it comes in.

So those are a couple of things that we did. This was the result. This was the overall traffic for the vote section. So we found that interesting, and perhaps slightly disheartening in a way. One of the things about the Internet is, as we know, it’s the ultimate channel-surfing environment. You can’t make people care, which is why we’re so interested in Gary talking about getting at the youth audience, because we have an extremely hard time with that. There was not a lot of interest in the run-up to the campaign. Like we’re offering all this stuff. I mean those are not bad numbers. Those are okay numbers. But they are very flat.

By contrast, when we did the Olympics, the numbers were huge, straight through. We can’t make people who don’t care about politics care about politics. By contrast, on election night the numbers were enormous. Election night and the day before and the day after. Contributing to our fourth and fifth highest traffic days ever, our highest traffic days are always Wednesdays … following the Olympics; that was our highest traffic date ever.

… Anecdotally, the news is much greater lately. Public broadcasters have a warm and close relationships with their audience, so we got really nice response. They were really very happy with the Web coverage provided on election night. A lot of people used it the way we expected they would—they watched us on television and were on the Internet simultaneously. … And interestingly, 20% of our traffic on election night came from outside the country. Mostly patriot Canadians who were living abroad, but also people in other countries interested in the election and interested in Canada.

So, good results. Three or four quick things that we want to do better next time. … We want to offer more control on election night. We basically want a player [where] you can load in your own riding and watch [the results] change all night. We really have not the control over that. It’s so much part of the response we want to be able to do that even better. People really like that. We’re considering the possibility of offering some kind of instant analysis on election night that would be similar to the big coverage on TV and radio. Kind of a play-by-play message for the election.

We are also considering forums. Message boards with guest experts, not live chat, but we would have a guest expert for a week, and they are there and drifting in and out and corresponding with the audience. It can make it a kind of a little fun too because [these experts don’t like] answering questions, which is why they don’t like to do this. But as the Internet becomes more and more a playe,r we can more likely be able to get [these] folks to participate in that kind of thing.

… The candidate selector thing, I think, is the most interesting thing happening in our election coverage. We did not fare badly, despite our best effort. We want to do it next time. I think it is a huge public service, very engaging, very attractive and a lot of fun.

Questions

Question: [inaudible]

Sue: I’m interested to see where that technology progresses because I think it’s going to get really interesting. If you look at some of the commercial applications of a similar thing where it’s really sophisticated technology, and we can start using that, that would be a really interesting place to go …

Question: [Follow-up, re: the difficulty of getting people to specify their own views on the issues]

Sue: … Yeah, that’s the new part, that’s the part a lot of people are not doing yet. Which is, everybody’s rating the issues but then in that group of four questions on the economic issues, how does that group relate to corporate culture issues and security issues.

Question: You mentioned, how much do the changes of the American media seem to impact with the Canadian people?

Sue: What’s happening in the American affects the world. So we are always interested. We are just now in this past election trying to make our own kind of thing. We are very conscious of changes here, and try to learn from it so we can enter the market …

Jan: Questions from the audience?

Question: [How can you reach people who don’t care about politics?]

Sue: … A political junkie could care a lot, right? What the net has done for those people is incredibly powerful, because you have access to so much more, and you can follow in so much more detail. The part that I struggle with is how the net can [engage the unengaged,] right? I know that your voting level in America is even lower than ours in Canada. And how you can engage the unengaged is a challenge, but if they’re not out there, they are just not looking for it.

Gary: And I can fully agree with Sue. Engaged users and voters, obviously the Internet allows you to search and vote and dig in and find sources that you never would have found before. So it’s wonderful there. For the non-engaged user, AOL’s experiment this year is to reach them through comedy. Will that work? I don’t know. But that’s our attempt, and it’s a very serious attempt so to speak to reach the unengaged user and to try to educate them. We’re hoping that way, we don’t know yet.

Jan: Final questions?

Question: My question is for Gary. [Will significant messages get lost when disguised as entertainment?]

Gary: No, I think you are both sort of asking the same question: how will you know if this is working? Honestly, we don’t have the tools to evaluate that to give you a very good answer. So we have taken a half step of saying we feel we should do something other than what we have done before. We feel we should try very hard to engage the 18-35-year-olds. We have guessed that comedy is the way to do it. How that’s going to turn out, we’ll have to do surveys after the fact or even during it. We’ll have to do surveys to find out if it was effective. At the moment, the only thing I have is anecdotal.

Jan: I’m going to play traffic cop because we have to wrap up. We’ll take a five-minute break and our next panel will come up. And thank this panel very much.

Moderator: Dale Peskin, Co-Director, the Media Center at the American Press Institute.

Dale: I’ll open with two confessions for you. One is that I’m a recovering journalist. After many years in newsrooms, in news management, I now sit on the other fence analyzing media from the prospective of the audience. At the Media Center we talk about the new relationship between news and information that digital media and other media are creating with people.

The second confession is that I was a judge at this competition. So those of you who submitted notable entries, I want you to know that I voted for all your entries along with the other judges in the room, who you can talk to and I wish to introduce very quickly, including Bryan Monroe; of course Jan, whom you met, Mark Hinojosa from the Tribune, Jody Brannon, Lee Rainie who is with us a bit, and Chris Harvey. So thanks.

One of the things that the judges really look for is the quality of journalism and the relationship that this media creates with the audience. This is something that the notable entries, and indeed the winners really demonstrated. Some quality of journalism and innovation in this new relationship made them outstanding in a unique way. I think all the judges will echo that in different kinds of ways here today.

The three things you are going to see I think represent different bases in starting news operations. We have Adam Howell from the Winston-Salem Journal, a local news operation, which did some extraordinary journalistic work; we have Shawn Bailey, the senior producer at the CBC, a national operation in Canada; we have Theresa Riley from Point of View Interactive in public television. All three offer different kinds of perspectives into news operation. I am going to let each one of them talk about their projects, where they came from, the extent of their operations, and how they approached all of this, starting with Adam.

“Murder, Race, Justice: The State vs. Darryl Hunt”

Adam Howell: I am out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We are currently a three-person team, and at the time we did this last year we were a three-person team but one person has moved on, so now we are a different three-person team. In a couple of weeks we will be a four-person team. We tackled this beast knowing that it would be the biggest thing that we have done.

A little background on why that is exactly. In Winston Salem in 1984 a 20-year-old black man with cornrows named Darryl Hunt, who kind of hung out in liquor stores and other seedy places, was accused of killing and raping a 20-something young white woman, a copy editor at the Winston-Salem Sentinel. She was on her way to work one morning in August and was brutally raped and stabbed to death. During the investigation there were no real solid leads. But after about a three- or four-week investigation, police eventually narrowed it down to this one black man, Darryl Hunt.

Over the span of 20 years since it happened there were three trials and even more stories written about it. Because of new DNA evidence that came up towards the end of the year, Phoebe Zerwick, who became our investigative reporter after the story’s success, decided to delve back into the story in 2003. This created a general uneasiness in the community and in the paper somewhat. Many people were worried that there would be no breaking news for the story and no reason to re-hash it other than for entertainment. But the largest breakthrough she had in the story was a man named Willard Brown, who had actually committed an almost exact crime two weeks after the Deborah Sykes murder. He was never investigated because police believed that he was in jail when he wasn’t; he was actually on the streets. Her story mentioned that for the first time publicly. [Eventually,] it became an eight-part story.

After the story ran, police reinvestigated and looked back at Willard Brown. It happened that when his DNA was cross-checked with the database of the states, that he was in fact the murderer of Deborah Sykes. He gave a full confession and is now in jail. Darryl Hunt has been fully exonerated. He was released on Dec. 24, 2003, so he had a very good Christmas. It was a good story to work with. We had a lot going for us going into it. So that’s the background for the story.

What we did was print an eight-piece story and we ran somewhere around 700 pages full of documents, 20 or so documents which were multiple pages that covered everything from eyewitness testimony to original 911 calls, wanted posters, etc. The look that we were going for was kind of a, as you can see, a photo metaphor, giving the idea that the viewers themselves were going through and looking at all the different evidence. Though we thought it was a really cool idea at the time, looking back on it, it was kind of more trouble than it was worth.

As you will see, we have an iframe [inline frame] and there is a lot of scrolling and a lot of different parts to each story. But I’ll talk about that later. We had an archive of old journal stories to go along with the documents, and that archive went all the way back to August 11, 1984. We tried to re-hash and look back at how the paper covered the story from start to the finish. And it was actually pretty interesting because the story was very biased against Darryl Hunt back in the 80’s, and has since pretty much turned face.

We also had about 20 Flash files which ranged anywhere from audio to interactive maps, and because DNA was such a large part of the case, a DNA quiz. We also had a timeline of events, maps and photos, key locations of the murder.

The biggest draws, as far as public reaction goes, were the documents, because it was the first time they were released publicly for everyone to pursue—and people did. Second was an interactive map. Witnesses recanted, they changed their story, and so we created this interactive map to try to simplify the process. You could walk through what each witness said they saw, and then by looking on a 360-degree shot, you could see what they saw. And we went and we took 360-degree photos of the crime scenes, and then you could “virtually” walk through and see exactly what they saw and had a much better idea of what exactly happened. This took us a long time to try to figure out.

On the public reaction, at first some of the members of the community were angry for us bringing this story back up again. It was a very divisive story, racially, in Winston-Salem and pretty much stayed that way for 20 years. There were many members of the community who always thought he was guilty and said they always would. One of those people was Deborah Sykes’ mother, who, at Darryl Hunt’s exoneration, made a speech about how she did not believe his innocence mainly because she just wanted closure.

What would we have done differently with the story? Number one would be less metaphor, mainly because it is not easy to work with, as I am sure you all know. When we began the epilogue, we started finding out that Darryl Hunt [might] be released. We had to knock off the multimedia tab because there just wasn’t enough room, and so now the multimedia is kind of hidden away in the stories. That was obviously a pretty big problem. Next time we will try to hold off on the metaphor a little bit. Avoid iframes as kind of rule. We thought you could print out of iframes, but you actually print the entire page, which I now know.

Project and content management [files] are all flat files. We tried through Dreamweaver to check in and out files, but it just doesn’t work very well. And being a small paper, we are kind of controlled by Media General, which is our umbrella corporation. They let us do very few things, so flat files are often the only way you have to go. Hopefully in the future we will be able to change that.

Early on we started working with prints and conducted interviews. We did audio with [Deborah Sykes’] mother and with Darryl Hunt, but we could have started even earlier and tried to do video, try to do more audio, try to get more documents, etc.

Dale: What made you select the Darryl Hunt story for expansion into an interactive, online project?

Adam: This was a pretty easy one because it is the most well-known trial in Winston-Salem history. We have a story coming out now, an upcoming story of another black male who was in the area when a woman was beaten in a parking lot, and her baby died as a result. But the woman was being stalked possibly by her boyfriend. He was never investigated, but was arrested. The black man was arrested anyway. As it turns out, we seem to do racially charged stories, but maybe we’ll get over that and move on eventually.

Dale: Adam, another question we get is the research question. A lot of smaller organizations say we don’t have the resources to sort of attack a project of this scale and scope. Could you talk a little bit about sort of the issues of that you may face in the newsroom, and what expense it did to normal operations and the kind of decisions that went on about a project of this scope and scale?

Adam: Well since then we have focused more and more on turning a profit. Unfortunately, projects like this, without ads, are tough to fight for. We ended up working a lot of late nights because it was such a big project and we were only three people. Our boss always said that you just play to egos. If you make it worthwhile to us to do it, then I guess we will stay and do it. But that’s a rare thing. Luckily it came together. I hope it will come together again in the future. Three or four people just playing their strengths seems to be the only way to do it. You need to have one person who is good at amassing information, which helps to document.

Dale: We have a question here.

Question: How did you involve your audience?

Adam: With each day of the story in print we released the story online with relevant documents and multimedia. We had users give us ideas on what to do, give us leads at what would be more interesting, what the best audio would be, and what the most gripping story would be. But they also came and they proofread and double-checked everything. And we were very lucky to have a very involved editor and a very concerned reporter because this was her story and she knew this was really big. As a result, they were more involved than most people would probably be.

Question: Is the Web site affiliated with the newspaper?

Adam: We are. We sit in the middle of the newsroom, the four of us and everyone else, and each night’s stories we put through on the Web.

Question: One quick thing about the documents. Are they all original documents—just public records that they picked up?

Adam: Yes. I should have told you. I probably said it was the first time they were released publicly. It was the first time they had been amassed publicly is what I should have said. They were all public documents. They were also the reason we did the file analogy, because there was a file in the Winston-Salem police department, which has bolts and locks wrapped around files and folders that still have not been released publicly. In the future maybe we can get them with the others, but these were all publicly released and just never actually looked at.

Question: Can you talk a little bit more about the kind of work and responsibilities between your group and the newspaper group? It is really an interesting question that everybody grapples with. Where does the editorial leadership take place, what is your job, how do you fit into everything?

Adam: I will try to explain, because I am just a player in it. I am kind of directed at what to do—you know, “Adam, you’re kind of good at Flash, why don’t you make this map?” And we sit around and we talk about it. We come up with the idea. These stories were the exact stories that were written in the paper. As you can see we added where we thought appropriate. This was our call totally, where to put witness statements and links to the map and what to choose to put here, and we really only reported back to our immediate boss, the content manager.

We knew what the stories were. We had all eight stories already in front of us, and so we read through them and picked and chose what to make and then we just kind of delegated amongst ourselves. There isn’t much formal direction with these big projects; it is more what you all think you can do and pick four or five ways, do it, let print read it and okay, and then just make sure the packet is in order. So it is not as sophisticated as it probably should be, but that’s just kind of how it happened with this.

Question: But there is some advocacy in your newsroom to go ahead and embark on a project like this? It takes someone in the organization.

Adam: Yeah. We have lots of support from upper management to really push [inaudible] which is really nice.

Dale: I am going to take one more; we will all have a chance to ask additional questions after. But please, one more.

Question: I’m still not sure, was the reporter for the Web site—or a reporter for the paper?

Adam: We actually don’t have reporters. It’s just us packaging content written by the print side.

Dale: We’ll come back and have another opportunity for Adam, but we want to share some other ones. The second project we want to look at was a different kind of story and a different kind of investigation. It was an investigation by the CBC into the crash [of] Swiss Air 111, which you may remember in Canada. A big complicated story that raised questions of why and how come. We’ll have Shawn Bailey here.

 

“The Nature of Things: The Investigation of Swissair Flight 111”

“I was called into a secret meeting … nine days before this documentary was to air. I was told about the Swiss Air 111 movie that we had coming out and that it needed a Web component. And I said ‘Great, what do you want?’ and they said, ‘Everything.’”

—Shawn Bailey

Shawn Bailey: I’ll give you the background first on this project, because it is quite different from anything we have ever done. This is a culmination of a 4-1/2 year investigation, and it was something where other news groups had only been allowed specific media spots to cover.

So there was a confidentiality agreement that was put in place with the Transportation Safety Board, with the Government of Canada, with the Swiss government and with Swiss Air. I was called into a secret meeting by our vice president of television and the executive producer of the program, Michael Alden, nine days before this documentary was to air.

I was told about the Swiss Air 111 movie that we had coming out and that it needed a Web component. And I said ‘Great, what do you want?’ and they said, ‘Everything.’ So I said okay. Because none of us on the team had actually been covering this as a story, I suggested we go to the journalists who had been covering this at CBC, and they said no you can’t, secrecy, confidentiality, and we cannot breach that.

So I said, “Okay, can I see the film?” and they said, “No.” Can we speak to the investigators, and they said “Yes, good luck.” So it ended up through perseverance we were able to track down the TSB investigators and work with them. They did open up a number of files to us. What we had to do is look back to the news stories that had already been posted to the Web site on CBC and elsewhere and look for problems in the speculation-based research that existed before this report had come out.

The main thing we had to address was what happened, what brought this plane down, and mostly, the recovery process. This was something that had never really taken place before. So how we did that essentially was to do something with the flight during this first section. We wanted to recapture the flight, but not really go in-depth beyond retracing the flight path and the exact details of what happened in the crash. This was simply because everything up to that point had been speculation. We felt it was probably best to re-visit that and provide information we now had access to that had yet to be released.

What is going to come up here is a series of animations. What we intended to do with this here was to retrace the exact flight path so that it was documented factually. It was based on the flight data recorder, it was based on ground radar, so everything that you see is actually over-laid maps that we took from the TSB.

I have turned off the sound here, but David Suzuki is narrating now the exact process of events that led up to the last 20 minutes before the crash, because we didn’t want to have people sitting around waiting for something to happen while the Flash movie was loading.

The controls that you see in the corner in the bottom right are accurate; normally those are just eye candy. When we are asked to do things for television, it’s “Make it splashy, bells and whistles.” In this case, the executives had no idea we were even working on this, so we weren’t asked to put bells and whistles in. So what we did was we actually made it tell a story. The story it told was based on the actual flight data recorder. We programmed this so that the compass had as the altitude, the speed as is, from the investigation.

And the reason we did this was because this piece was international. We had what we thought might be a language barrier. We just did it in English as text. We wanted every possible angle we could attack on this to tell this story so that anyone in the world would be able to understand what was going on, through visuals, through the narration, through the video clips. So I will jump out of this for a second.

The three focuses that we put on were the recovery, the reconstruction of the plane, and how the fire spread. Now the most important was how the fire spread, which again for the purpose of language and understanding, we did as a series of video clips that track and trace where things were happening within the plane. If you have ever seen schematics and diagrams of how a plane is put together, it is millions of little parts. There is no understanding of what you are looking at. There are switches everywhere. So what is coming up here now is essentially a video in the corner that will show you exactly where the fire started. Then there is an animation that takes you through the plane to offer a real common understanding of what is going on.

Our hope was that by being able to track it to that red box that you see there, which moves as the fire moves around, we could show the exactly what is going on. We hoped that would give people greater understanding. Partially we wanted it because of the language. The other thing we were looking at were distraught families who were trying to understand what happened and that they were probably going to be asked to give interviews. We didn’t want somebody going out there just surmising what happened based on a 90-minute documentary film. So we really wanted this to be clear and concise to the point, another reason why we stripped back the graphics and made it very clean.

The color scheme was something that we looked at as well. It’s soothing, it doesn’t really distract from the content of the story. We thought that was quite important as a design. Normally everything is ‘make it look good, make it look splashy, make it have a big impact.’ Sometimes I feel that takes away from the content itself.

The memorial was something that we put together, just for reference purposes. We were going to have journalists from all over the world coming and taking a look at this. If there were any needs, they could reference them here. This was cleared by the TSB and the Swiss government. I’ll just scroll through the names. We wanted to create a piece aside from the fire because we also wanted to have a virtual memorial that represented what was happening through it. Two memorials are in place right now in Nova Scotia, and we just wanted someplace that reflected those spaces as well. We also offered information about the memorials, where they are located, why they were created, the sight lines. There is a story about the sight lines that you can read as well.

While people were waiting for things to load, we had an interactive map that we put in so that people could understand what ships were involved in this process, where they were located, references for the last known position of the flight, flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder, what each one of these ships performed in the recovery process. Most people spent a lot of time actually going through this and gained a lot of information where normally this would just be loading. So as we launched the piece, this became the story of the recovery, which was something that really wasn’t touched upon. That’s what we wanted separate.

What we wanted to do was add something beyond the documentary itself. News coverage as well as the documentary touched upon the recovery, but they touched upon it in a way that was just simply you know there’s a heavy lifting barge that has been brought in now, it is recovering the plane. Now they’ve switched to a scallop driver. What we wanted to look at was what that process meant, because this was a 4-1/2 year investigation where normally air crash investigations take a matter of weeks. This one was important in that the plane crashed in the ocean. They knew there was a fire involved. That meant that all debris that could be gathered that might lead them to the cause of the fire was actually part of the fire, as opposed to a post-fire, crash-burn scenario. So these investigators were away from home for 4-1/2 years, away from their families.

We wanted to tell their story as well as to what went into this recovery and why it was so important for flight traffic safety. As you go through this you can then look through the various points of this recovery process from the very beginning until the end, when they brought in this giant ship from the Netherlands that actually vacuumed the sea floor. So in the end they were able to recover 98% of the plane from the bottom of the ocean based on weight. They weighed everything. And I saw wreckage from this plane. Basically it was as if we all went six miles off shore, took all of the change out of our pockets and threw it overboard. Most of the pieces were of the dime/quarter size. So being able to recover that much material was an incredible endeavor that had never before been undertaken. We really felt that it was important to tell that story as well. And that was beyond the documentary or news reports that were currently in place.

Dale: Shawn, one of the things that struck the judges was the power of the visual story telling. There is very little narrative and very little text in all of this. I wondered how conscious that was of CBC. I know there is a broadcast notion to it, but I mean the emergence of a visual Web to tell stories, was that foremost in your mind in telling the story?

Shawn: Yes, we were very conscious of that. One because of the language barrier. We also wanted something that told the story without the text. I’m not online at the moment, but we do have an in-depth series on the Swiss Air site that goes into five years of recording; it’s an archive. So if technically you want to go back and read everything that’s been recorded about that crash, you have the ability to go there and do that. We didn’t want to recreate that here.

The technology now is to do a different kind of journalism through the animation and photo usage that you saw today. It was a synergy with the broadcast as well, that was the main reason for that. The other thing we got into was the plane.

Dale: Could you just spend a minute on that, and then we’ll go on and we can follow-up with some questions.

Shawn: Sure, okay. Part of why we did it visually and we stripped it back as well was to give details and explain, really show what happened based on evidence and not just instill fear. We didn’t want to have something that was very sensational and overbearing. We wanted to have something that just said, “This happened to this plane.” You could understand a bit that the design schematics of the plane and the plane itself was for the most part safe. It was an insulation planted that was faulty that brought the plane down. It was just to really stem the fears of people in terms of flight. So I guess for that I will leave it there since we are running out of time.

Dale: Well, we can come back and ask some more questions about how this was done at the end, but in the meantime, Theresa Riley is here to talk about her project from P.O.V. called “Borders,” a different kind of story that we as judges thought set an expanded standard of journalism in the media as well.

“P.O.V. Borders: Environment”

Theresa Riley: Hi, good morning. I’m Theresa Riley from P.O.V. I have a little background first on P.O.V.

P.O.V. is PBS’s longest running documentary series. We are a film series on PBS. We typically have between 12 to14 films per year, and part of Interactive is a Web site. We have three people on staff including myself, and throughout the season, a couple of freelancers here and there. We are a pretty small team and what we mostly do is create companion Web sites to the broadcast. And then P.O.V.‘s photos, which is what I want to talk about today is a Web-only series. We have a lot of fun on staff, trying to explore different ways to tell stories in the online environment.

Our content strategy at P.O.V. is to promote activities like learning, we are PBS, provide opportunities for further understanding of issues explored in our films, and foster discussion. One of the big reasons this series was started in the first place was to provide a national forum for people to watch documentary films and then be able to talk about them and discuss them.

And so with P.O.V. Interactive, which started in 1996, having an online component was a great help in that effort because people could go on and talk about films with each other in a way that they hadn’t been able to before. So today on the Web site we start to engage interactive viewers, and we also encourage them to co-author content, which means sharing stories of their own, their own experiences, contributing to conversations. That can be through a question or a comment for filmmakers or for characters in films, participating in polls, which we don’t do too much of but we do some of, and taking quizzes online just to find out more about their own perspectives and what that might mean on a national level.

P.O.V.‘s “Borders: The Environment” is the second episode of the series. It explores how the individual choices we make shape our environment. We draw on stories from across the country within the framework of three basic elements, earth, air and water.

I think what I’m going to do now is just show you a little bit of the site. … The point is to really engage them from the beginning, saying everyday we make choices about what we eat, drink, and breathe, and ask what do you choose, what are your choices. That sort of tells you right away what peoples’ thinking is about their daily lives.

For this intro we used Flash because we wanted to have people find different things happening as they moved around. So these are sort of previews of all the little stories that you will find. I’m just going to show you in our “Air” section.

This is the most traditional video story. Most video clips are between two and four minutes each. In our first episode, which launched in 2002, we found that a lot of our videos were a little bit longer and people didn’t really want to watch videos that long, or at least our audience did not. They were sort of confused that we were a TV show, with a Web site, and that the videos were going to be a half hour. They really weren’t interested in doing that. And so here we really try and sort of show that you have a little time here, it’s 2-1/2 minutes and actually has Larry David and it’s really exciting for people. You will see here his wife, his real wife, who actually is a big environmentalist and very interested in hybrid cars that he has several of.

[plays video]

I’m going to stop it there, so that’s one of the little videos, and the way that we sort of consorted this is there’s the video there but then there’s also some text there that you can read and sort of learn a little bit more on how this kind of fits in Hollywood and how it’s involved in environmental programs. And then also on the page we try and have just a whole bunch of different things that somebody can do to interact with the content themselves. We have a little pop quiz that you can take and then also we have this—which is where people can show their own stories about hybrid cars and where they stand on this issue. And we have gotten great response where people actually come out with a world of comments about the status of hybrid cars, and how popular are they in their neck of the woods. So you can sort of read what other people have to say and put in your own comments as well.

Another example is in the “Water” section. We found in our research that a lot more people listen to the radio as opposed to looking at images, so we wanted to do something that was more audio focused. In this particular story we wanted to look at the phenomenon of bottled water and try to figure out why, I think in the last 10 years, bottled water has gone up incredibly in the United States in terms of people buying it. It’s a $7 billion dollar industry. So our journalist here takes a look at the phenomena by going out on the streets of New York City and trying to convince people.

[plays audio]

A couple of more minutes, and you can obviously go to the site and check it out yourself if you want to watch more. This last part demonstrates the main point of this series, which is to look at a story in different ways. Taking an untraditional route, we wanted to use a game to convey a story so that a user experientially could sort of understand what was going on.

In this particular one we are talking about a farmer in Canada who was sued for over growing crops in his field that he hadn’t paid the license for. At the time that we made this, the case was still in Canadian court. So we wanted to show the story by actually having you play the role of the farmer in your field. His case was that the seeds had blown over from either a passing truck or another field, and that’s how they got in his field—it wasn’t something that he did on purpose. It turned out that he lost the case, but this is the problem throughout the world for farmers having things coming into their fields without them necessarily wanting them there.

In this game you sort of get to play with butterflies, not too much, but you get to sort of block the seeds, or you’re supposed to, before they fly into your fields. The real components of this is that if you make it through to the third bubble which is actually very difficult, but not too difficult—it can be done—we send you real seeds in the mail. You get to plant those in your garden. We thought this was really great in terms of having a real world component to an online activity. So you can take this and then go and plant them in your garden. And there are other things too.

Questions

Dale: Okay, let me ask the hard question. Here’s a site with sound and games and video and this stuff. How long did it take? What’s a project like this take to do?

Theresa: This took a long a time and this was our second episode so, our first prototype we designed had a very different-looking field. This one we designed with the intention of using as a template for future episodes. We’re hoping that future episodes will take less time. But in terms of getting this whole design and all the components, it probably took about four to five months. Obviously, we were also doing sites for the shows, so it was kind of like half time four or five months.

Dale: I should ask the same question of Shawn and Adam too. How long did your individual set of projects take to really put together?

Adam: Well, ours was nine days, with three of us working on it.

Dale: That’s extraordinary.

Shawn Bailey: My team is three people. No sleep. We had a couch. We actually had a closed environment. We had to build it in because of the confidentiality. We had a couch behind us so one of us would just rotate. Sleep on the couch for a couple of hours while the other two worked, in between jet-setting back and forth to Ottawa to meet with the TSB.

Question: I have a question on storytelling. There’s something explicit in all your presentations—what your theory of storytelling is or what you think has to work. How intentional was it? How accidental. Especially in nine days. How do you determine the storyline?

Shawn: A great question. For myself, we were visited by Gary (Kebbel)‘s Ministry of Fear. Fear is a powerful motivator. We simply sat down and we knew that the thing that we had to tell was how this plane was brought down. So that was the key we needed to focus on. It was just hard core research into that. Beyond that we just explored the recovery story. How did we do it? Just non-stop research and perseverance.

Question: Theresa, the same question. How did you conceive of the game as a storytelling device?

Theresa: Well for us you know we decided we wanted to make our theme the environment. We actually had a branch of environmental journalists who came together and we all talked about what stories were important right now in terms of issues. And through that we came up with the idea of just breaking it down to air, water and earth. Doing it that way let us concentrate on one story in each area, making it easier for people to understand and grasp right away. But these stories, we sat around talking about different ideas and the project did start with a story and then we decided how we wanted to do it. So it was more the story first, and then thinking about how we can best tell it. Through video, radio, or something else. Actually we are working on our next episode now and taking proposals for stories if anybody has an idea. But we want to use different ways of telling stories again just to keep trying different ideas and see what works and what doesn’t. But it starts with the story.

Question: Question for each of the panelists, perhaps starting with Theresa. How did you promote these packages? I say start with Theresa, because yours was a Web-only presentation.

Theresa: It’s a real challenge for us. Typically with the broadcast component we can, at the end of the show or even during the show, have little Web markers to pick out our Web site for information. So we actually sent out postcards to different organizations through our network of PBS local stations. Obviously our home page was featured on PBS. We also did some work with Grist magazine, which is an online environmental magazine. We’re going to . . . have one of their personalities come over and answer questions from viewers in our Border Talk section, which I didn’t even get to, but that was where you can really interact with people. A lot of grass roots promotion, like have interns go to other Web sites and post “Hey, check out this cool Web site.”

The other thing is blogs. We really tried this time to make an effort to advertise to bloggers. We’d send e-mails to bloggers that seem to be interested in these types of issues, and see if they could post things in their blogs. We had some success with that.

Shawn: In our case, we didn’t really have the ability to promote it beforehand because we weren’t allowed to say that we were working on this. As the news story broke, the TSB released a report [and] it became front page on the CBC home page. We had about five minutes before the announcement to scramble and get the story up. Beyond that we had a number of sites that the victims’ families had put up as well. We sent them e-mails just letting them know that the piece was out there, about an hour before the program had ended. A number of them created forums and linked to it from there.

The Swiss government had just disbanded their Web division and were trying to rebuild it so at the time they didn’t have anything. They pushed through it from their television program. At the end of the program, there was a round table discussion. … And then in the subsequent days there were other news stories that broke where they linked back and pointed to us. So for us it was more of an aftermath than before thought. Normally we try to push things in advance. Then just finding those Web sites where you can post stuff and say, “Hey, check this out.”

Dale: And Adam, in Winston-Salem, how did they discover it?

Adam: Usually with things that we do online, especially if they’re exclusively online, we just have shirttails in our print stories that say go to our Web site. We didn’t do a whole lot of promotion online other than to put it on the front page.

Dale: I think we have time for about one more question.

Question: You have a lot of really impressive animation on this site. Was it given to you from the broadcast, or did you also build that?

Shawn: We built the majority of it using Maya. So vis-á-vis CBC, but we have huge graphics departments with all the computers in place. We purchased a model of the plane, which saved us an enormous amount of time, and then we used that plane in animation.

Dale: Let’s take one more. Your turn to get in.

Question: Why did you pick the environment, and did you say that you found that the audience was more interested in audio-based rather than video, or how do you judge that?

Theresa: Just from general research out there. People listen to radio at work. While they are doing other stuff they are listening to the radio. Radio is huge on the Internet. In terms of the video stuff, just from testing we had done with people. They seemed to like the shorter clips better. They didn’t really seem to have … patience with the fact that obviously last week they just announced that … there’s more people in the U.S. using Broadband now than not. It just went over 50%, so who knows if the future of longer video will be possible, and the whole conversion issue, which they have been talking about for years but it might happen. That might have a place in future episodes, but right now we’re focusing more on audio. We just find people like it.

Dale: Theresa, Shawn and Adam are going to be around to answer more questions. I want them all to know that I voted for all three of you as the winners. Thanks a lot.

Jan Schaffer, Moderator: I have a special affinity for participatory journalism, because it really derives straight out of the civic journalism playbook. When we were doing civic journalism in the 1990s, all of the participation was at things like town hall meetings and deliberate focus groups. By the end of the decade, I think we were beginning to see how cyberspace could be as effective, or even more effective, than real space as a room for engaging an audience.

What I think these panelists will demonstrate today is how the processes of making news and consuming news are really changing. We journalists like to think that we are the ones who author or produce all the news. I think that what you are going to see today will strongly suggest that ordinary people, our audiences, are now much more involved in the process of making the news for themselves. Making their own stories. And they are building their own stories using the tools that we journalists give them.

Here today, this panel, I hope, will show you how this is evolving. And we have Kinsey Wilson who is Vice President and Editor in Chief of USA Today, who really sees round-the-clock on-line production of breaking news, sports, entertainment, business information to more than a million readers a day. He is also involved in content alliances [and] syndication distribution opportunities. Sean Polay is from Projo.com, the Web site of the Providence Journal in Rhode Island, and Sean Fagan … is Senior Producer at KQED, which is a public broadcasting station in San Francisco, and he likes to say he started his career as a struggling screenwriter, which as you read the bios outside you’ll find interesting. I would like to start today with Kinsey, to tell us how they did what is really kind of a feature, perhaps even an entertainment, story; how they created a new model for doing that.

“Sing My Song”

Kinsey Wilson: Sing my Song is the piece that we singled out for the award. The other two there are subsequent pieces that we have done online that, in a way, draw from what we have learned from that piece.

USA Today—if you even have a passing understanding of it, you know that visual journalism is at the core of what it’s editorial has been about since 1982, when the paper was founded. Information graphics in particular … raised that to a new level, I think, and much of the newspaper industry has followed. It was natural in 1995 when the site was launched that we would embrace that as part of our identity. Not only was the on-line medium suited to aspects of visual journalism—even in the early development of the Web—but it was something that would allow us to differentiate ourselves from the competition.

The big news sites that we were up against—CNN in particular at the time, soon MSNBC—had vast stocks of video that they could employ in visual journalism. We didn’t. So we turned and leaned fully … on information graphics. I think that over time, as the technology has changed, as we have become more sophisticated, as a story telling tools have evolved, the form has changed a great deal. Some of the underlying principles that drove what we did in the early days are still there. It is first and foremost all about the journalism; all about the information.

My design director, Jeff Diney, has emphasized over and over again the importance of getting a kernel of the story and then figuring out what visual tools you want to use to augment or illustrate the story. The other thing that we have tried to do is to really lean on speed to market, fast turnaround. It’s great, and the piece you are going to see was developed over a long period time relatively speaking for a site like ours. But the real goal is to be able to turn around day and day out on a breaking news deadline. So that’s part of what we have worked for.

I think in the development of a site one of the real changes came with the uptake of Flash, when Flash truly became a pervasive tool that was really part of the repertoire and became capable of supporting audio and video in really dynamic ways. It suddenly opened the doors to the possibility of an entirely different type of narrative news delivery. The challenge that I have put to our staff is to figure out where we take that.

I am fond of saying that the Web at this point is very much like early television, where they were putting cameras in front of radio announcers and showing them on screen and hadn’t really figured out production values or what the binocular of what television was or how to best convey the story using the media to best advantage. That’s what we’re experimenting with here, and … in some ways this piece is completely atypical of our site. We’re a news and information site that goes 24 hours a day, headline scores, stock quotes, all the commodity stuff that everybody does. At the same time, at least elements of this piece are very much at the core of what we do, and with time we’ve tried to bleed this into the more traditional forms and figure out how to marry print and visual journalism and aspects of television and the unique interactivity of the Web.

With that set up, I should say that Ron Coddington, who is in the audience, is one of our senior designers and is conversing not only in the Web but in television and print, and Benny Gaynor, who is a very experienced photographer and photo editor, were the two folks who put this together completely under the radar. I had no idea this was coming. They were working for months; they were working on their own time. They chose to do—I think it’s fair to call it a documentary on the [20th anniversary of the] West Virginia New Song Festival. Had they come to me I probably would have said, “Can we try the Grammys or something that might have a little more visibility and attract a little more traffic, and can we condense it down a little bit, maybe keep it to two minutes?” This runs about an hour.

They spent 48 hours on site, they did countless interviews, six hours of audio, 300 photographs, I don’t even want to begin to know how much time they spent editing it into shape. I will show—obviously I can’t do it justice in terms of the form that it’s intended to take, but I want you to look for different aspects of the different elements that we used here and how we put them together.

[AUDIO: “I came here via Colorado, doing my first long distance tour, and this is my final finale kind of stuff. So I drove here yesterday from Missouri and that was a long drive. We ended up here at about 1:00 in the morning. The first festivalgoer that I’ve met this year, my wife and I were coming back from picking up a bunch of peaches last night.”]

This first tab here represents about 10 minutes worth of sound and photographs, and really tells a chronological story of the competition. And then each of the tabs behind it employ related but slightly different methods of telling the story. There is one devoted to the art of songwriting, again very much in the voices of the participants. There is no voiceover; it is all done in the voices of the individuals. They say it together. In other cases we included, we used text to sort of fill in the background information that you needed about individuals.

We experimented with using Flash to blow up photographs … if you came to our site during the Olympics, we used a slightly larger [thumbnail image] and blew it up to an entire full page to highlight some photography we were taking there.

There is a fair amount of text in here in terms of the lyrics, and I believe the profiles of the judges, with short biographies associated with them. And then we put together … a poll that allowed people to, as they went through the music, vote on the songs that they would have selected had they been in the position of the judges. That was scored and you could listen to all the clips and so forth. Probably an hour is an underestimate here by the time you play all the music and so forth.

In the scheme of our site this … attracted relatively modest paid use, 30,000 paid use. A really strong breaking news story will do 100,000, 150,000-200,000 on our site. The point to me was not how much traffic this garnered or how much time went into it, but the opportunity to experiment with visual storytelling. And there are probably a dozen, at least, different pieces that we have since tried to tease out and use in a more demanding news environment.

Steel Ring was an enterprise piece that was initiated by the newspaper about cluster bombs in Iraq. This is a case where we met with the reporter ahead of time, gamed out the story that he thought he was going to cover, invited his participation in collecting the information, and then worked very closely with him upon his return to put this together. It works both as a complement and really as a stand-alone piece. It employs traditional voice-over narration, which we have done with information graphics to provide kind of background layer of information beyond what you see visually on the screen. These kinds of things are just a more elaborate version of something we’ve really been pioneering since 1995.

[VIDEO: “Paul Weisman talked to farmers about living in fear. This is a picture of a farmer south of Baghdad. His wheat field is filled with unexploded cluster sub-munitions. A US States Department team came out and looked at his field and decided it was simply too danger to go in there and try to pull them out. So he’s lost his crop. You see the wreckage here of an Iraqi military vehicle that was destroyed in the US cluster bomb attack. There is no question that this was a military target in this area. Iraqi troops were massed there. The problem is it was also a farming area, and after the fighting was over a lot of unexploded bomblets were left behind and the farmers have trouble making a living.”]

This was a case were we didn’t have the advantage of audio from a translator, or we could [have done] it in the more first person fashion. We used primarily text to tell the stories of the individuals on the ground. Very quickly, the last piece I want to show you—the next challenge, then, was this was a piece of enterprise. We had a fair amount of lead time on this. We were able to really craft the components. This last one was done very much on deadline, and was turned around the same day that Reagan’s funeral occurred.

[plays video]

I guess I will have to voice this one over. What we did was simply send a photographer and a sound person to the scene and the real breakthrough here for us we weren’t relying on sound that a print reporter gathered sort of haphazardly, and then trying to edit through masses of tape. We really went strategically, the photographer and sound person working together as much as they would in television, and marrying up the images.

A lot of the work was in the editing and creating what was about a minute and a half piece that completely gave you the sense of the cortege moving down Constitution Avenue and to the Capitol. And then there were subsequent chapters where we interviewed people who were standing in line, we covered the funeral, National Cathedral, and so forth, and these all went up within hours of the event taking place. It’s a work in progress; we don’t claim to have the Holy Grail as to how to tell these stories and what the ultimate vernacular will be for this meeting but we’re feeling our way along.

Jan: When you do something like Sing my Song, which is really out of the USA mold because it’s sort of a regional story, not a national story, what kind of reaction do you get from people who come to it sort of serendipitously stumble across it?

Kinsey: I’ll start with the reaction of my Managing Editor … he and I usually see eye-to-eye, and he has great news judgment, and he said, “You want to put what on the home front [page]? And why is this going to be of interest to our readers?” I mean the truth is, [the paper] and certainly the Web site has always been comfortable breaking out entertainment, sports, off-beat features and so forth and combining that with serious news, and this sort of fit in that vein.

“Tribute to our Troops”

Jan: Question, before we move on. We’re going to move on to Sean Polay. Kinsey sort of represents what we think as big-J journalism, and we thought of what the ProJo.com did was maybe small-J journalism that could be replicated in many ways. Tell us about Tribute to our Troops.

Sean Polay: My presentation today is decidedly low tech compared from what you’ve seen here from the rest of the panelists. I won’t blame the [New England] Patriots’ victory last night as getting in the way of that. But really it’s because it’s a low-tech application and it was done that way on purpose. We were trying to facilitate interaction between our readers and their loved ones stationed abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere.

The genesis of this particular site actually started 3 years ago after September 11th. It was right before we had started our partnership with Legacy.com. Those of you in the business [know] that Legacy.com allows us to post death notices online and tie in guest-book type features where people can leave condolences. What we did for September 11th was we solicited e-mails, and we received hundreds, possibly thousands of e-mails that we had to post manually each e-mail by hand.

We decided we’re never doing that again. And we had already had an existing application for user uploaded slide shows where users could come online and register just a few bits of information about themselves and post photos, and we had won an Eppy Award the year prior for our garden slide show where people could upload photos of flowers in their gardens. And we decided, well, hey we could use that technology or that programming for other similar applications, and Tribute to our Troops was one of them.

It’s an interactive database populated by our readers and allowing users—whether they be family or friends of service persons or members of the Armed Forces themselves—to create Web pages simply by filling out a simple form. No special skills or Shockwave are needed. I mean, if you have a familiarity with the internet, you can use this site and you can go ahead and post, and it’s really quite simple. And it’s evidenced by how much it has been used in, I guess, the two and a half years that we’ve had it online.

We’ve also shared it out with several of our … interactive brethren sites, many of whom are in large military markets. Particularly WVEC, the television Web site in Norfolk, Virginia, has made use of this site, as have our sister sites in Texas, Louisiana and states that you see on this slide here. That tally is [as] of 10 o’clock last night, and it’s still growing. I mean, there were another 51 messages pending, which is one thing I will show you here.

First of all, let me show you basically how easy it is to add a page, and you can see here I’ve typed in my e-mail address with the yellow there, and you click on “Create a new page now.” I happened to have already been registered because of testing this application, [but] if you’ve already done this once before, you simply have to type in your password. If you haven’t registered before, we actually e-mail you a password to log you in, and you become sort of the owner of that page once you create the page. And this is all you have to do.

You just fill in the person’s name, the hometown, their state, their branch of service and you can add a photo if you would like. One of the faults of this application is [that] if you forget to add a photo now, you’re going to have to e-mail us to if you’ve come up with a photo later. And that’s fine. We’re more than happy to do that for folks, and I probably add a few photos a day for people who’ve forgotten to do it the first time around. And that’s it. Your page is created.

Now, it doesn’t immediately go online. … Every two hours—and you can see there are several people on staff who are [included in this e-mail too]—[we] receive e-mails letting us know how many soldiers’ pages are pending, and how many messages are pending, to remind us that hey, amidst all the breaking news that you’re covering, there are other pieces of the site that you need to maintain and here’s an easy way for you to do it. So we’re really trying to make it easy for the staff to maintain as well.

Here were 51 messages that had been added within the previous two hours … This is our internal admin page, and there are all the messages. The approved button is already selected, so you just scan the messages and make sure that there’s nothing derogative or defamatory or you know something you wouldn’t want your kids to read. And there have been a few messages like that where there have been love triangles that we’ve had to take down pages for. And sometimes it’s quite voyeuristic from where I sit sometimes because you get to learn a whole lot more about users or even casualties than you really want to.

But anyway, this is an internal administration screen for my staff. And so if find one to delete or if we find one we want to think about, we can hit the skip button and it will stay there as pending until we decide, well, okay we’ll let it go.

Jan: But once it’s up everybody can see everything.

Sean Polay: Yes, that’s true and that’s what I will get to next. But, anyway, so it just shows the simplicity of it, the low-techedness of it, but extreme popularity of it in terms of user contributed content. And we, ProJo.com, even since our inception in ‘96, really try to leverage two things. We try to leverage our breaking news capabilities and we try to leverage our interactivity.

And even this year, we finally collected a lot of user generated stuff, which is sprinkled everywhere throughout the site, into one section called “Your Turn.” And so there [is] our music site with music from local musicians. This Tribute to our Troops site with messages from people all over the globe. Our art site, which is posted by local artists, user uploaded slide shows, our forums and our surveys. We have daily surveys and interactive polls that we do as well.

We have a very strong recognition of the value of user content … from a strategic standpoint it breeds loyalty. You turn a casual user into a devoted user and hopefully a devoted user into an evangelical user that goes out and says, “Hey, go check out ProJo.com. It’s a cool site. I had a lot of fun there. I was able to my opinion mattered and it was published.” I mean, there’s extreme value, particularly for a smaller newspaper like us. You know if you’re published by the Providence Journal in our state in the state of Rhode Island, you’ve accomplished something. And so here we online can do the same thing.

As you might imagine, much of my 12-person staff pitches in daily to read and publish these messages and I participate in that as well, particularly on weekends when we have sort of an on-call system between [me] and my news editor. We go online and make sure—we’re low staffed on the weekends—that the messages are getting published at least once a day.

And I am daily humbled and amazed at the quality and the heartfeltness of these messages. I mean, it is absolutely mind-blowing. Mothers writing to their sons and daughters, wives writing to their husbands, particularly new mothers talking about how a baby has taken their first steps and posting that to her husband. It nearly brings you to tears at times when you’re reading through some of these messages. It’s extremely powerful content.

And I’d just like to take a moment. At random last night, I picked a soldier from Providence. There’s ten messages, and I’ll just read you some of these. From Deborah Royal of Coventry, Rhode Island. “Hi Lema, my name is Deborah. I have a son, David Taylor, someplace over there with you. We pray every day for all of our guys and gals to come home safe. Thank you for what you are doing. Stay safe. Stay focused. Love to you and to all your comrades. Godspeed, Deborah.”

This from Aubrey Jones in Franklinton, Louisiana: “Hi Lema, we want you to know how brave we think you are and that we are praying for your safe return home. God bless you, Sheriff Jones and Staff.” And we’ve had people who—one particular poster from New York, who I think—and I don’t if you saw on that introductory screen, we have the 10 most recent added soldiers. I think we have this woman from New York who clicks on all of those, and posts like 10 messages a day to people. And it’s the same message every time, which actually makes it kind of easy from an administrative standpoint because you see her name and you say, approve, approve, approve, but here’s the message that [she] types every single time.

It says, “Hi, hope you are doing well. Just want to say a big thank you for bravery and sacrifice in the service of our beloved country. I worked just six miles from ground zero in New York City. Being on the front lines of the home front we know all too well that freedom does not come free. I guess you could say we’ve been through the fire here, yet we carry on each day standing tall with heads high because of our awesome U.S. military of which you are a part. May God bless you and all of those you love and return you to them safely and soon. You will remain in my prayers and my very best wishes, Pat.”

There are messages not only from loved ones, but from complete strangers, and messages of gratitude. I have an acquaintance of mine who I went to college with who has served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and I sent him sort of a little note of thanks. And he sent something back to me that said, you know those kinds of e-mails, they never get old. And I’m sure that the people whose pages are get online and read these.

And we do get messages posted from soldiers. In fact, I think I wrote down one here. Nelson Gonzales from Brownsmill, New Jersey, says, “Hey everyone, thank you so much. You don’t know how much this means to me, and my wife is a very brave woman. The messages you all have left for me is the best thing in the world. Thank you all from the sailor overseas, Nelson Gonzales, II.” I mean, the soldiers do go online from wherever they’re stationed and they do read through this stuff and so it is making a difference in their lives.

One last thing, you may have noticed that it’s an unbranded site, and that was done on purpose, because we allow family support sites to link to it, we allow military sites to link to, we allow other media sites to link to it. To us it wasn’t important that it was ours. It’s the reader’s site and that’s why we didn’t put our brand on it.

Question: How do the soldiers know it’s there?

Sean Polay: You know, I’ll tell you, we have spent absolutely zero dollars in marketing. And that’s true of everything that we do, but it’s especially true of this site. It truly is grassroots, word of mouth, really bottom-up kind of stuff. I mean, once some of these family support sites, once they find out about it, you see messages everyday. “Hi, I saw—I know your wife from such and such support site, and she told me about this site and I just wanted to post a message of support to you on her behalf. She’s a great woman.” You know, I mean we’ve seen all sorts of messages like that. It’s really as grassroots as grassroots gets.

Jan: One question, and then we’re going to move on to keep on scattering more questions afterwards.

Question: How do you deal with people protesting the war and making their desires known [to] be the same?

Sean Polay: You know, only occasionally, and even then, I’m probably overstating it. Really, 99% of the messages that I see—and I don’t do it everyday, I really rely on my staff to do it—but I’m at least online there checking the messages two or three times a week, and no, I’ve not really seen that. I mean you see that more on our message boards. That’s what they’re for, you know.

“You Decide”

Jan: Last, but not least, I can—thank you, Sean. It’s another Sean. This is a day of Seans. Sean Fagan from KQED, who I think will show us a different model for telling not just two sides of a story, but many sides of a story.

Sean Fagan: You Decide is a project started three years ago, actually, as a result of September 11th, sort of. I’m from New York, though I work in San Francisco now. And immediately after September 11th, there was a lot of scrambling going at KQED just to put up local resources for people, emergency contact information where you can send messages to loved ones and so forth. And I was a little disturbed by what I was seeing very rapidly happening in the country, which was sort of a—and I’m going on a life long passion of mine, which was critical thinking—there was almost a dampening down of critical thinking going on in the country at the time. People in Congress were suddenly trying to push through things that were 10 years old, like the national identity card, almost immediately afterward. And I thought, whoa, somebody needs to start emphasizing critical thinking in some way.

And we were actually working on a model, and the interface wasn’t entirely ours. PBS had used it in a couple of places on different Web sites … kind of an online devil’s advocate that asked you a series of questions, [very] much like one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. If you answer a certain way, it takes you to a different page than if you’ve [answered] this way. And the first one I did was on national identity cards, [since] I was struggling for a subject and I happened to be not on a project.

At the time, I’d worked on a dozen other Web sites, both as a producer and a designer, while I’ve been doing You Decide. And we did the first couple of them and they were so successful by our traffic standards that we were able to write a grant to the [Corporation for Public Broadcasting], and other people in the system that are here today know the CPB was throwing money at internet stuff around that time, where they’re doing it a lot less now. And we managed to get a grant and studied up officially on something to be very simple and modular [that] turned out to be just this little job description for you to just stick on your site, because most public broadcasting sites have one person who half [the] time works on the Web, and it initially looks like a poll, and this is the draw.

Speaking just to some of the things that were said here today—how do you get people engaged [and] make it kind of personal? Ask them a question as if they’re answering a poll. People love to enter these straw polls. [There is] some ambivalence about online straw polls because they’re not scientific, and they can be spammed heavily by activist groups, and so forth. But here’s an example of You Decide on our home page right now—and this is right now syndicated on 16 other public broadcasting sites. It looks much smaller, actually, than other sites, and we’ve actually gotten Salon.com to carry it. There’s been no money exchange. We wish there was, but Salon has no money.

So it asks you an initial set of questions. Here it is: “Do Americans pay too much in federal income tax?” And when you click to answer, it goes, “Are you sure?” And I think most users … are a little bit teed off at first, because they thought they just were going to get to answer a poll. “Teed off” is actually part of the whole point of this thing—to kind of get people [riled] up, because that’s what keeps them going through the activity. But we’ve discovered looking at our description boards and with actual exchanges with our users that it ends up calming down the conversation, calming down the rhetoric. And admittedly, You Decide is almost always about major wedge issues.

So you get a little bit of an introduction here. It tells you a little bit about the history of income tax in the United States and the fact that federal income tax didn’t always exist, and so forth. It tells you a little bit of each side and then says, we’re going to ask you this four or five more times. Some of the activities are a little bit longer, and only at the very end does you vote really count, and then we ask you again. And as you go through the path, there’s really only two user paths. The site map for this looks like this [two parallel paths], you know. But it even though it’s so deceptively simple, it really gets people thinking this site is talking to them.

“Well, what if you knew that somehow the income taxes are unconstitutional?”

And we have seen on the discussion boards, the activities get a wide range of traffic. Some of them have gotten only about 1,100 [or] 1,200 people completing.

Some of them, depending how wedged and how much they got spammed and attacked basically by groups that feel very strongly about these issues, have gotten upwards of 8,000 [or] 9,000 unique users completing the poll or activity, as I like to call it. Salon has had traffic that has exceeded that at times.

But it continues to do this throughout the process, considering this, until you get to the end. And when it says [vote], you can place your final vote, but it also invites you to go back through the activity and select the opposite answers of your own before you vote and note the fact that we’re arguing your side too. Pretty interesting.

A lot of people probably have had this experience. You usually don’t hear, one-on-one or at least e-mail-wise, from people who are happy with the content that you’ve produced. They’re usually the people who are most motivated and pissed off. This one just launched, so the traffic is pretty low to it so far.

We also have a teacher guide that goes along with almost of the activities, which is pretty typical of PBS on mission when CPB required that of us, and that’s grades 9 through 12. Though my sister teaches college freshmen, and she says they sure could use some of these critical thinking skills too, because they come to her with almost none.

The discussion boards have varied wildly in terms of traffic and some of them, they often start off—the first initial postings are usually somebody who didn’t get the way the activity worked. And the interface has changed slightly over time. At first, we just threw you into it and argued with you. And now we have, as you see, that big yellow chunk at the bottom that says, “This is how this works.

We don’t say it to you in the beginning, because if we did most people wouldn’t look at it. We’re going to engage you in an activity that takes a half hour to complete. Then no one’s going to click on that, right? Some people do actually spend the full 20 minutes or so it takes to complete one of these. The average time on it is about 6 minutes, but that, by our traffic standards, is very high. You couldn’t just, you could click through the whole thing in about 20 seconds, fifteen seconds really, and just vote no.

So that 6 minutes [shows] they’re at least looking at the major arguments and discussion boards show us that some of the people have gotten really granular and say, well, in here you say this and there’s more to that. Our ultimate goal, and we say it on the You Decide home page, which—not many people come directly here because of the nature of the thing—that we do give you the option to get from the end of each activity, [that] the goal is [to inform readers that] these questions aren’t all black and white.

Unfortunately, these are often the questions that politicians use as wedges and become the major topic of national debate, when really there’s more to the question. You know, we talk about figures, like we did one on the ethnic profiling in airports. We did one right here on this: “Should couples consider global population issues, before having more than one child?” There are often liberal versus conservative arguments at times, but I feel like we’ve accomplished something when I thought I had an opinion going into this and come away from it with a really gray feeling on the subject.

In fact, maybe the question wasn’t the right question in the first place. We did one on physician assisted suicide, and I’d never even thought of the fact that, like, in an HMO system, if an HMO can kill you for $60.00 rather than keep you alive for $60,000, maybe physician assisted suicide is not going to work until you have like socialized medicine.

And we covered a huge variety of things. Some of them are clear, obvious wedge issues that have been national debates for a while, and some are a little more specific that we knew were out there and we felt, this would just make a good You Decide. Like, should fast food companies be held legally liable for the impact that their products have on consumers’ health. Not a lot of people like debating that in the media, but there’ve been legal cases around it. That’s been also one of our big struggles [on] this site—the whole thing is done by two people. A reporter in Austin who I’ve only met once ever, three years ago, and I serve as editor and designer for almost all of them. A couple of people on my team have done the graphics, very few of them. But for the most part, it’s just be me and Melissa, who’s been just really digging in. She writes these in 40 hours, 20 hours a week.

… I would like to talk about one of the activities specifically. And, by the way, these have all been low tech, and I got to do one with Flash on whether we should send a mission to Mars. This is the only Flash one I got to do. Not because we don’t like to work with Flash, but because we had no time and no budget. Speaking of that, we had no graphics budget whatsoever on this project from the very beginning. So you’ll see on almost every one it’ll say, “graphics courtesy NASA.gov” and it a gazillion other dot.gov Web sites, because those graphics are public domain.

This activity just recently was the most painful month I’ve spent on You Decide, and we’ve published about 24 of these. It publishes monthly. The reason is that that’s kind of the way public broadcasting site traffic works. People are enormously loyal to public broadcasting sites. They come looking for a specific program, something that they heard on NPR, or something like that. So, we’re both NPR and PBS and then they might stick around if they come across something like this. And we realized that we were publishing biweekly at first and that half our users were missing this stuff.

So, we published an activity because the assault weapons ban was coming up for renewal and should the U.S federal government continue the ban on assault weapons? I don’t know if any of you is familiar with the term “freep,” but we got “freeped” on this heavily. Users of FreeRepublic.com, a very conservative Web site, they’re sort of the equivalent of those MoveOn people on the left. They have heavy discussion boards on many, many different sites and they say “FReep this thing.” And when they see a poll around something they feel very strongly about, they’ll post a message, and the traffic to this went through the roof compared to anything else we’ve ever done.

And the discussion boards—these users are extremely loyal to our radio and television media, but we haven’t gotten them. Our site averages about 250,000 unique users a month, but you would think that they would really like to engage in our discussion boards. We make it really easy. You don’t even have to log in. You can just make up a name on the spot. And that’s cause a bit of a headache of late because some hate postings have been put there.

… And we did one about whether Saddam Hussein should be executed. They tried to “freep” that one actually and people just didn’t get as passionate, but I’ve seen it on the [FreeRepublic] boards. This one ended up with 275 postings about assault weapons and, as you can see, some of them are quite, they’re essay length, you know. And what I found really encouraging about this, even though it was kind of a very emotional experience … I’ve been accused of being a storm trooper for John Ashcroft, or several users on this one wrote to us directly and called us pinko Chinese, and they thought that was very retro.

Jan: How many people actually changed their mind on this exercise?

Sean Fagan: : There’s no way we can track that. It’s funny—I got an e-mail from a woman recently saying she was very upset that we did one on whether the military draft should be reinstated. And she said she’s very upset because she’d gone through both sides and she’s really passionate about her opinion on this issue, but she voted wrong. And she wanted—she said that it was a failure. She said, even in Florida, you should be able to correct your vote, you know, if you voted wrong. And I’m sorry, but actually you can’t. Once you’ve put it in that ballot box, you’ve voted. And so I wrote her back and explained [that] we just don’t have resources to … track every single user and say, have they voted before? Is this a different vote and they’re voting opposite? This is a correction vote, you know. It was beyond any technology I knew, but I find really encouraging what happened with [the assault weapons ban edition], because this is a very stressful month for me.

They’re actually completely correct in a number of things that they attacked us for. Some of the weapons, I had a very hard time finding graphics for this. It’s almost [like] the U.S. government Web sites don’t want to admit that assault weapons even exist, because this is a dangerous ground for a lot of politicians to get into. So, I just couldn’t find any graphics and actually I finally got some from the Violence Policy Center, but I asked them if it was okay if I didn’t credit them because they are [highly opposed to] gun activists. So that’s where the guns that are in the images and the site came from.

But my original, I thought I was going on reliable information on a few real cheapo clip-art yearly subscription stuff that we have, and it said “this kind of weapon, this is an AK-47,” and so forth. Turns out I was dead wrong on several of them, and so there was huge discussion on, “This is misleading. You’re showing guns that haven’t been legal in the United States since the thirties when machine guns were basically banned.”

So, I went back and I’m actually not as proud of the graphics on this one because I had to slap this together really quick. Get the right kind of gun from the Violence Policy Center and put it there. But we also had a journalistic area that was really glaring in the very first paragraph of this thing. And this is just a perfect example of limited resources. I sort of have to rely on Melissa to check resources in more than a few places and she’d gotten a very compelling bit about a professor from Emory who wrote a book called, “Army America” that, based on old probate records, claimed that most Americans didn’t own guns until the 1880’s or 1890’s when the big gun manufacturers like Winchester started marketing them to us, and that it was a myth of the Old West with everybody walking around with guns.

Well, that professor that was our leading paragraph, and that professor has since been stripped of his title, and the award that he got for the book that he wrote was also stripped. [Following protests on the message board] I removed it and apologized as PBS Interactive on this discussion board, and that calmed that down. But what I found was really interesting a lot of people were coming into this by the FReep discussion boards saying, “Go there and FReep this poll. They’re arguing the assault weapons ban should be removed.” It was a classic case that we usually get only a couple times a month where someone just doesn’t get it.

And then I always write back this form response: “We argue both sides. Please go back and look at the other sides of the discussion.” In this case, it was such a perfect example of, they’d been told before they even got there that we were arguing only one side. So, nobody for the first hundred odd postings here had bothered to click, yes, it should be renewed, to find out about the other side of the argument.

“People started coming out and saying, ‘Hey guys, I went and clicked on yes and they argue our side too.’ And as soon as that came into the debate, all the [uproar] calmed down and this discussion got quite interesting.”—Sean Fagan
But what was interesting—it was self-correcting. This community itself—because we were able to get I.P. addresses of all of these sites that we’re pointing to—so I went and looked at all the discussion, which was on these other sites as well. People started coming out and saying, hey guys, I went and clicked on yes and they argue our side too. And as soon as that came into the debate, all the [uproar] calmed down and this discussion got quite interesting.

People started coming out and saying, “I don’t know much about, I don’t own guns. I live in the city. I don’t know much about these things, but can you tell me at what point should we limit weapons? Should people be able to own bazookas and drive around in Bradley fighting vehicles?” And then the conversation got very leveled out because now they felt like they had a voice. … People are coming back from the same organizations—because they had the same logins, the same discussion boards—and [saying,] “That’s a very interesting question. I debated that much myself because I’m very much an advocate of the Second Amendment, but I don’t believe that people should be driving around in Bradley fighting vehicles.” And long essays got posted along those lines and it came full circle to something that I found very engaging.

When we first started You Decide, we talked to an expert on deliberative polling. And deliberative polling, for those of you who don’t know, is where they take a bunch of people and they put them in a room, and they come from varied backgrounds, and they pose a series of questions to them and get them to vote.

And then they keep these people for three days, like this seminar, where they come back and experts speak to them on the subject on various sides of the issue. And they ask them to vote again the second day, and they ask them to vote again the third, and people end up in much grayer areas. But not only that—and this is what I found, you know, very moving in what happened in some of these discussion boards—deliberate polling, its ultimate goal was to teach you that your ideological enemy is not necessarily evil and [not] like your physical enemy and out to do you harm.

You know, take the gun issue. If you live in West Oakland, guns to you mean gangs, and you just don’t want them on your street because you want your kid to safely go to school. Well, if you live in North Carolina, guns to you might mean hunting, or even just target shooting, and your kids have never been threatened with a gun in school. But both of you are coming from this point of view that, “Even though I’m sitting across from you and there’s this enormous ideological divide between us, I recognize that you just want to protect your children and I just want to protect my children and you just want to have an education for them and you just want safety. You want your family to be safe and you want your free speech to be recognized, and so forth. So you share all these values, it’s just the way you want to accomplish them, the way you believe we as a nation should accomplish them, that is polarized.” And I’ve seen that again and again with these discussions.

And [then you hear] directly from people saying, “I disagree completely with this side of the argument, but I really want to thank you for doing this, for putting both sides there. I never understood this other side of the argument that well.”

Jan: Well, you are a wonderful storyteller.

Questions

Jan: We have time for about two questions before we have to move on and keep our train on schedule. Anybody got anything before we move?

[Inaudible question, re: USA Today’s use of infographics online]

Kinsey: We do both. Just to give you two perfect examples. We did very contained, very precise information graphics that we used that were about particular elements of men’s basketball, for example, that were reported on the ground and maybe had 3 frames with a little bit of animation that extricated the particular aspect of what was going on. … We did one women’s volleyball; we did one on cycling, and so forth where you had maybe 20 or 30 photographs in a montage with sound underlining, a combination of interview and natural sound, and so forth.

It was meant to convey the flavor of the Games on the ground. And I thought it was particularly effective in the case of the Olympics because we couldn’t use video at all. We were left with just still photographs, words if we didn’t do something like that, so [we were] trying to do both.

Jan: Anybody else. One more question.

Question: My question is also for USA Today. Mr. Wilson.

Kinsey: Yes.

Question: You earlier joked about had you learned of the Sing My Song project beforehand, you might have suggested that [it] might attract more traffic. I just wondered what kind of connection you see about the concern for traffic and the drive for journalists to engage the community. Do you think it helps or do you think it works the other way? And from your experience, what do you think will work out the connection, [as it] works out in a national paper as compared to a more local [one]?

Kinsey: I think it’s a very double-edged sword. But we now have software that allows me to look in real time at what’s getting hit on the site within 10 minutes of it going up. Interestingly, the people who have been most obsessed and most fascinated with this are my newspaper counterparts who have been flying blind for 20 years and basically going by the seat of their pants in box sales and very rough circulation numbers. And I almost worry that they don’t understand the number of different factors that come into play and that there’s a real risk of journalistic values being subverted. It’s something that you struggle with each day. I think we pick up valuable information about what readers are looking at.

“The single element that has gotten the most page readers on our site is a snap question that we did on whether or students to have to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom. We got 8 million responses.”—Kinsey Wilson
One of the things I noticed yesterday, for example, was that the stories about George Bush’s military records were the second and first [top] stories on our site all day long, even when they weren’t linked in [the top] positions. And it was an indication to me that all of a sudden interest in not just that particular issue, but the political campaign generally, now that we’re past the convention, has started to take off, and that’s consistent with what we’ve seen before. But there was a sort of a cue to me that maybe we need to start raising the visibility, now that we’re past Labor Day. But there are also—I was thinking when you were talking about the visual reaction, the single element that has gotten the most page readers on our site is a snap question that we did on whether or students to have to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom. And we got 8 million responses, and we don’t have an audience [that large], and that was without the question actually being taxed by [an automated voting] program.

Jan: I want to thank this panel and ask you to save your questions for lunch—and I know you have more—for a really great point of [view] into the future.

Presented by Bryan Monroe, Assistant Vice President-News, Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Jan Schaffer: Today with us to present the winners of this year’s Batten Awards is Bryan Monroe, the assistant vice president of news for Knight-Ridder Newspapers. He’s in charge of all Knight-Ridder’s 32 newspapers and he’s chairman of the Batten Award Advisory Board. I should figure out a way to throw up images as we hand out awards.

Bryan Monroe: Well, since I’m the only one between you and lunch, or in some of you all’s cases, you and some money, we’re going to make this quick.

First of all, thank you again for coming out this morning and thank you to all the presenters and all the nominees and those who have entered the contest. Let’s give everyone a quick round of applause. I also wanted to thank Jan—Where did Jan go? She just ran out the door—for putting all this together. She and her team and Julie—yep, they both ran out—have really been doing all the hard work to make this—there they are—have been doing all the hard work to make this day and really this year a success, and for us in the judging team making everything go so smoothly that all we had to do was look at some really, really fantastic work. So, thank you.

I want to very quickly get to the winners. We were fortunate this year to have over—what did we have?—seventy-some entries, and they were of incredible quality.

One of the things giving the history of the Batten Awards for Innovation was Jim Batten, who is the former CEO of Knight-Ridder, who passed away, I knew Jim and he was the salt of the earth, a journalist’s journalist, but he was also a great leader and a great innovator. He helped sponsor a project that I worked on several years ago called the 2543 project, [which] some of you might [remember] as the Boca project that we did, oh my gosh, 15 years ago—I’ve got gray hair and everything—where among many of our goals he told us to go out on the edge of the tree limb and jump up and down. If the tree limb doesn’t break, take another step and jump and down. If it still doesn’t break, take another step, jump up and down until it breaks and take a step down.

And that was incredibly liberating to come from the CEO of the second largest newspaper company in America, to be able to create an environment where you could take your core principles of journalism, of storytelling, and test them and experiment and try some things. And that spirit has really been captured in this competition and has really been captured in our finalists, as well. Each of them has taken chances, has gone out and tried to find fresh and truly innovative ways to tell stories and to do great journalism.

So what we have is three awards of distinction, a $2,000 runner-up and, of course, our $10,000 grand prize. We’re going to start backwards and work up. Our first award of distinction goes to the Providence Journal and Projo.com. Are they here?

Congratulations. There you go, and the money for the award. The Providence Journal package, as you saw earlier, was a truly wonderful, intimate, interactive database that allowed readers to create a Web page for an individual soldier, sort of like the old letters from the Civil War, and you could go on there and truly interact and post your own comments and talk about this person and their life and how they work with the troops and the family in the neighborhoods and communities. It was simple, low tech, but very powerful. Thank you Providence.

Our next award of distinction goes to another project. One of the great things about all of these projects [was that] they really ran the gamut from the low-tech, simple, clean, effective to the very beautiful, elegant, visually compelling Flash high-tech music and sound. I mean, each of them used the technology that they had to tell stories well. So our next award of distinction goes to USAToday.com.

Congratulations. The USA Today Sing My Song project was that coverage of West Virginia’s new song festival through community participants’ eyes, conceived for the Web. It was an expensive extended four-page inside the paper. Users could vote their five favorite songs and compare the picks with judge’s selections, very interactive, very engaging.

A third award of distinction was another extremely compelling project and it was impressive to hear how quickly it was pulled together on such a small staff and in a tight timeframe. The CBC’s “The Nature of Things.” Congratulations. Just some truly compelling storytelling there, and I really appreciated the small touches, the small detail. You saw the animation with the plane and the scene from the cockpit matched the actual facts of the crash. And here it was about three guys, nine days, a couch and probably a lot of Jolt Cola, very impressive.

Rob Curley, Director of New Media/Convergence LJWorld.com, Lawrence.com and KUSports.com

Jan Schaffer: Before we move into hearing from our keynoter, Rob Curley, I want to introduce Tom Kunkel, Dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, the home of J-Lab. He gives us great support and I’d like him to say a few words to you today.

Tom Kunkel: Thanks Jan. I’m just going to say a couple of words … I would like to welcome you to Washington, or as we prefer to call it “Greater College Park.” This is always a wonderful gathering and we’re delighted to have you. I don’t know how many of you in the room today knew Jim Batten in whose name we are gathered. I’m happy to say that I did know Jim. I checked the other day—it’s been almost 10 years since his tragic death. He was only 59. It seemed awfully young to me at the time, and, boy, now it really seems so. Jim was a true Southern gentleman, as smart as he was charming. And, make no mistake, he was a tough businessman, but he was first and foremost a journalist.

“[Jim Batten] told his editors not to be afraid to practice journalism with a social conscience.”
—Tom Kunkel

Unlike so many of his generation, Jim thought very expansively about journalism and what that meant and what was important, and that journalism evolved with the world. He told his editors not to be afraid to practice journalism with a social conscience, and therefore he was an early champion of what came to be called civic journalism, something that Jan has been associated with for many years. He was just as far-sighted when it came to thinking about technology in journalism. I think in too many precincts even today technology is still considered something to be feared.

But if Jim were here today, as he is surely is in spirit, I think he would say that we have an obligation to use technology to do our jobs in better and more creative ways and to reach out to our own audiences in new and enjoyable ways. It is only fitting that, as we are here to hold out the best examples of that kind of journalism, that we do so in Jim’s name.

“If Jim were here today, I think he would say we have an obligation to use technology to do our jobs in better and more creative ways.”
—Tom Kunkel

Welcome. Congratulations to all of you, to all the honorees, and again we’re delighted to have you.

Schaffer: … I am really delighted today to have Rob Curley with us. I had the pleasure about three weeks ago of spending two days in Lawrence, Kansas, where Rob now holds court, to see how they do things. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience. They are running a series of so-called CLIK conferences to show how things happen in a town of [65,000.] It was truly fascinating.

Rob made his reputation at the Topeka Capital-Journal, which is a Morris Communications Co. newspaper. He went on to become an executive with Morris Digital Works and could have easily moved into a big-10 market, but he decided not to. He decided to go back to Kansas, to a family-owned publication run by the Simons family, who have given him a lot of license to create. That’s what he’ll talk about today. He speaks with a great deal of reverence of Dolph Simons Jr. and his sons, who create the environment where the creative ideas of Rob’s team can happen.

Rob has won just about every digital online journalism award in the book—so many that I’m not sure he even enters any more contests. His reputation is well known in the industry, but more applicable to our sessions today is the mindset that he brings to the task at hand and to the journalism and the information his team creates. I think it is very eye-opening. It really speaks a lot to the future of journalism, and it really speaks a lot that Lawrence, Kansas, is a place that people from all over the world want to come and work, to be able to work with Rob Curley. So, Rob, tell us what you’re up to.

Rob Curley: My goal after an introduction like that is to not suck. I saw in the program I was listed as “online innovator.” Normally, I’m called things that rhyme with leather rocker, so I’m really unfamiliar with anything that holds us up in reverence. Really, I just try not to get fired. Normally when I give my talk about what we do, it takes me three hours. So I have an hour, and before I started I drank like six Mountain Dews, so I’m going to talk really fast because, number one, I only have an hour, and I really got to go to the bathroom.

“If you were reading a story [on our Web site] about a Kansas legislator proposing tax cuts for the utility industries, and you clicked on [his] name … and saw that all his major campaign contributions came from the utility companies, you could start to see the circle of life come around.”
—Rob Curley

Posting Public Records

Jan asked me to talk a little bit about my life pre-Lawrence because when I was at the Capital-Journal in Topeka, we did lots of political stuff and she thought that might be of interest to some of the folks in this gathering. So we built this big legislative Web site and it had all sorts of crazy stuff on it. We did audio and video almost every day. Before the legislative session began, we did a sit-down, online-only interview with those we thought were the 10 most powerful people in Kansas politics. For the State of the State address we posted the full text, we had live audio, streaming video highlights, that sort of stuff.

We built a database of every elected official in the state of Kansas, and we built a bio for them and for the bio we did a public information request. You’re going to hear this several times, I love public information. But we posted all of their major campaign contributions. And then in our publishing system we put together what we call a proper-noun search where, when you posted the story, there would be a proper-noun search for a name and if it found the name in our database that matched, it would link his or her name to it.

So if you were reading a story about a Kansas legislator proposing tax cuts for the energy companies, utility companies, and you clicked on the name of the representative proposing that and saw that all his major campaign contributions came from the utility companies, you could start to see the circle of life come around.

We didn’t call them blogs, but we had diaries of House and Senate members, and the first year we did it they were very popular; the second year we did it we had about 20 different elected officials lobby us to be our online columnist. We wanted one Republican and one Democrat, one from the House and one from the Senate, and we wanted rogues—we wanted people who were a little bit on the fringe of their party where their loyalty was to their constituents, not to the party. And I remember we knew we had the right Republican when he posted one of these diaries saying, “We just had a big meeting on Friday with all the Republicans to talk about our game plan to defeat the Democrats this week, and let me go through what that game plan is going to be.” And I’m like, “Oh, this guy is awesome.” We knew we had the right Democrat when she referred to all Kansas Republicans as descendants of the Taliban. And I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be an awesome session.”

“Our reporters figured out early on that they had a bigger audience online than they had in print.”
—Rob Curley

Our reporters figured out early on that they had a bigger audience online than they had in print, so they were very helpful to us. And when we wanted the video with our television sister station, they said fine. So this is what that would look like in time-to-time—closely related clips on our Web site.

[AUDIO: … remarkable careers span decades. Among the journalists who covered Governor Finney … during that time is Capital-Journal Government editor Jim McLean. Jim joins us now. Jim, what do you remember about Joan Finney? Well like most people who leave their mark on the world, Joan Finney was a complicated bundle of sometimes-contradictory characteristics. In the eyes of the state’s voters she was a friendly, almost grandmotherly figure. But by the same she was a tough as nails …]

What I love about this and I still believe this to this day, is that as soon as I reach puberty I’m growing a beard, because didn’t that seem really credible? It did to me, and I think it’s the facial hair.

So we built all of what we call “evergreen content.” It’s content that can last forever. So we built a video tour of the Capitol building. We shot it all on home video cameras that we bought at Sears, and we edited on iMovie. Then the key to all of our video clips is to use as much music from The Weather Channel as you can. Because this is powerful, you should see my home movies, they are awesome.

[We created] big archives for things that related to important events. We did the Cliffs Notes version of what was happening at the State House today and an overview of what happened yesterday, useful information like how to meet the governor, how to lobby the legislature, where to park, that sort of stuff. We did video journals; I’m not going to show you those.

We went and shot virtual-reality tours of all the parts of the State House so you could see the different parts of the State House. So that’s how we covered the state government. A lot of the things I’m going to show you in Topeka unfortunately are no longer on that site. I’d love to give you the URL, but it doesn’t exist anymore. That’s sort of stupid, too, because that was cool!

“We would write down the gas prices of all the gas stations that we passed, and each day we would post a sampling of where the cheapest gas was.”
—Rob Curley

We did lots with hyperlocal journalism in Topeka. For instance, every day, as our team would drive into work, we would write down the gas prices of all the gas stations that we passed, and each day we would post a sampling of where the cheapest gas was. We posted all of the state assessment tests for every school in Topeka, so you could see who had the best third grade reading program. That was pretty fun.

And then … I love this. We posted the home appraisal values of every home in Topeka, updated every … year, so you could see if a home had appreciated or depreciated. Or you could just type in my boss’s name and find out how much his home was worth. We posted everyone who forgot to pay [his or her] taxes on our site and made that searchable—I love public records. We did something in Lawrence that I did want to tell you about.

We did a public request for all of the professors’ salaries at the University of Kansas, posted that, and I got a few phone calls about that. But my favorite thing was what we started hearing from people at KU who said that they had students coming up to them and here’s a conversation that we would hear. We’d hear a student go up to a professor and say, “Dr. Smith, I just took your class. It was great, it was really good. And I was on LJWorld.com and I saw that you were making $130,000, and I notice that Dr. Bob, who I took a class from last semester, was making $38,000, and I just want to say that I really learned from Dr. Bob and that, pound for pound, you suck. I mean if we are evaluating you on the money that you make, it’s a travesty.” So I really love public records, and I love to see how we can get as many phone calls as we can through them.

This is another public record that we did. We went to the State Board of Health every week and got all the restaurant inspection reports and databased them so you could read those, or you could search it a million ways. Like you could search by area of town, so you pick where you go and then here are all the restaurants in that area of town. I mean you could pick on your favorite restaurant, here’s a good Chinese restaurant that I like, and you can see all its health inspection violations. If you don’t understand what “observed two live cockroaches” means, we cross-referenced it with the Kansas Food Code book so you would know why cockroaches are a bad part of your meal …

The first time I was in Topeka, when I really thought I would get fired, I was watching the cable access channel, which—I’m so boring, I’m the biggest nerd you ever met—I’m watching the City Council meeting. I see something happen and I say, “That is the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” And I want to show you what I saw here. This will take a little while, but trust me it’s worth it.

[AUDIO: … in public housing agencies around the country governing themselves. We must let go at some point, and I call the question. If you look at—do you wish to challenge—the question now arises … Mr. … play to the rules. I challenge. Why don’t you play fair? You’ve been so dishonest and you’ve lied to us as Council members. You’ve lied to us, you’ve lied to these people, and someone needs to tell you so you stop yawning. You have just now violated the Council’s rules and your manners are atrocious.]

City Council Survivor Game

So … I had an idea for this so I called our staff together the next day and I said, “Okay, here’s what we want to do.” Our online reporter built a bio of all the City Council members. One of our news nerds put together some software where you had to answer some questions. You had to give us your name, your e-mail address, a phone number to verify, and you had to write a paragraph explaining what you were about ready to do, which was to vote a member of the City Council off the imaginary island of Topeka. And it was very bizarre; we introduced the [City Council Survivor] game with this video clip again shot on our home video cameras.

[ Music from Survivor ]

So our executive editor—I revered this man—still won’t talk to me because of this. He thought that it was terrible. Beyond-belief horrible. Our managing editor, whom I also revered, loved it. She thought, “You know what? We haven’t had any letters to the editor about our City Council in a year. And in two weeks you’ve generated 22,000 confirmed letters to the editor. We have a community dialogue going on here that we’ve never had before.”

And a really bizarre couple of things happened. Every 10 years the Capitol-Journal gets together this blue-chip group of citizens who figure out who are the 10 most powerful people in Topeka and they write these big stories about them. And the Mayor was picked as the number one most powerful person in Topeka. She was the first person voted off the island.

“There were four people running for mayor and the Mayor didn’t make it … it showed that our readers had a better understanding of how the community felt about our Mayor than our own newspaper did.”
—Rob Curley

In a very foreshadowing thing, the primary election happened about six weeks after the game happened, and to make it out of the primary in the mayoral election, you have to be one of the top three vote getters. There were four people running for mayor and the mayor didn’t make it out of the primary. So our readers had said, “Look, we know how the people feel about our Mayor. You people at the newspaper are disconnected.” I loved it! It really was a powerful thing that showed that our readers had a much better understanding of how the community felt about our Mayor than our own newspaper did, and I loved that and I preach it and I’m glad the Executive Editor was fired. No I’m just joking. That’s a terrible thing to say.

I believe in really local journalism, so what do you do if you have a national story that the local audience doesn’t want to hear any more about. Well, in Topeka … we had a big story blow up where the locals were tired of it. They didn’t want to hear any more about it, but we were getting so many e-mails a day, and we could see through our search, through our archives, that people were desperately wanting this.

Phelps Family Coverage

There is a church in Topeka called the Westboro Baptist Church, whose minister, the Rev. Fred Phelps, his whole ministry is based around the idea that homosexuality is the ultimate sin. And he believes this so strongly that he pickets the funerals of people who die of AIDS. He flies all over the country and world to do this. The people in Topeka were very polarized by this, so we decided that we were going to build a big section—it took us nine months to build the section. We didn’t monkey around with it; we really put a lot of thought into it. And what was really bizarre was it took us nine months to build it and we had it done for six months before we linked to it.

Initially, we were going to call it “Hate for the Love of God.” If you know how URLs work, our URLs at the Capital-Journal worked like this. When you are building some big section, we’d be CJ.online.com/webindepth/ then the name of what we were working on.

Well, as we were working on this, we had a lot of interaction with the Phelps family. And they are all lawyers, and they are smart too. So they figured out we were building a section for them and typed in “/Phelps” and saw the site probably three months before it went live. And we get a call from one of them who said … “Rob, you’re doing this all wrong. You don’t understand. Our ministry is not about ‘Hate for the Love of God.’ It’s about loving God’s pure hate. And once you understand and can love God’s hate, then you…” I said, “Are you suggesting we should name it ‘Loving God’s Hate’? And she said, ” Yes, I am.” and I’m like, “It’s a done deal,” and I’m doing a dance in the background because I’m very excited that we finally have a name that we can attribute to them.

They are a very interesting family because they fought the civil rights battle in Topeka long before any lawyers would, and they would win these fights. They would go to court—it was very hard in the ‘50s to find a lawyer who would represent a black citizen of Kansas—and the Phelps would. So here you’ve got this family who are big civil rights proponents who hate homosexuality. It was very bizarre.

So we built a section that had all of our newspapers archives dating back to the ‘50s where you could read the stories of Phelps defending minorities in court. We had him write the Fred Phelps Manifesto, which was about a 30-page, long-winded thing on why he decided to picket homosexuality. We had photo galleries … We had tons of multimedia. We sat down with him for an online-only interview where we posted his clips. In ‘94 the newspaper did a 12-page broadsheet section on him, and we retyped in all those stories.

Our message boards were going crazy. There were chapters, there were books about him, and we got permission from several of the publishers to post the chapters about him. We had tons of multimedia from him speaking at the City Council. There’s a documentary about him and we got permission to post parts of that documentary. So I want to show you a little bit about what this man is like.

[ AUDIO: … the way I do it. It’s a formidable little sign. You know that Columbine massacre, well when that happened and Gore came out there and held a big rally and they had about 100,000 people the first day after it happened, well we went out there and picketed that whole thing and were [at the] center of it all. I mean those people were mad, and the message to them was you taught these kids from the time they started school that it’s okay to be gay. So that’s where you busted the moral compass. The same God that said “Thou shall not kill” said “Thou shall not lie with mankind as a womankind” and I fix the death penalty for both sins. And you taught them that God didn’t mean what he said about one. So if it’s okay to be gay, it’s okay to kill. You are teaching the kids in this evil place that it’s okay to kill. Are you reaping the harvest about Godless curriculum? That’s what we were telling them as they passed by. See, now that was a very good sign, and some woman out there this morning was enraged over this sign …]

So back when I was still entering contests, we decided we would enter this site. The problem was we had never linked to it. So we entered it and we finally realized we’re going to have start linking to this site, because when they announced the finalists, we were finalists. So I’m like, “Oh God, what am I going to do?” …

HBO had released a movie about Matthew Shepherd’s death, the gay student in Wyoming who was killed. And Fred Phelps is a key figure in that movie because [he and his family] went and picketed Matthew Shepherd’s funeral and all of Matthew Shepherd’s friends dressed as angels and circled them so that no one could see them. So it was a key point of the movie. So we could link to it now, so that was great. When we went to the awards ceremony, which was in Denver, Phelps found out about this and flew to Denver to picket us. So that was cool because we won. So we thanked our picketers. So that’s how we covered the Phelps.

Covering Lawrence, Kansas

I want to really change gears here and talk about the Lawrence Journal-World, which is where I work now. It is a very, very progressive small newspaper, 20,000 circulation, owned by a family who are now in their fourth generation of ownership. And I remember the very first time I met the Simons, I had just gone to an online conference I think in San Francisco. One of the keynote speakers was Arthur Sulzburger from the New York Times. I remember him saying it’s very important that [for] the reporters of the New York Times that we are no longer a newspaper company—we are an information company. And I’m thinking “Wow, this is great.” And I get to my hotel room a few weeks later in Lawrence, and sitting in my hotel room is all sorts of goody-bag stuff about Lawrence, including a book that has a transcription of a speech that Dolph Simons Jr. gave in 1992, commemorating his family’s 100 years of owning the newspaper. And I’m reading his speech and one of the things that he says in his speech is, “It’s very important that our reporters understand that they are no longer newspaper reporters. We are going to serve our readers regardless of what their media of choice is, and we’re going to do it well.”

After I met Dolph Simons I was trying to figure out how he was only 10 years ahead of Arthur Sulzburger because the guy is amazing. He began laying cable in Lawrence three years before I was born, to set up the first cable company west of the Mississippi, and I think the second in the country. The guy is driving with his brights on … I want to show you our Web site, www.LJWorld.com, and explain what we’re doing by looking through the eyes of our Web site, which is updated 24 hours a day with local news only.

“We took all of the national news off [LJWorld.com] when our Web team arrived there. When we did it our page views at the time were about 500,000 a month. Now they are at about 5 million.”
—Rob Curley

We took all of the national news off of it when our Web team arrived there. When we did it our page views at the time were about 500,000 page views a month. Now they are at about 5 million. So we saw a huge increase in traffic when we decided, “You know what, we’re going to let the MSNBC.com and USAToday.com and CNN.com own that space. But no one is going to out-Lawrence us when it comes to Lawrence news.” So we took all of that off and our readers responded hugely. So we have no national news on our home page.

Here’s a story about candidates raising money for a local election. It says to go online for more info. You see all the candidates’ names. When you click on a name you get a list of everyone who has donated any amount of money to that campaign. So if you’re from Lawrence, you can begin seeing where the powers are putting their money behind certain candidates. Then we did live chats with all of the School Board candidates. We do live chats all the time. We try to do one every week. We do a live chat with everything from our high school football coach to our mayor to our representatives in Congress …

When we did the live School Board candidate chats we began realizing that news was always happening in the chats. Not that the chat was news, but something newsworthy would always happen. So we actually had to begin to start covering our chats as news events, and now the Associated Press in Kansas City now covers many of our chats as news events, because things happen in them.

A perfect example would be a chat with our KU basketball coach, who had been asked for six weeks who his starting lineup was going to be. He wouldn’t tell us. But Bob from Eudora, Kansas, asks who his starting lineup is going to be and he says it. Two hours later, it’s moved as a national story on AP, and it’s the lead story on ESPN.com.

When the whole Massachusetts gay marriage thing was happening our Governor would not talk about what her stance was on gay marriage until [a reader] asked her and she answered the question. The first time she had gone on record happened in one of our chats. And we started realizing what was happening. A political person might be able to say no to Bob-reporter but he or she cannot say no to Bob-constituent. And that’s what’s happening in these chats. So news is always happening in our chats.

“Our KU basketball coach … had been asked for six weeks who his starting lineup was going to be. He wouldn’t tell us. But Bob from Eudora, Kansas, asks who his starting lineup is going to be [in an online chat] and he says it. Two hours later, it’s moved as a national story on AP, and it’s the lead story on ESPN.com.”
—Rob Curley

When we did the chats with our School Board candidates we told them they would last 30 minutes. None of them did. They lasted an hour or more, and the candidates loved them because they felt it was unedited, unfiltered, and we ran news stories about them. We would run transcripts of the chat in our newspaper.

For the local election we pulled together the transcripts and the stories written about our candidates. The way our publishing system works in the general world is that our reporters aren’t told that you have a 12-inch story to write. They are told to write the story they want to write. And then when they’re done, the editor says, “Okay, you only have 14 inches in print. Go through and strike through eight inches that will only appear online, so then they self-edit, and then when the copy editors and editors read the story they read the whole story.

But when it’s flowed [to the presses] it only grabs the 14 inches the newspaper needs and it sends the full 22 to online. So the stories that we are running online are much longer. Then we would have the video pieces [with] them. When we were putting together the voter guide for our newspaper, we had all the questions that were asked of each candidate. And we put them into a simple database.

Our programmer is a guy by the name of Adrian Holovaty, and he is so brilliant. If you haven’t visited Holovaty.com, you really should. Anyway, the database would show you every question asked of each candidate and all of their responses. … With each question, the responses were put in a different order. So you read the question, all the responses, and you [could] click on as many of the responses as you felt most closely represented how you felt about that issue. Then when you hit submit, we would tell you which candidates answered the most questions the same as you did. And then you could click on a candidate’s name and we would tell you how he or she stood on every issue.

When the election polls closed, we were updating them about every five minutes with the results and then we pulled all of the content together that included online content that showed all the precincts in Lawrence. What we did was we called the election office and said, “Would you please, when you’re done tallying even if they’re unofficial, would you send us [the results]?”

So about two o’clock in the morning they all come, one of our Web producers rips them apart, and we’ve got this map of all the precincts in Lawrence, which Lawrence is small enough that these become almost neighborhoods. So you could click on your neighborhood and see how your neighborhood voted for all of the candidates or all of the issues. So it was a neighborhood-by-neighborhood look at all of the election. I mean of course we layered in all the video from Channel 6 and all the stories from the newspaper.

“You could click on your neighborhood and see how your neighborhood voted for all of the candidates or all of the issues.”
—Rob Curley

Now in an ultimate piece of irony, the Bob Dole Institute of Politics library is at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and each year Dole picks the person who he wants to speak there. And this year he wanted Bill Clinton to speak there, which we thought was bizarre, but great. So we covered it live on Channel 6, and, as the story was happening, all of our reporters have cell phones and they were calling us throughout the day with stories.

Now our online editor is—nothing against a hotshot 24-year-old journalist who just graduated from school, but that is not who we wanted as our online editor. Our online editor is a guy by the name of Dave Toplikar, who is our senior-most reporter at the newspaper. He’s been an editor [and a] reporter, he covered the legislature for our newspaper, he is really trusted. So when we put together our online team, we wanted our main editor to be the ultimate bad-ass from our newsroom. So when they call in, they’re calling into this editor and writer, who’s writing the stories on the fly, using the stuff from the cell phone calls. [That] is why you will often see breaking news stories on our Web sites that will have up to six bylines, because we are quoting the reporters who are calling in information from their phones.

Using Camera Phones

The other thing that you’ll see a lot on our site is that all of our reporters’ cell phones have cameras, so you will almost always see a camera-phone image on our breaking news stories. So when the actual story [runs] in the newspaper, we do something called a “Webified” story, and the Webification of this story [looks] like this: We had all of the video from Channel 6; we had video from the entire speech on there. We had huge photo galleries of people waiting to see him. Clinton wanted to meet the KU basketball team, so we were able to get pictures of that. We got pictures of his speech … we do lots of steerable, 360-degree photos, and they went and shot those for us, live from the event, so that you could log on and see what Allan Field House [and] KU’s basketball team looked like when they were talking. You could download the whole speech as audio or video, that sort of stuff.

“All of our reporters’ cell phones have cameras, so you will almost always see a camera-phone image on our breaking news stories.”
—Rob Curley

Earlier this month John Edwards came to town and Lawrence, although Kansas is very Republican every year ever, Lawrence is very, very, very liberal. It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. So Edwards coming to town was a lot like Moses coming. You know, I mean, it was a very big deal for the people of Lawrence. The story was broken in our e-mail edition, and again the live story was being called in by all of our reporters who were in town. And this was one of those things where we found out about it about six hours before he got there. This was completely unplanned by the Kerry campaign.

So we built a thing called “On the Street,” where we asked people what they thought, and we tied a message board to it. This is what it looked like in the newspaper and you can see how the converged coverage was mentioned here. Then this is what the Web-enhanced looked like, which included big photo galleries, video clips, it included steerable virtual-reality photos, audio clips, all those sorts of things—just overkill bonanza.

What was cool about this was that Rush Limbaugh had a little mini coronary about all of this. So the very next day when Rush Limbaugh was talking about all of this, we decided to run all of the stuff that was happening with that, which included a transcript of Rush talking about how crappy Lawrence is, which we thought was really cool. And then we got permission to post clips of Rush talking about how crappy Lawrence is. So here are those:

[AUDIO: Lawrence, Kansas is your typical town, very liberal, where the University of Kansas is, and very liberal, lots of professors, lots of students, lots of students who date the professors … It’s all that you thought of a liberal academia rolled into one little population center. And so Kerry and Edwards they’re going to go there. And they’re going to drive through there on a train.]

Now we had to break it up, because of fair use we could only use clips that were under 30 seconds. So we had to really break it up. We only could use four. But my favorite is, I don’t know if you know this, but Rush is from Missouri, and Kansas and Missouri have had squabbles dating back to the pre-Civil War because Lawrence was founded as a free-slave city, and the bad blood dates back a long time between Kansas and Missourians. And you really start to see this in this next quote from Rush

[AUDIO: … and Kerry, he doesn’t know where Kansas is, let’s be honest. I mean he knows it’s next to where he was born, but how long was he there? But the one thing that people of Missouri know, if you’re going to be traveling West, and you’re driving on the ground, the one thing that people in Missouri know is that you go through Kansas at night because there’s nothing to see there anyway.]

So our message boards were going crazy. So that became a part of our story, and we then quoted our message boards in our newspaper. Even our KUsports.com‘s Jayhawks message boards began having Rush Limbaugh threads. And then our bloggers on Lawrence.com, which aren’t associated with the newspaper, began blogging about him … Of course we covered it with TV.

Mindie Paget is our Arts Editor. She’s doing a big story on a KU professor whose artwork is very confrontational regarding racism. So when we posted this story online, we put together these huge galleries of all of his work dating back to the early ‘70s, and then you could see what the series was about and you look at all of the images from that series. Then we did all sorts of audio interviews with him, video interviews, that sort of stuff. So Mindy each week on our sister television station also does a “Welcome to Art A La Carte, I’m Journal-World Arts Editor, Mindie Paget …” So you get the idea.

Local Sports

KU basketball is very important in Lawrence. KU basketball games have been sold out for decades. The only way you had to renew your tickets was to just send a form back every year. Well the new athletic director who was just hired said, “Look, that’s not how it’s going to work anymore. Your seats are going to be assigned based upon how many points you have, and how many points you have is going to be based upon how much money you have given the university.”

So it was very controversial, and when it ran in the newspaper it said to go online for all sorts of extra content. Our extra content included our programmers putting together a calculator that really works. If you answered these 10 questions, we will tell you how many points you have, because we used the same mathematic equations that they were using. We put it in an online format. So you answered these questions and we tell you how many points you have. Then, you could go to our seating chart and we would show you what seats you would get for that point level. And then if you wanted to know what the court looked like from that seat level, we would show you a view of the basketball court from those seats.

The other thing is they only sent this letter to KU season ticket holders, which meant there were thousands and thousands and thousands who wanted to know about this but didn’t get the letter. So we scanned it in, and the University really liked this, that we did this. And we made it so the whole world could see it. And it was great!

“Game was based around the idea that we were going to [cover] little kids in Lawrence … like they played for the Kansas City Royals.”
—Rob Curley

This summer we launched an online section called Game, and Game was based around the idea that we were going to treat little kids in Lawrence, Kansas, who played baseball and softball like they played for the Kansas City Royals. So we built this section called Game. We covered their games every week. Adrian Holovaty and Simon Wilson built this amazing database to track not only how all the kids were doing, but their games. So if you wanted to know what games were at this field, you could see them, or you could see the 360-degree photo of this field, which you could go in and steer it.

Or you could see all the games for your kids’ teams, and if this is your kid’s team, this is probably my favorite thing, you could click on cancellation alerts, and it would bring up this page that explained how it worked and you could type in your e-mail address or your cell phone number, and every time one of your kid’s games was cancelled, our Web site would call you or e-mail you automatically, or both, to say, look, your kid’s game has been cancelled tonight, don’t show up. So this became very popular. We used standard SMS technology and we databased it all. So there were no humans touching this, other than to put in a list of the games being cancelled every week. So we used SMS to talk to all of the parents.

Then we posted all the rules for all the leagues. We posted huge photo galleries every week, probably over 100 photos every week. We built these little player cards, they’re kind of like baseball cards on steroids, where you could nominate a player for an outstanding effort and he or she would get a little kind of baseball card on steroids where you could read his or her bio, and listen to an audio interview with the kid. That sort of stuff. So it was kind of overkill, which [you may have] figured out, we are really not very good at knowing when to stop. We hear this a lot.

“We decided that the Web staff, not the newspaper, would also produce a tabloid.”
—Rob Curley

So we decided that the Web staff, not the newspaper, would also produce a tabloid. So there was a 16-page weekly tabloid that appeared in our newspaper that was laid out by the Web staff. I brought copies if you’re interested in what it looked like. Interesting side note was that it started out with almost no advertising. By the end it was completely chock-full of advertising. It was inserted into our Wednesday newspaper, and our Wednesday newspaper’s rack sales went up 250%.

So this is my view of local journalism. I want to tell everyone that we are the Lawrence in the World [Journal.] We are not trying to be the Wall Street Journal, we’re not trying to be the New York Times, we’re not trying to be the Washington Post. We’re trying to be the Lawrence Journal of the world, and we take very seriously that we are going to cover you like the Lawrence Journal-World. So that was a lot of fun.

We had bloggers on the site and the blogs became very popular because we had like a ball field mother, we had an umpire, we had a coach, we had a player, and the blogs had become so big that we run them in the print edition as columns with their responses.

Enterprise Stories

Bill Snead, I want to change gears, is my hero. Bill Snead is our Senior Editor at the Lawrence Journal-World, and Bill Snead is amazing. He started off working for the Lawrence Journal-World in 1954. He then left the Journal-World to go work at other newspapers. He then was the head of photography for UPI out of Saigon for the Vietnam War, where some of the most famous Vietnam photos you have ever seen were taken by Bill Snead. Then he left UPI to become the Director of Photography for National Geographic Magazine, where he ran that for five years. Then he left National Geographic to be the Photo Editor at the Washington Post; he was there for 21 years I think.

So he was at the Washington Post, and about 10 years ago Dolph Simons, my boss, sees him at an airport; they had been in contact all along. It was kind of a fluke meeting, and they’re sitting in a layover talking to each other, and my boss says, “You know, Bill, you should come home.” And Bill thought about it, and two days later he goes into Ben Bradlee’s office and puts in his letter of resignation to come back to the Lawrence Journal-World. So now Bill does whatever the hell he wants at the Journal-World, still it makes him one of the most inspirational reporters we have because he works so hard.

“We are not trying to be the Wall Street Journal, we’re not trying to be the New York Times, we’re not trying to be the Washington Post.”
—Rob Curley

So here’s a story that he wanted to do on the drought in Kansas. Now Bill writes long; he’s a photographer who has no qualms turning out a 100-inch story, so when he wrote these stories for us they were too long to run in print. So we ran the full versions online. Then when he submitted the photos, we could only run three or four in print so we ran hundreds online of these Kansas farmers. Then we built a Flash interface, which would show you every Kansas county, and when you moused over it, it would show you what the rainfall total should normally be in that county, what they currently were, and what that meant in millions of dollars to that agricultural community.

Then our nerds worked with the nerds of the state of Kansas to put together a database of every well in the state of Kansas. So you could search for any well in the state of Kansas and we would show you what the well waters levels were and how irrigation was affecting the state’s water levels. And then Bill, as he was doing all these interviews, he videotaped them all. So then you could see video clips of all the farmers he interviewed. So, this is all put together by Bill. Bill Snead is a journalist on steroids. It’s amazing.

Now, is there anybody here from the University of Missouri? Good, because I’m talking pretty fast, and I don’t want to slow down. We realize that coverage doesn’t just have to be news, and one of my favorite things is we asked one of our political reporters if he would mind going to Columbia, Missouri, the day before the KU-Missouri basketball game and dress in all Jayhawk stuff, and then we were going to send a videographer and a photographer to document if he had his ass whooped. So he wrote a big story about what it was like. But my favorite part was the video piece.

[AUDIO: …fans are preparing for battle on the hardwood. Over the weekend our Joel Mathis went to … Columbia, Missouri, to find out just how intense this rivalry was. If KU and Missouri are playing, that could only mean one thing for this KU fan—a roadtrip to Columbia. First up, the mall. Well, Coach Collette, let’s go see how the good people of Columbia are ready to welcome us. But the reception wasn’t that bad. How much KU gear do you sell here? None. How much Missouri Tiger gear do you sell here? And does anybody ever ask for KU gear here. Yeah, usually we laugh at them when they do. On to the home of the Tigers, The Hearn Center, where I got the expected reaction. Who do you think is going to win the game? Missouri, of course. You don’t think Coach Roy’s Jayhawks are going to win? Oh, I like the coach, but I think Missouri is going to win it. Truth is, aside from a few dirty looks, I didn’t get much reaction at all. Time to hit the Fraternity Row. Coach Roy, are we going to get our butts kicked? That’s where I challenged the Sig Epps to a basketball game, with Coach Roy as my coach. All of you against me, because he’s a really good coach. I wasn’t that great a player, unfortunately. Roy is not feeling very confident right now. Sure enough, I lost … Okay Coach Roy, what are we going to do to the Tigers tonight? We’re going to spank them Tigers, spank them Tigers!!! That’s what we’re going to do. Rock … Jayhawks … KU … Bill Mathis, Six News.]

He’s a print reporter, but more importantly he’s a Mennonite, and we thought that would be very key in him talking his way out of any problems that he might get himself into.

Lawrence.com

Now I want to change gears completely. We’re okay with creating separate brands from time to time, and we feel like there’s a couple reasons why you do this. Number one, maybe you want to take chances that you’re uncomfortable taking, not only in your newspaper, but in your newspaper’s Web site. And number two, what if you want to go after an audience that thinks your newspaper sucks. So we literally thought we wanted to create something that would go after a reader that doesn’t like us. So we created a site called Lawrence.com, and it’s a little bit edgy. As a matter of fact, if any of you have heart meds, I would take them now, because I remember when we first presented this concept to Dolph Simons, who is in his 70s, we got the most amazing piece of advice I could ever have heard. He literally said, “If I like this, then you have failed.” And I’m like, you’re going to like it.

“We’re okay with creating separate brands from time to time … We literally wanted to create something that would go after a reader that doesn’t like us.”
—Rob Curley

Lawrence.com was aimed at people in Lawrence under the age of 25. It was very entertainment-based, and we were going to write like Rolling Stone or Wired or even Maxim, which meant we were going to cover local stories and we were going to use language that the newspaper would never use. And we were going to use topics that the newspaper would never write about.

I remember when that headline right there ran, I got a call from the NAA [Newspaper Association of America]. They wanted to write about it, and I’m like, “Please, I would just rather go under the radar right now. Because we don’t really like to use the word ‘vagina’ a lot, but we will when called for.”

Here’s an example of how we tell stories. This is a story about a bar in Lawrence that is disgusting. There’s really no other way around it. If you go there, you have to throw away your clothes. It used to be the coolest punk-rock bar in the world. Nirvana played there, Green Day played there; it was amazing. Now it’s a BYOB strip club. So this is perfect for the type of story we write.

We mostly focused on its punk-rock past, and we had MP3 interviews with all the key players. We had a database of 400 flyers of bands who had played there through the years, so you could see what the Nirvana flyer looked like, those sorts of things. We had MP3s of bands who are still cognizant, who would approve to let us post. We had video of people out there, that sort of stuff.

The heart of the site, though, is the entertainment database. But again we had to build this software in-house, because there was no software that would do what we wanted to do. It shows you the best bet of the night, but you could look at all the events in Lawrence, and when you find an event you’re interested in, it will give you this sort of detailed page. Now before we launched the site, we spent four months building evergreen content to lay underneath the Lawrence.com Web site. The evergreen content that you update once. You write it once and then you update it with minutia that changes. So it knows what the bands pages are. It knows that if you go to this show, you might hear these songs, these are MP3s that we’ve uploaded; we’ve literally uploaded thousands of MP3s to the site. And then it gives you information about the venue; we wrote overviews of all the venues, and the database knows what other events are going to be there.

“Before we launched, we spent four months building evergreen content to lay underneath the Lawrence.com Web site.”
—Rob Curley

We’re working with the University of Kansas right now, because one of their journalism classes has been tracking how many times the cops have been called to every bar. So we’re going to put that on there.

We love alternate delivery. So if you go to this site, and you click on “Remind me via e-mail,” you say you want us to e-mail you the day of the show, day before the show, two days before the show, three days, whatever. Then we became the first newspaper on the Web site to use SMS on a daily basis. We’ve been doing this for about two years. If you click on “Remind me on my cell phone,” it will say what time do you want us to call you on the day of the show? You pick 3:00, at 3:00 your phone rings, you look it up and it says the Hardaways are at the Tap Room tonight, don’t forget that you wanted to go—10:00 PM show, $3.00 cover.

Local Music Scene

So we built this huge band database that’s tied into that calendar. So these are all local bands. When you find a local band you’re interested in, it tells all the stories, the history of the band, who they sound like, who the key members are. In the database we have every musician in Lawrence, not only what band they are in now but what bands they’ve been in the past. So if you click on their names it will show you all the bands they’ve ever been in, or you can click on “guitar” and it will show every guitar player in Lawrence. You can see our reviews of the band or the readers’ reviews of the band; we’re big on reader-submitted content.

“We have about 14,000 to 15,000 MP3s [from local bands] loaded every week.”
—Rob Curley

We have about 14,000 to 15,000 MP3s loaded every week. This is really funny because we have a very legal disclaimer that the bands have to sign in order to release their songs so we can post them. And when we did it, our Lawrence.com editor, who is an amazing editor, he’s a younger guy, but his name is Phil Cauthon and he was a former political reporter, Washington reporter, for the Houston Chronicle. But he wanted to cover music in his hometown, so he quit that to come back to do this. So he’s a great editor, but he also really knows our audience well. So in our band release, there’s a line that our lawyers asked us about, and our senior management said it’s okay to leave it in. In the band disclaimer release, it says that if your music [is lousy] we refuse to post it. Many of the bands have videos, so we have posted their videos so you can watch them or download them. So, it’s surprisingly well done.

[plays music video]

We own the cable system so we thought maybe it would be really fun if we did a weekly television show. So one of our Lawrence.com online guys produces it and hosts it and then we post all the clips from it in the little bite-size bits from the bands.

[VIDEO: Hi everybody. Welcome to the Turnpike. Thank you very much for tuning in. This week on the show we have Connor. Lawrence’s own. Stick around. You’re going to love them.]

The show includes interviews with all the bands, live performances, and those sorts of things.

[plays music video]

“We became the first newspaper on the Web to use SMS on a daily basis.”
—Rob Curley

Now what has really surprised us is that it is syndicated throughout the state of Kansas now, and it’s going to move outside the state of Kansas. It’s kind of like a new millennium version of Austin City Limits but doesn’t kind of suck. Not sucking is very important to us. I should tell you that right up front.

If you like a band you can type your e-mail address on its site and every time that it has a show scheduled, our Web site will just automatically e-mail you. We decided the radio stations in Lawrence stunk, so we built our own. There are 20 of them on our Web site. When we uploaded the MP3s to the database, we fielded what type of music they are so when you click on a type of music it will go to the database, put them in a random order so that every time you listen, [the order] will be different, and then it will launch our radio player. This is the most popular content on our site.

Local Bloggers

We have bloggers. We wanted our bloggers to be community members, not people who are associated with our company. Our original bloggers really set the tone for how far I could go without getting fired. Like we had Farmhouse Blues, who’s a born-again Christian, who has every part of his body pierced. And he’s been addicted to everything known to man. So his views of Christianity are a little weird. I remember when Kelly Osbourne, Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter, played in Lawrence, he wrote a blog that said “Thank God that fat white chicks with no talent now have a role model.” This is the kind of blogs that we get from them. A local political blog. A guy who does nothing but write about video games all day. A chef blog.

This is an interesting blog that began on our site. It’s a University of Kansas grad who is teaching English in China and he’s gay. So it was the gay Kansan in China blog. I remember when he wrote a blog about how he was having trouble finding partners so he slummed and slept with a woman, and wrote about how horrible it was, and encouraged all homosexual men to never go this route ever because it’s a terrible thing.

Our most popular of our first bloggers was a KU student who wrote a blog called Powder Room Confessions. She wrote about her personal life. She had a lot of boyfriends. She wrote a lot of details about their private times. So it was very popular. Every week I wondered if this was the week I was going to get fired. And it’s a blog, so it was a two-way interaction between the readers and the writers. So it was huge.

“The vast majority of our bloggers are women.”
—Rob Curley

We have a new wave of bloggers now on our site. Our bloggers, if you’ve read the recent article in Wired that say that bloggers don’t have a long shelf life, our bloggers are that to a T. Six months is amazing if they last that long. So this is one of our new bloggers, and she is a KU grad who graduated with a live theatre degree. I remember her first blog that she wrote about her background and said, “in case you’re wondering what you can do with a live theatre degree, I’ve been stripping ever since I graduated.” So KU really enjoyed that blog, I think.

Another weird thing, almost all of our bloggers are women, it’s very crazy. The way it’s set up is that every page of blogs it says, “Do you have what it takes to be a Lawrence.com blogger?” They have to apply, they have to submit three blogs early on, and by far the vast majority of our bloggers are women.

This is an interesting blog because this blogger wrote about how she was breastfeeding at a local athletic club and was told that she had to leave. And she kept blogging about this, and finally one of our City Councilman who saw this proposed a law in the city that you could breastfeed anywhere. And this story ended up on the front page of our newspaper and it began as one of our blogs, which I totally love.

But my favorite blog, I’m not going to lie, is Farmhouse Blues, the born-again Christian, and now his blog has envolved a little bit. He now does video clips where he films his roommate and they created characters and one of them is called Randy E. Lee and Randy will answer questions that are submitted to him via the blog. He just shows up; he e-mails us the file and we post it for him.

“This story ended up on the front page of our newspaper and it began as one of our blogs.”
—Rob Curley

[AUDIO: … I never went to high school … Hey, welcome to Christian time. I’m Randy E. Lee. Hello America. This is my second cousin, Toody … We hopefully are going to answer another question this week. Toody, why don’t you hand me that e-mail I got this week? This e-mail comes from Tom King. He lives in Lawrence. He writes: Ginger or Mary Ann? And that is a very good question, Tom, and good questions from good people require good answers. Now this is a tough one but listen. Some people would like Ginger, she’s very good looking and beautiful and nice, she has long legs and she looks pretty in a dress. But I would like to say maybe Mary Ann, because I like girls that wear a lot of denim. This is one of those heart-felt questions, and whenever I’m troubled with something like this, I would like to, well, I always go to the man that changed my life. He knew me better than anyone else did. The day he when he died, he died for all of us. Yes sir. And he knew us and that man is … Tom, I can’t answer that question right now. That man died for me, driving. The passion of that man … He died for me. Dale Earnhardt Sr. was pronounced dead at the Halifax Medical Center at 5:16 p.m. from injuries sustained in the ….]

I love that; I think he should have his own TV show.

We wanted to have content that was very important to our readers, news you can use, so we have a section on our site called “Get Your Drink On,” which is a database where you can look at the drink specials in Lawrence updated every day. We have every restaurant in town databased a million different ways, so you can just search by area of town, type of food, is it locally owned, do they have a smoking porch, those sorts of things. So when you find a restaurant you’re interested in, it has everything you ever wanted to know about them, and many restaurants have paid an extra fee to have their menus uploaded to it. There are steerable 360-degree photos so that you can log on and see what the place looks like on the inside, that sort of stuff.

The Deadwood Edition

“… We said if we could get a million page views a month, that would be amazing. So we launched in March [2002], and by April … our numbers were already at a million page views.”
—Rob Curley

So when we launched this site we told the Simons family that we thought that it could take upwards of a year for us to get good traffic. And they asked us what we would call a success. And we said if we could get a million page views a month, that would be amazing. So we launched in March two years ago, and by April, you know six weeks later, our April numbers were already at a million page views. So our Ad Director is now having a little mini-Ad Director coronary because he’s realizing that he can sell ads to an audience that has never ever picked up the Journal-World. But he said, “You know, to make this an easier sell, Rob, I would love to make it a print tabloid.” So we decided that was fine, so it’s a weekly 24-page tabloid, which I brought copies of, called the Lawrence.com Deadwood Edition.

Initially we were going to give all of our content to the Journal-World newsroom to lay out. We gave it to them for the prototype and when it came off the press it looked a lot like a wedding tab, so we decided that the Journal-World newsroom could not lay out the Deadwood edition. So this is laid out 100% by our Web staff. It is still very edgy—not as edgy as the Web site, but edgy enough that I wonder if it’s going to get me fired a lot. Like there is a very popular band in Lawrence that’s been in Rolling Stone, that’s about to sign a national label deal called Anything But Joey. But no one in Lawrence calls them Anything But Joey. Everyone calls them ABJ. We ran a cover that said, Everybody Loves ABJ. So there are things like this that always makes me wonder if this is the week I get fired.

“Initially we were going to give all of our content to the Journal-World newsroom to lay out … When it came off the press it looked a lot like a wedding tab, so we decided that the Journal-World newsroom could not lay out the Deadwood edition.”
—Rob Curley

All of the content is from the Web site, and it will … go online for audio interviews, MP3s, reader reviews. Our bloggers become our print columnists, which is why we have a blog from Farmhouse Blues with the headline “Gay Priest Rejects Bishop’s Post.” Our live chats from KUSports.com become our sports content, so we just run our chat transcripts as sports content. The list pages are our most visited pages; it has all the e-mails that we have received … About thre months after we launched it, we started getting feedback that people wanted to have a crossword puzzle in there, because they were reading this while they were drinking coffee at Starbucks. So our editors thought, we want a crossword puzzle, but it’s got to feel edgy. So we went and looked for a guy that I had met, a guy by the name of Merl Reagle, whose crossword is amazing. I think it only appears in the Deadwood and in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s really amazing. But we renamed it to fit our audience. Not going to stick on that very long.

KUSports.com

KU Sports is another site we built to have a separate brand. It’s the biggest Web site for the Jayhawks on the Internet. The University of Kansas hates that. It has won a lot of awards, it’s been named best sports site in the world by NAA, the newspaper publishers association, best sports site in the world by Editor and Publisher. None of that means anything because this is my favorite site.

I’m born and raised in Kansas; I wanted to build my site. So when we were building this we changed it almost weekly, what our content is going to look like. So we have a staff data feed that connects us to every Division I school in the country, updating a player page for every Division I player in the country after every single game. So if you want to know how the No.2 quarterback at the University of Maryland is doing, we have the stats there. So for the Jayhawks we had our beat writers help us put together these bio pages that are kind of like a scouting report that’s not like the feel good thing that you see from the KU sports information department. And then we layer in all of their stats, and audio interviews, and stories, and those sorts of things.

Because we are not sugar coating it like the sports information department is, like here’s a good example. Here’s a KU player who’s been known to get in trouble off the field. If you click on that, it’s going to bring up his arrest record, and stories from our newspaper about him going to jail, and stuff like that. We do this for the basketball team too. It’s a lot of fun.

“Here’s a KU player who’s been known to get in trouble off the field. If you click on that, it’s going to bring up his arrest record, and stories from our newspaper about him going to jail, and stuff like that.”
– Curley

Because I run our news organization—I’m the head of our newspaper and television station—Coach Mangino and Coach Sell have my cell number, and I can always tell when we’ve posted another arrest report because the phone calls start coming in. So when I see it’s Coach Mangino, I’m like “this is not going to be a fun phone call.”

We built a virtual Memorial Stadium and virtual … field house. They can click on any seat [and] we’ll show you the field or the basketball court from that seat. We did the steerable 360-degree photos.

We wanted our weather [on KUSports.com] to be unlike any weather forecast in the world, very local. So we take the same national weather service data feed that every Web site in the country uses, and we repurpose it to make it what we want to say. So instead of saying that it’s 85 degrees with the wind blowing from the south at 5 miles per hour, it says currently at Memorial Stadium, 75 degrees with the wind blowing across the stadium from Joe’s Bakery at 6 miles per hour. We take 36 different landmarks around the University of Kansas that the students hang out at, so the wind is always blowing from a KU student landmark.

Then for the five-day forecast we had our meteorologist inputting in the five-day forecast, so we had our senior designer, who is a brilliant guy by the name of Dan Cox, draw a cartoony landscape of the KU skyline, and then he and our programmer Adrian Holovaty made it so that when the meteorologist put in the five-day forecast it would be the KU skyline broken into different areas of the skyline representing each day. So if it is raining on Wednesday, it’s only raining on this part of campus. We also put into the database sunrise and sunset, so this current conditions thing always reflects what’s currently happening in Lawrence right now. So if it’s dark outside, it’s dark in that current condition. The other thing [that is] probably stupid that we did because we could was that if you log onto our weather page while KU is playing a home football game, there will be people in the stands.

We do animated playbooks where we explain the key plays that the Jayhawks run, and we animate them in Flash. If you log onto our site after a football game you will see something like this, which will explain the play, what situation they ran it in on Saturday, and what situation they normally run it in, and then you’ll have the Xs and Os come out and draw it how the play worked, and then when you hit play the Xs and Os will run the play. [Applause] That was a good point. Kansas does always score.

The reason why is that when we first started doing this, the Jayhawks were two and 10, and I would get all this hate mail from Jayhawk fans saying, “Man you’re giving out our playbook.” I would reply to them saying “look, we suck, we’re two and 10, and I’m a Jayhawk fan, I’m not afraid to admit it, and I look at this positive re-enforcement. I want our Jayhawk players to remember what they did last week that didn’t suck, so that maybe this next week they won’t suck as much.“And this last year, they went to a Bowl Game, and I think it’s 100% because of this. I believe that in my heart.

Our KU game day coverage, we’re the only newspaper in the Big 12 to send an online-only reporter to every game who updates our Web site every five minutes. When the game is over we have huge photo galleries, up to 50 photos that didn’t appear in the newspaper, audio interviews with the players and coaches, the animated playbooks, deeper stats than what we could run in the newspaper, and then online only video clips. Our sister television station doesn’t do a broadcast on Saturday or Sunday so they come in and do a Web only clip for us.

Gary Bedore is our KU basketball beat writer, he does an online-only column called “Ask Gary.” He answers about 50 questions a month, and he doesn’t answer them with yes or no questions. I want to show you what one of his typical responses looks like—Gary is not married. Our Journal-World sports editor is a guy by the name of Chuck Woodling, and he graduated from Missouri. So the whole town hates him. We figured out how can we capitalize on this hatred towards Chuck. So we put together a game called Whack Woodling, where each week he picks the winners of the Big 12 game, you pick against him and if you win, you get a shirt that’s got his teeth knocked out, and a knot on his head and it says I Whacked Woodling, very popular on our site. His insights are amazing. I just can’t tell you how proud I am of him. I remember last year he picked Texas A&M to beat Western Louisiana-Lafayette because ampersands always beat hyphens.

“We’ve built a new brand of convergence … that we like to call Guerrilla Convergence. This is when you converge with a media partner that doesn’t know it’s converging with you.”
– Curley

We have video clips of KU through the decades [AUDIO: It’s homecoming time as Kansas and Nebraska meet in perfect football weather in Lawrence. Here we see the various methods by which the organized houses prophesized the downfall of the Corn Huskers. Nebraska’s great teams is sparked by All-American Halfback…] We also have every known piece of footage of Wilt Chamberlain as a Jayhawk—see if you guys can figure out which player is Wilt. [AUDIO … as the Kansas Jayhawks go for the National Championships against the Tar Heels … ] We love convergence and we love to practice convergence and we’ve built a new brand of convergence we think that we like to call Guerrilla Convergence. This is when you converge with a media partner that doesn’t know it’s converging with you.

Let me tell you how we set up the idea of Guerrilla Convergence. During the Final Four last year when all these television stations from across the Midwest were coming to Lawrence, if you’ve ever visited Lawrence you realize that downtown is very, very popular. There are no empty storefronts. There’s no parking ever. Our offices are downtown, and these television stations wanted to come into downtown Lawrence. The only place to park was in our parking lot. So we thought, and I think you guys will agree with me, that if you parked in our parking lot, you would like to converge with us. So we took that as an invitation to converge with any media outlet that would park in our parking lot. I want to show you what that looked like. Here’s the television station at Kansas City who wanted to converge.

[plays video]

It’s not just the Web site, we send out thousands of e-mails a day, we have a Palm Pilot edition, and our cell phone, and some … updates are so crazy now, there are three or four options. One is for us to call your phone when the game is over, one is to call it at half time and at the end of the game, another is to call you every ten minutes on the game clock, and another one is to call you every ten minutes of real time. During KU basketball we had 5,000 people sign up to have us call them every ten minutes in real time. So our SMS updates are hugely popular.

I’ll tell you a problem if you set up an SMS thing like this. The number one thing that we get that’s annoying to people is that KU fans whose next door neighbor is a Missouri grad or a K State grad, will sign up their next door neighbor’s cell phone number. So we get about 20 hate e-mails a weekend telling us to please take their phone number off the list. So we do along with a little message that says, “Watch out Jayhawks, go KU.”

I want to show you what our television commercial looks like for KUSports.com. This is a commercial that we run on ESPN and Fox and Comedy Central in the evenings. This was developed in-house, and since we’re on the cable system we can just float it into those narratives.

[plays video]

So that’s what we’re up to in Lawrence, Kansas.

Questions

Question: What size staff do you have?

Rob: We have a 13—person staff in Lawrence. It’s broken in half, six are editors and content producers, six are commercial producers that help build all the revenue parts of the site and programmers and designers and those sorts of things, and then there’s me. So that’s the size of the staff. But we use a tremendous number of interns. I speak all over the country and the world, and the number of interns who have applied is insane. So we use a lot of interns. It’s really amazing, like Game, the [Little League] Web site … was all done by interns.

We had 150 students from across the country apply to be one of the Game interns, from the top journalism schools in the country, you know, Northwestern, McGill, Berkeley, and UT Austin, University of Missouri, and I knew that something weird was going on when the deans of these schools would call me to say, ‘Look, this is an amazing student, he’s got a 4.0,” and I’m thinking, you’re lobbying so I can have your guy cover T-ball. So it was very, very competitive to be one of our interns, and that’s the way it has been for the last two or three years. So that’s our staff.

Question: What is your budget?

Rob: Our expense budget is about $800,000. Our revenue budget is about $900,000.

Question: What is the difference between LJWorld.com and Lawrence.com. Do you think you’ve gone too far with the latter?

Rob: For the Journal-World’s Web site, we are very serious about committing world-class local online journalism. We believe in creating the most imaginative, ethica,l amazing, local journalism. It has nothing to do with how many newspapers you sell on Sunday, which is what Dolph Simons preaches. So I think the Journal-World’s Web site is the most ethical—I think that other newspaper companies should look at LJWorld.com and try to be doing that because if you’re not doing that not only are you not serving your readers correctly, you’re not serving your shareholders. We’re not laying the ground work for our readers to trust us in this next world of journalism.

As for Lawrence.com and KUSports.com, we clearly created separate brands so that we could take chances and do some things that we would be uncomfortable doing on the Journal-World’s Web site. Lawrence.com is not like the Chicago Tribune Red Eye; it’s in no way attached to the Journal-World. We have separate mailing addresses; we have separate phone numbers, separate copyright. We are not trying to be a sister publication to our newspaper in any whatsoever shape or form.

To me, it was very inspirational when the owner of our company said, “Rob, if you build something that I appreciate, then you failed.” That laid the groundwork for building something that would allow us to serve us not only our readers but our advertisers by reaching that under-25 audience.

To answer your question, no, I don’t think we crossed the line at all. As a matter of fact, I wish that the rest of the newspaper industry would have some moxie. You know we all work for companies that were formed by these brilliant people, and led by people like [Jim] Batten, who encouraged us to take chances, and now we have a country full of media companies whose goal is to get up to bat and not strike out, instead of to get up to bat and get a hit.

I hate the mentality of American journalism right now. Corporate journalism has me so pissed off. [That] was why going to the Journal-World made the most amount of sense to me, because I wanted to get into a batter’s box where the coach would be signaling, “Swing for the fences,” not, “Don’t strike out.” I hope I’ve answered your question.

“I don’t think we crossed the line at all. As a matter of fact, I wish that the rest of the newspaper industry would have some moxie.”
– Curley

Question: How much of the interns’ time is spent doing tedious tasks, and how much is spent learning journalism?

Rob: A tremendous amount. Like taking 50,000 pictures at Memorial Stadium, that’s a new type of software we developed called internology. But on top of that, they get to learn how to do all this Flash story telling, we teach them how to do video. One of the reasons that the interns gravitate to our Web staff is because we’re [teaching] them things that no journalism school is teaching right now. And we’re not hiring Flash gurus and multimedia gurus; we’re hiring great journalists. Our writing test, I’ll bet you, is harder than any other writing test for a newspaper 10 times our size, because we want great journalists. On top of that, of being an incredible writer, we’re not hiring a skill set, we’re hiring a mindset. If you’ve got the right mindset, learning how to do this stuff is easy. So we’re hiring mindsets. Once you know how to write, that’s all we’re worried about.

Question: How many of the interns are full-time?

Rob: On a full-time, like, they’re not going to school right now, upwards of five, six. Those who are doing it on a part-time basis, probably another 10. … Most of it’s on Lawrence.com. Lawrence.com is produced almost 100% by free labor.

Question: [inaudible, re: unorthodox working environments]

Rob: Right. And the owners of the company have allowed me to have a refrigerator full of Mountain Dew, which I refill about three times a week. It’s awesome. You should come work there. We also have an X-Box.

Question: You said your budget is $800,000. What does that amount cover?

Rob: Yes, and that includes everything.

Question: How much of that goes to fill up the Mountain Dew?

Rob: Not as much as what you’d think. I bet we probably spend $150 a month.

Question: What is your organization’s main focus?

Rob: Right now, we’re all about alternate delivery. What I love, and I really love this, I love talking to online people who say they have to fight the battle in their newsroom to get their newspaper to want to publish on the Internet. Then if you ask them to do something differently, they’re just as closed-minded as their newspaper is. To me, the Web is not the future; I believe in my heart it’s the cell phones.

We own the cable company in our town and our local telephone company too, and we can see it. These students are not getting landlines. Their only phone is their cell phone. And if you hang around them for 10 minutes you see them talking to each other, you see them taking photos. That is why we’re doing so much development right now on phone technology because we really believe that, we need our readers, our audience to know that we’re there for them now so that they don’t start trusting some other company for that information. So we’re all about alternate delivery right now. Big time.

“To me, the Web is not the future; I believe in my heart it’s the cell phones.”
– Curley

Question: Do you have special software?

Rob: Yes, our publishing system built by Adrian Holovaty and Simon Wilson is the most sophisticated publishing system I have ever seen. It allows us to communicate with our readers however they would like their information. One of the new tools that’s going to be on LJWorld.com here shortly is that we’ve kind of taken a page from Google. You know how you can run a search on Google, and Google asks if you would like that sort of search ran every day or once a week, and then it will e-mail you a list of all new stories related to that? Well very shortly, LJWorld.com will do that. But it won’t just do that when you run a search. Our editors are going to be putting in data for certain stores—if this is an important story that is reoccurring—at the bottom of those stories, it will say: would you like us to contact you?

And then when you register, you can pick how you want us to contact you. Do you want us to contact you via instant message, is that IRC, AOL instant messenger— how do you want us to contact you? Is it e-mail, is it your cell phone, is it in a list of priorities where it says, “I want you to do all three of these things, but if I’m not logged into AOL IM, then call my cell phone, if my cell phone is turned off, then e-mail me.” It’s set up to do all of those sorts of things. We’re all about alternate delivery right now.

Question: Do you think it’s difficult to get companies to change with the Internet?

Rob: I know it is. When I used to work at another newspaper company, the way they used our online, I’m very blessed by the way. The team that I’m working with right now, the core group has been together for five years, and this is the third job we’ve taken as a team. So you don’t hire me, you hire the team. And when we were with this other newspaper company, it had newspaper holdings from Florida to Alaska. And what they would do is fly our team in for two weeks to a month at a time and rebuild the local Web site. And we didn’t build Lawrence.com. The first time we’ve ever done this is here.

You know when we landed in Hannibal, Missouri, we built the biggest Mark Twain Web site on the Internet for Hannibal. We were in St. Augustine, Florida, we built the biggest history-related site to the landings there, you know, the oldest city in the country. In Augusta, Georgia, we built the biggest Masters Golf Web site. As long as you understand that it’s the ideology—don’t do what we did in Lawrence—take the thought process behind it. What most newspaper Web sites are completely horrible about is they don’t recognize when they have an 800-pound gorilla in their back yard.

A perfect example was, about three months ago, I’m watching the movie “Radio” and I’m fascinated by this, and I want to know what the real “Radio” looked like. It dropped in the movie that it was in Anderson, South Carolina. So I go to the Anderson, South Carolina, news site, and they have nothing on this “Radio” character on their site at all. To me, if we would have had a major motion picture coming out of Lawrence, you would have found it on our homepage. Here’s everything you want to know about—you know. Newspapers are terrible about this. So to me what the business model is: become the master of the obvious. And the revenue will follow.

It’s very bizarre because if you’ve noticed there are no banner ads anywhere on our site. We think banner edges don’t work. We won’t sell anything that we feel like won’t help your register, which is a core philosophy of the Simons. They do not want to sell ads to someone that’s not going to get their cash register ring for it. So when we go on Lawrence.com, there where no ads on it for like six months because we were trying to build an audience, so that when we put ads on it, it would work. I believe with everything in my heart, that this would work.

“Most newspaper Web sites … don’t recognize when they have an 800-pound gorilla in their back yard.”
– Curley

The key is the publishers, the person in the glass office, willing to do the things that it takes to make it work. And I have some media companies where the person sitting in the glass office is willing to do this. You know I speak at a lot of these meetings, and a lot of NAA meetings, and I look out in the audience and it’s all white males over the age of 60, and I’m thinking “Dude, they’re not getting this. Why did you even bother? Am I talking too fast?” It freaks me out.

Jan: Rob, thank you very much. Your energy level needs to be applauded. It’s quite impressive, and thank you for opening another door for us.

Rob: Well thank you. I have copies of the Lawrence.com Deadwood edition and our Game tabloid, and I’ve even got some Lawrence.com shirts and stickers, which, when you see our stickers, I’m pretty sure you’ll wonder how I didn’t get fired for those.

Jan: And you said we should stay tuned to Lawrence.com soon for a refreshed site.

Rob: Yes, we are going to re-launch it in the next month and we have a few things up our sleeve that, I guarantee, you’re going to be reading on the Poynter listserv that I finally got myself fired. Let me put it this way. One of the new things that we are going to do is, you know we’ve got that database of all the KU professors, well we’re going to move a different version of it over to Lawrence.com along with the professor’s picture, and then have you ever visited a site called “Am I Hot or Not,” where you rank on a scale of 1-10. You’re going to be able to rate on a scale of 1-10 on whether that professor is worth that amount of money or not. It’s coming, the pink slip is there.