Canadian Association of Journalists conference 2010, Montreal
Keynote speaker Rob Curley, new media editor of the Las Vegas Sun, on the future of online media.
Rob Curley and the Las Vegas Sun are running an experiment that could become the newspaper model in 20 years. Their print product has become an analytical news magazine, and their website the paper of record.
In print land, the Las Vegas Sun runs as an 8-page insert in its main competitor, the Las Vegas Review Journal, and because of a federally-imposed joint operating agreement, this part is funded by the larger paper. The insert doesn't try to be comprehensive, just more contextual, focusing on the how and the why, says Curley. Twelve reporters (about 20 staff total) work on this side.
The website has roughly equal staffing, but here they cover the 'what' of journalism and try to make everything hyper local. They might have 25 to 45 stories a day on their website and only a handful in the paper. Eventually, they hope, the online will pay for the print edition, and Curley says they are already halfway to making the web portion self-sufficient.
Their approach to building readership is understanding what their audience wants to read. There are four reasons why people go to the web, he says: for practical reasons such as finding out where a restaurant is, for personal communication as in email, playful/fun reasons, and for porn, which he can't help you with, he says, even if he's from Las Vegas. Beyond that high-level understanding, the paper is unashamedly neurotic about traffic statistics for the site. They only cover what gets clicked on, which is why they cover professional fights and local college football teams. They also cover high school football games and get great uptake, but only for five schools, the ones with a sense of legacy. The rest of the schools get covered from the office because they weren't getting significant numbers of clicks.
On the Edmonton Journal site, minor crime stories seem to get a disproportionate number of clicks when compared to what I would judge as their overall significance, especially when compared to some political and in depth stories. That's what I was thinking about when someone from the audience asked, “What gets lost in the pursuit of traffic?”
Curley played down that concern. “Our readers are very sharp” he said. “Our readers really do want the news.”
Curley also talked about the paper's upcoming launch of a super hyper local website. For the past two years, they have been geo-coding all of their stories. In several weeks, readers will be able to enter their zip code and get crime data, restaurant reviews, gas prices, home prices, advertisements with coupons, and local news, all on a customizable website and for their neighbourhood. They also do things like this history project, which people keep coming back to for years.
The paper has five full time programmers on staff to help dream up and complete these projects, and some of the best writers poached from big newspapers. We need great writers for these web teams: quick, clean and good because, he says, unlike in print land, they don't get the luxury of three copy editors. Plus, all 12 of the web reporters are self-assigning. They all have beats or areas of reporting and send a note letting the editor know what they are doing that day.
Curley's blog post explaining the Las Vegas Sun
A Washington Post columnist's take on Curley's project
City Life article with much more depth, including some challenges to the scheme
Blog post by Elise Stolte,
estolte@thejournal.canwest.com
or follow me on Twitter @estolte
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