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EPpy Awards Finalists
Congrats to my buddies in Lawrence for being nominated in the “Best News Site” (LJWorld.com) category again this year, and especially to Nathan Borror, whose design for Lawrence.com is nominated in the “Best Design” category.
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KUsports.com and Lawrence.com redesigned and relaunched
Overnight, my good friends at the Journal-World got all of their sites moved onto Django 1.0, and launched major redesigns of kusports.com and lawrence.com, as well as some subtle realigned of the flagship ljworld.com. The process of moving these sites to Django 1.0 has been ongoing for literally like two years, as they were previously running on a Django revision somewhere between .90 and .91. Now that they’re all caught up with the latest and great and have swanky new designs to work within, I hope to see my old team get back to what they do best: coving Lawrence like no other local paper in the world covers their beat. Congrats, guys.
For the curious, I believe the design work on Lawrence.com is primarily the work of Nathan Borror and kusports.com was lead by Christian Metts (guys, correct me if I’m wrong on that).
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LJWorld.com: Race for U.S. Senate
Once again loving Nathan Borror’s information design for the election results in Lawrence, KS. It gets a little bit better every time — and it was kick ass the first time.
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Jayhawks honored at White House
My old buddies at the Journal-World have a whole slew of multimedia and other content related to the Jayhawks’ recent visit to The White House. President Bush saying, “Rock Chalk Jayhawk” is probably one of the coolest things he’s ever done. See also LJW’s great special online feature on the Championship, which I believe was mostly this work of Richard Cornish.
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2008 EPpy Winners Announced
Big congrats to my old cronies at the Lawrence Journal-World (Best News Web Site with fewer than 1 million unique monthly visitors), as well as my friends at MSNBC.com (Best Community Web Site with over 1 million unique monthly visitors), and The New York Times (Best News Web Site with over 1 million unique monthly visitors and others).
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LJWorld.com: Photos of Mass. St. celebration after elite eight victory
I’ve lived in Seattle for over eight months now, and I think this is the first time I’ve wished I could be back in Lawrence. Looks like a ton of fun. Have a few for me, guys!
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Matt Croydon: Why I’m not worried about Google News Local
A picture is worth a thousand words.
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LJWorld.com: Kansas Democratic Presidential Caucuses
My old cronies at the Journal-World continue to find innovative new ways to do database journalism. Today, they’re using the new Google charts API to display pie graphs of Kansas caucus results, and they’re also streaming the results to Twitter in near real-time. Awesome.
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Digital Edge Awards finalists announced
Once again, my boys back in Lawrence are finalists for several Edgies. LJWorld.com is nominated for Best Overall News Site, Best Design and Site Architecture, and Most Innovative Multimedia Storytelling (for 24 Hours in Lawrence). Additionally, Lawrence.com is a finalist for Best Local Guide or Entertainment Site. Is it just me, or did the Edgies used to hve an award for sports sites?
Anyway, congrats to all the finalists — especially my buddies back in Lawrence. We’ll have to get everyone together and have some drinks — that LJWorld.com redesign we did seemed to pay off!
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LJWorld.com: Free State brew tops ‘Draft’ list
Free State Brewery in downtown Lawrence, KS, has the best beer on the continent, according to Draft Magazine. I don’t know about that (I don’t drink beer), but I’m here to say that they definitely have the best damn chicken salad drenched in ranch I’ve ever consumed. If you’re ever in Lawrence for some reason, you can’t afford not to go to Free State.
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2007 Knight-Batten Awards: LJWorld.com election coverage
The 2006-2007 election coverage stuff we did back at the Journal-World was named a notable entry for these Knight-Batten awards. Congrats to everyone involved — especially Nathan, who rocked all the fun Flash stuffs.
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Making the ‘24-hour newsroom’ work
Inland Press has a nice little feature on our Managing Editor, Dennis Anderson, and how he’s adapted the workflow and processes in the newsroom to accommodate for today’s 24-hour news cycle and new technology.
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Simon: Doing Local Right (the blog post, this time)
Simon posted his slides from his @media presentation over the weekend, but he’s now posted a shot blog entry on the talk. He discussed local news coverage, and used LJWorld.com and Lawrence.com as his examples.
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Simon Willison @media: Doing Local Right
Simon did a short presentation on why good online local news coverage requires a dedicated, focused, talented and most of all, local team. He used our work at the Lawrence Journal-World as the basis for the presentation (Simon worked at the Journal-World for a year while he was studying here in the states). Thanks for the props, Simon!
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LJWorld.com / Multimedia
A page we’ve always wanted to have on the site but never had taken the time to build. Christian threw it together quite nicely early this week. I think it’s a fun, exploratory view into the various types of content we publish.
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LJWorld.com / 24 hours in Lawrence
Another LJWorld.com special section. Visual stylings courtesy of Nathan. I especially love the downtown Lawrence time lapse by Thad Allender.
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LJWorld.com: Alcohol violations: Minors in possession
Yet another data-oriented interactive journalism project from our crew. Credit for this one goes to Matt Croydon on the data modeling, importing, and JavaScript, Christian Metts on the visual design, and Christine Metz on the reporting (yes, I said Christian Metts and Christine Metz). Good stuff.
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LJWorld.com: Replay respect
Esquire Magazine calls Lawrence’s bar The Replay the best bar in Kansas. The magazine picked one bar for every state. The Replay is my favorite bar in Lawrence, and probably the best bar I’ve been to in Kansas, as well. Louise’s and The Jackpot in Lawrence are close, and Manhattan’s got a few good ones, as well, but I think The Replay bests them all.
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LJWorld.com: Learning outside the lines: Home schooling in Kansas
An online package I put together to go with a five-day print special report. Features stories, audio, video, slideshows, graphs, tables, etc. I love these big, in-depth multimedia reports.
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LJWorld redesign
Nathan led the design process for the reworked LJWorld.com, and he posts some thoughts on the matter. The site’s design is intend “to disappear,” he says — which is great. While you’re over there, poke around Nathan’s personal site a bit. He’s gave it a slight facelift for May 1. It’s not a redesign, but there are a lot of nice new little details.
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LJWorld.com: Redesigned
We finally got our Lawrence Journal-World website redesign out the door. There is still much left to do, but it’s live and working. The design work here was led by Nathan Borror, with support from Christian Metts, and I personally think it’s brilliant. It’s much cleaner and less cluttered than most newspaper websites, and I think the readability on the site is really, really good. One of my favorite features, as a user of the site, is the new “everything we published today” feature. Unlike most online newspaper archives, this accounts not only for new stories, but also for blog entries, podcasts, photos, galleries, videos, and more.
Like I said, there’s still a lot to do to get LJWorld.com where we want it, but getting this out the door is 90% of the battle. We completely redesigned the site using much cleaner HTML and CSS than before, and we’ve (finally) migrated our own site to use all the latest Ellington goodies our clients have been using for a while now. We’ve set ourselves up for much, much faster iterative development — both from a functionality and design perspective — so we can roll more new stuff our more quickly.
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LJWorld: Mining’s Legacy: A Scar on Kansas
Another beautiful piece of interactive journalism and multimedia storytelling from The Journal-World. This one was designed by Nathan Borror with assistance from Christian Metts and direction from David Ryan.
This is an early attempt at something we’ve been talking about for a while, but are just starting to really do. That is, to take a story and tell it the way it wants to be told. Wether that’s video, audio, text, photos, infographics, or anything else — the important thing is the story. This is in contrast to most newspaper companies, who still hold text-based pieces as the cornerstone.
Take a look around. You’ll find that many sites are doing videos and photos and such — but rarely are they first-class citizens. Usually it’s a basic text-based story layout with a few additional bits of multimedia in a sidebar somewhere. We don’t want to do that (at least not exclusively). If the best way to tell a story is through a video with some supporting text, then we want to use video with some supporting text. We don’t want the fact that we’re (historically) a newspaper company to keep us from telling stories the way they’re best told.
Besides the “mediums besides text can be first-class” approach, this is also an example of taking a big, multi-part (even multi-day, in print) piece and giving it an art-directed design all it’s own online. You’re going to see a lot more of this from us in the future.
And besides that, it’s yet another sneak preview of the design direction for the new LJWorld.com, which should launch this month. Check out the tight 16-column grid!
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CitMedia: Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement
A very nice (if long) report on the state of communities in the context of online news. Includes mentions of LJWorld.com, Lawrence.com, the Django framework, and our Ellington CMS.
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LJWorld: Primary Election Results
Local elections may not be glamorous, but they matter a lot to communities like this one, and they deserve a good online treatment from the local media. I think Nathan Borror did it justice tonight. Nice Flash work — and the basic layout may just be another mini-preview of where we’re going, stylistically, with the LJWorld.com redesign that will launch soon.
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Lawrence Journal-World: Kathy’s long journey
Lots of people in journalism say you can’t art direct stories online. Well, dammit — we’re gonna try. Here’s one of our first shots at it. It might just be a sneak preview of the new LJWorld.com design, too (but don’t tell anyone I told you that). Photos by Bill Snead, design by Nathan Borror.
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LJWorld.com | Election Results
I challenge any local news outfit to a friendly game of “Our Election Coverage Is Better Than Yours.” Flash hotness by Nathan and data massaging by Matt Croydon. Powered by Jolt Cola — oh, and Django.
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engadget: Lawrence wants to ban phones completely from roads
Our LJWorld.com gets a link from an unlikely source. Thanks for pointing it out, .sara. :)
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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