Luncheon Keynote

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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