fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

The Las Vegas Sun print newspaper has 25 editorial employees and its accompanying Web site, lasvegassun.com, has 45.

The paper focuses on the how and why of stories. It doesn’t cover breaking news, sports or stories unrelated to Vegas. It reads like a daily news magazine.

Lasvegassun.com, on the other hand, aggressively covers breaking news, ‘close to the ground’ community content, high school and university sports, and produces high energy news in text, video and audio.

Rob “blow up the newsroom” Curley, the baseball-hat wearing Web evangelist and newspaper strategist who has left his mark on news Web sites across the country, is leading change at the Sun. As the new Web President and Executive Editor of Greenspun Interactive, Curley’s enthusiastic experiment at the Sun is a ground-breaking test of some of the prescriptions for ailing newspapers that have been argued about in conferences and blogs for the past few years.

The Sun’s ambitious experiment includes:

A newspaper in a major market with a small staff — Curley argues you can put out a paper and news Web site with 50 people, if you have the right 50. He’s assembled an experienced online team of intense and talented staff who believe in what they are doing, work long hours, and aren’t afraid to work on filling out a school database one day, covering a trial the next and ending the week with a studio podcast of community leaders or the latest alternative band to come through town. The newspaper staff has a similar dedication to sharp writing and explanatory journalism. Interestingly, while staff used to move from the Sun to the larger Review-Journal, in recent years, the migration has been the other direction. Staff at the Sun are from news organizations such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and CNN.

Risking stylebook consistency for copy with voice and attitude — Staff can write straight breaking news, but the emphasis amid all the multimedia is strong writing. Curley says all his staff start with that foundational talent, and build on that by telling stories that makes the site fun to read, engaging and not-to-miss.

Strategic community participation — The Sun also puts out the Las Vegas Weekly. They don’t invite blogs from any neighbor down the street; in addition to plentiful comment spaces, their approach to citizen content is to spend a lot of time recruiting compelling and interesting personalities to write for the site. The two most popular blogs on the site are Stripped, written by a UNLV student who is working her way through school as a dancer, and Luxe-Light, written by Robin Leach, host of the 1980s television series ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.’

Not expecting online revenue to surpass print revenue — Curley argues that online revenue will never match the monopoly-induced profits that news organizations generated in the past few decades. The economics are different. Holding out for a model that promises the enormous gains stock analysts historically expected is a losing proposition. Get over it.

Don’t be everything to everyone — Go after the niches in your community. Curly advocates finding the passions in your readers and pursuing those aggressively. Make your newspaper for people who love newspapers. Make your Web site intensely local. Generate addictive evergreen content. And put EVERYTHING in a database.

The stars have come together in many ways for this experiment to take shape. The Las Vegas Sun is part of a unique JOA with the Las Vegas Review-Journal. They don’t publish advertisements in the print product, which is bundled inside the Review-Journal. The paper is family owned by the Greenspuns, who have the capital and guts to take these kinds of risks. The lasvegassun.com newsroom is a breathtaking peek at a new media newsroom, complete with a broadcast studio/conference room, podcasting space, pinball machines, and endless supply of gummy bears. And Las Vegas is one of the most interesting cities in the world; following the passions of a city that oozes sex and sin on a strip surrounded by neighborhoods full of Mormons and hopeful refugees has got to be worth writing about.

For all our sakes, I hope this experiment has a long and interesting life.