The San Bernardino County Sun is located in an especially temperate and pleasant part of Southern California, close to Riverside and Los Angeles, a part of the state that enjoys sunshine and pleasant temperatures year-round.

As with other Web sites that attempt to reflect some aspect of their surrounding environment, the front page of sbsun.com has bright colors and an airy treatment of separation space.

But it took a spate of natural disasters in 2003 that led the Sun to create a special interactive section that ultimately garnered the paper a major award for its online news coverage.

This online interactive special section called “Unnatural Disasters” won the San Bernardino County Sun a Digital Edge award in 2005. The section explored the relationships between 2003 fires, and mudslides and flooding in this area of Southern California the next year. The section included features such as Flash mapping and online chats.

That series, “Unnatural Disasters,” chronicled October fires and a Christmas Day flood that plagued the region that year. The Newspaper Association of America honored the paper with a Digital Edge award for its coverage, and the paper also won additional recognition from other news organizations.

Shared resources

The Sun hopped on the Internet five years ago and last year retooled the site. Hosted by parent MediaNews Group in Denver, it’s managed locally by the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (part of the LA.com network) and the Sun’s (daily, 68,658; Sunday 75,043) editorial staff.

According to John Hoeft, vice president interactive, the group’s newspapers share as much technology as they can to corral costs.

Each paper tweaks the software to support its own needs; enhancements are shared among the group when appropriate.

Sbsun.com is built upon a variety of technology packages, including Java and SQL to power the main publishing system.

Open source software, ranging from MySQL and PHP to ASP, is also used, Hoeft said.

LANG’s upcoming deployment of Unisys’ editorial software will begin to simplify and streamline the site’s operation, said Jay Tuten, interactive content director.

 “Currently, we use a mix of a number of legacy systems that we will be happy to have replaced,” he said.

Moving content online

For now, until the Unisys app is rolled out, content moves from the Sun’s editorial front-end through a local gateway called Keyzip, Tuten said.

“Keyzip reads the content for keywords and associates stories to different sections of our site automatically,” he said. “For instance, if we had a story for San Bernardino High School, it would automatically be sent to the San Bernardino High page. Our online staff chooses the story order and presentation manually each day, but we automate as much as we can so our online staff can do higher value work that cannot be achieved through a computer.”

Sbsun.com counts three interactive content producers that contribute to the site, as well as a newsroom staff of 90. Sales are handled by an interactive sales manager, with the help of about 40 people that sell both print and online products.

LANG maintains a tech support office in Woodland Hills, supplying IT help to all of the group’s 10 papers as well as the LA.com network.

The Sun doesn’t currently require users to register to read content, but it plans to do that early next year. Sbsun.com will allow users to customize the site to match their needs, giving them an incentive to sign on.

Top features

A prominent feature on the site’s front page is the “Top Jobs, Top Rentals and Top Real Estate” block of ads. Advertisers purchase those particular enhancements to attract passive job seekers and shoppers, and those ads are featured on various sections in addition to prominent placement on the home page. Advertisers pay extra for that placement, which is currently available to classified marketers.

Each individual site within the LA.com network features these top ads, but the content is market-specific and only appears on that individual newspaper’s Web site.

“Traditional online advertising such as banners and content sponsorships are the most popular (forms of advertising),” Hoeft said. “We can usually create a lot of excitement within a market by having an interactive sales blitz focusing on local accounts and selling out designated inventory.”

Sbsun.com also offers specific products for employers, car dealerships and real estate agents.

“Ads are being sold based on the amount of times they can be delivered, (which is) usually a flat monthly fee based on traffic to a specific section,” Hoeft said. “We also offer video banners and other rich media.”

Like other sites, sbsun.com packages traditional print ads into an online offering by giving users the opportunity to click a specific button. Print ad rates reflect this print and online combo buy, and PowerOne Media provides the technology behind the PDF conversion.

Awarded for innovation

Sbsun.com’s technological underpinnings were put to the test in 2003, following October wildfires and a subsequent flood on Christmas Day. All told, 22 people died and losses exceeded $1 billion.

The series used “incredible” multimedia and interactivity to compel users to explore the site, said Tuten.

 “We had some amazing video shot by firemen on the scene, depicting the creation of a ‘fire tornado’ that was very compelling. We also invited Fire Marshall Peter Brierty to participate in a live (online) chat with local residents to discuss the threat and the response to the fires and floods.”

Interactive maps demonstrated local threat levels in a very visual way, and overlaid the population growth expectations in hazard areas. “Altogether, it was a well-rounded package that gave users many different areas to explore and interact with,” Tuten said.

The creation of the special section was spurred by the considerable Web traffic that responded to the Sun’s coverage of the fires and floods as they were happening.

Fast response

In response, sbsun.com’s news staff developed interactives, posted photo galleries and video, and continually updated the staff-written stories throughout the day.

“It was our first chance to break into the 24-hour news cycle and keep the readers informed about this dangerous situation,” Tuten said.

Following the positive response to the multimedia, online editors are using audio and video as often as they can on the site. More online multimedia is in store, Tuten said.

Video associated with earlier projects, such as ‘Teens Who Kill,” an examination of local teen killers, continues to be viewed regularly on sbsun.com, Tuten said.

In addition to the multimedia elements, sbsun.com also enabled users to blog on its site in a bid to increase readership.

New features

“We have a blog called ‘Beyond Borders’ manned by Conor Friedersdorf that takes a look at immigration from all angles,” Tuten said. “It was nominated for an Online News Association award, but came up short. The real victory is the discussion, however, and how the community has gotten involved with the content.”

According to Hoeft, the site has a number of improvements and additions planned for 2006, including the debut of community journalism, which will allow users to post additional content.

Other blog-related content will also be enhanced, Hoeft said, and the site’s classified ads will be bolstered with transactional features and photos.

With the advent of user registration, sbsun.com will also be able to direct its newsletters more efficiently to targeted audiences.