Rob Curley of the Lawrence Journal-World presents "Let's Quit Building Crappy Newspaper Sites" at the New Media Summer Public Lecture Series at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
I'm there via webcast because there was no way I was going to get onto I-80 on the Friday kicking off Memorial Day weekend.
Curley's talking fast. I'll try to keep up.
He says the web site has had great success with searchable public databases. Examples:
- Donations to local election campaigns, so people can look up who's giving to whom.
- All homes' appraised values. "Just type in your boss' name to see if he has a cool crib," Curley says.
- All salaries of University of Kansas employees.
Curley said the next project, which will go online in June, will be a database of all tickets given in Lawrence since 1997. It'll provide information on racial profiling, and you'll be able to find out where in town you're likely to get different types of tickets. "Type in Dolph Simon's name to see if he's ever sped; he has," Curley says, referring to the Journal-World chairman, who Curley also says has provided the vision for the site's success.
LJWorld.com's live chats, which are hosted three or four times a week, have regularly broken news. Sources find, "It's a lot easier to say no comment to a reporter than to a constituent than a fan," Curley says.
The governor wouldn't declare her position on gay marriage but when some guy named Bob asked her in the chat, she fessed up. The University of Kansas basketball coach, responding to a fan in a chat, announced the team's starting lineup. The newspaper story wound up becoming a lead item on ESPN.com because a freshman was going to be a starter.
Other tidbits:
- How do they manage to do such a great job at a 20,000-circulation newspaper? It's not just that they own a TV station. The answer, at least in part: internology. Curley's phrase for the young people he's able to recruit, some paid, some not.
- All reporters have camera phones, and some of their images even appear in print. One column, but still, wow!
- Only with internology could they have produced a section like Game about local youth baseball and softball. The newspaper rejected a chance to publish a print version, so Curley arranged for online to produce it. "The advertising director couldn't believe how easy it was to monetize it," he said.
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