Luncheon Keynote

Transcript for the 2004 James K. Batten Symposium & Awards for Innovations in Journalism
September 10, 2004
National Press Club
Washington, D.C.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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]

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.

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.

[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

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.

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.

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