LAWRENCE, Kan. - From the outside, the Journal-World doesn’t look any different from most newspapers its size. But walk through the door and it’s like stepping simultaneously backwards and forwards through time.

The aroma of camphor oil permeates the newspaper’s polished wood floors and high ceilings, taking you back to the frozen-in-time grace of a Midwestern summer - and you can almost hear the buzzing whine of cicada bugs and the muted pops of old-style flashbulbs.

The modern world

Open your eyes and the modern world hits you in the face: the Journal-World’s (daily, 19,728; Sunday, 19,744) reporters are all armed with laptops; Wi-Fi transmitters are peppered throughout the modern newsroom.

The convergence desk at the World Company's News Center houses the new gathering operations of the Lawrence Journal-World, Channel 6 news and World Online. The three operations merged when the building's remodeling was completed in September, 2002.
Photo: Lawrence Journal-World

The dichotomy is jarring, but the seamless integration of these two ages of journalism speaks volumes about what the Journal-World’s founding Simons family is trying to accomplish with its vision of complementary media.

Befitting its legacy, World Online, the newspaper’s Internet venture, also melds the old and the new, wedding traditional values in how news should be covered to modern display technologies.

“I’m a big believer that the homepage should be all local news,” said Rob Curley, World Online’s general manager.

“In the (print) newspaper, a subscriber probably only subscribes to one paper. But online is a whole different animal. We can’t ‘out CNN’ CNN.com. If there’s a story about bombings in the Middle East, thousands of sites have that story. But if Wal-Mart is denied a building permit in Lawrence, only we have that story.”

Extensive freedom

Curley, who has been given extensive freedom to shape World Online since he joined the company in August 2002, said he’s guided by a speech given in 1991 by Dolph C. Simons Jr., the Journal-World’s editor and publisher.

“Simons said it was critical for the Journal-World to look at its business as an information business,” providing consumers with news, advertising and any other information desired, Curley said.

Taking that advice to heart, Curley has attempted to break the mold of what a city site can accomplish, given resources, vision and a lot of hard work.

Curley concedes that although his philosophy doesn’t sound terribly radical, it goes against the traditional technique of populating the site with the identical content that goes into the print edition. That led to initial grumbles from some in the newsroom, but Curley insisted that Internet readers were looking for those “water-cooler” stories that draw the buzz and shouldn’t have to hunt for them.

“If a group of KU (Kansas University) students pose for Playboy, why make people look for that story on our site when it’s the talk of the town?”

Because The World Co. owns the cable television franchise in Lawrence, extensive integration among print, locally produced cable news and the Internet was not only possible, but also inevitable. In the fall of 2001, the three newsrooms came together.

Convergence plus

A local school board election in 2003 is a good example of how the combined teams cover a specific event.

The Journal-World’s education reporter wrote expansive profiles of the candidates. These profiles, 20-plus column inches in length, were pared down to eight column inches in the newspaper. Readers were invited to access the Web site to see longer versions.

Meantime, Journal-World print reporters discussed the election on the local cable news show.

According to Curley, print journalists deal with the different requirements of television in a variety of ways.

“Some reporters think they look great on TV, some use notebooks for cover and some insist on B-roll (footage that runs with a voice track in the background) while they’re talking.”

Oftentimes, an on-camera reporter will conclude a one- or two-minute piece by saying “Read more about this in tomorrow’s Journal-World.”

Tailored differently

Each of Journal-World’s three Web sites is tailored to a different audience and branded differently. Ljworld.com is the site that consolidates news and information from the newspaper and the cable station. Lawrence.com caters to the college crowd and serves as a music and entertainment portal, including everything from an extensive calendar of events with automatic e-mail updates to a warehouse for local bands’ MP3s. The site drew more than 14,000 downloads of these music files in the first two weeks the service was launched.

Lawrence.com is written in a more casual style, not necessarily adhering to conventional AP style, said Curley.

The chief entertainment editor for the site was born and raised in the area and returned after working as the Washington reporter for the Houston Chronicle. Interns are used to fill out the staff as necessary.

Sports key

KUsports.com, as the name implies, covers the university’s sports teams and draws considerable traffic.

That traffic spiked sharply last spring when several events converged: the appearance of KU’s basketball team in the Final Four; the firing of KU’s athletic director and the resignation of basketball coach Ray Williams.

As a result, the site had more than 9 million page views in April, tripling the normal volume. During the actual day of Williams’ departure, traffic was at the highest level any of The World Co.’s sites had ever seen.

“In fact, we had to strip all the graphics off the home page and just moved over the text from the story,” said Curley. “It was crazy.”

The KUsports.com site also sponsors and hosts a very popular “Women of K.U.” calendar, both in print and online. The online version offers a number of features, such as screensavers, e-mail postcards and video clips.

The sites are built on a mix of technologies that will soon be integrated into a common framework. According to lead developer Adrian Holovaty, open-source software has become the organization’s preferred Web development resource.

Custom scripts

The most recent system, which Holovaty designed, runs the entertainment site Lawrence.com. It was built in the PHP scripting language and ties into a MySQL back-end database.

Ljworld.com and kusports.com, meanwhile, were built in 1997, based on the programming language mod_perl. It will be replaced with the MySQL database by year-end.

“For a site our size, MySQL is a no-brainer,” Holovaty said. “It’s free, fast, lightweight and easy to use. Some folks in the industry believe free (open-source) products are inherently inferior to any paid product.

“That thinking is misguided, ignorant and frankly, ridiculous.”

Although parts of the workflow process have been automated from the newspaper side, there’s still a significant amount of human labor involved, including managing pictures. The next generation of software will reduce the amount of cutting and pasting required.

“The goal is to build software that is easy to use, is infinitely customizable and, above all else, does what the staff wants it to do, and will grow easily to accommodate new needs down the road,” Holovaty said.

The sites’ ads, meanwhile, are not sold on a traditional cost-per-thousand basis but instead based on sponsorships and other cooperative opportunities.

During a recent playoff season, for example, the local Days Inn ran a “Best KU Room Rates” ad on KUsports.com and received 250 online bookings. So far, revenue generated has been poured directly back into the sites to expand their capabilities.

Certain features on Lawrence.com are designed to attract advertising, such as a “Get Your Drink On” daily feature that displays the best drink specials at the college bars.

Curley is a passionate believer in the current and future value of newspaper Web sites.

“If you’re not reaching an important audience that your advertisers really desire with your core newspaper products and traditional Web sites, then how is that taking care of anyone - including your company - when those readers and advertisers are going to go someplace else to get the kind of local content they want?” he said.

Advertisers, he said, will only go where the readers are, Curley said. “If you’re not serving that niche, you’ve really jeopardized your company’s future on several different levels.”