Media coverage

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Sports convergence

UAB's 'hell hath no fury, March 27

Whether it's a pre-season exhibition game or a Sweet Sixteen game in the NCAA Tournament, the Lawrence Journal-World and its local media partners report on the Jayhawks like few other college teams in the country are covered. A look at the schedule/archives on the Journal-World's University of Kansas athletics site, KUsports.com, shows that overkill is the gameplan from mid-October through March Madness.

Before the game began, KUsports.com played host to live online chat with readers and Journal-World basketball writer Gary Bedore and Birmingham News basketball writer Toraine Norris.

The game coverage then segued to a three-person team dedicated to live game updates on the Web site. One person writes an AP-style game write-through that is updated after every basket. Another person updates the homepage game brief after each basket. And the third person updates a detailed "live" box score for the game.

This real-time game coverage crosses from the Web site over to mobile phones, as the Journal-World became the first newspaper in the United States to offer daily news updates via SMS. SMS stands for Short Messaging Service. SMS technology allows mobile phones to receive short (about 100 characters). Throughout KU basketball season, thousands of Jayhawk fans receive these cell-phone game updates as often as four times a game.

At halftime, the Journal-World's photographers send at least one photo back to the newspaper so that it can be posted to the online game story.

Once the game is over, the bottom of the online game story tells readers to pick up a copy of tomorrow morning's Journal-World or watch that evening's News6 broadcast.

But the real convergence overkill kicks in once the game is over.

Journal-World photographers send between 20 and 40 extra photos for each game to be published in an online gallery. Post-game interviews with players and coaches are digitized and edited so that readers can listen to the entire responses. Box scores are augmented to have links to detailed player pages, which include game-by-game and cumulative stats. Video reports from News6 are posted to KUsports.com.

Because News6 doesn't have newscasts on weekends, games that are played on Saturday or Sunday include special online-only post-game video reports built exclusively for KUsports.com.

All of the other post-game stories and columns are then cross-linked within all of the related coverage on the Web site.

The next morning's newspaper has a high-profile reference in it, telling readers what extra content is available online. Read story.

Grassroots Guru, April 25

With the massive popularity of sabermetrics in Major League Baseball, as well as the popularity of the book "Moneyball," KUsports.com online editor Levi Chronister went about putting together a very local story on the man who started it all, Lawrence resident Bill James.

Chronister's original story was written for the newspaper's entertainment and lifestyles site, Lawrence.com. It eventually also ran as the Sunday sports centerpiece in the Journal-World. The story's multimedia components included a live chat/transcript with our readers asking James questions, video of James from a weekly interview show produced by sister station News6, audio excerpts from Chronister's interview with James, and links to other stories about the famous baseball statistician from CNN, ESPN, Business Week magazine, Harper's, and too many other to list.

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