The Des Moines Register is driving traffic to its Web site with the launch of searchable databases for high school records in track and field, boys and girls basketball, football and wrestling, the Drake Relay high school winners and 2009 commitments. The Register regularly promotes these databases in print and in prominent carousels on its Web page. Click here for the link (follow the middle rail down the page. They’re under "searchable records.")
The Register also broke a story about the NCAA using new computer software to gauge the "affordability" of potential postseason matchups. USA Today picked up the story and ran it in print/online.
The Register also considered West Des Moines gymnast Shawn Johnson a Web story first in its coverage plans building up to the Beijing Olympics. It created a home page specifically for her near the beginning of 2008 – www.DesMoinesRegister.com/shawn – and continued to build online content over months.
That content, which as of early fall had generated more than 260,000 page views, included:
■ INTERACTIVE GRAPHICS: Traditional print graphics that detail some complex thing (in this case, the four gymnastics disciplines) were turned into four clickable online graphics that walk you through each and showed her top challengers.
■ SPIN-ABLE GLOBE: The Register created a "spin-able" competition globe where you can spin the globe and click on Johnson’s competitions around the world. The intent was a layered site of Register content, with any/all stories (the Register’s, AP or other providers), links to all photos from that competition and links to video, if available. It was one-stop-shopping for all of her senior-level events over three years.
In addition, The Register aimed for different audiences – young girls and families in particular …
■ FAN MAP: A fan map where you could place a pin on the world, showing where you will be rooting for Shawn Johnson. We had more than 2,500 participate from every continent but Antarctica.
■ COMPUTER WALLPAPER: A set of 10 downloadable wallpaper for home computers.
■ ‘COLORING BOOK’: An online "coloring book" where young fans could color different images of Shawn and print them out on home computers. Says sports editor Bryce Miller "What we didn’t see coming: Young girls colored dozens of images and kept printing over and over – so this grew into much more than a one-time experience for a new online audience."
There also were the tons of photo galleries, forums, stories, videos, links to other key sites and more.
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| Click on the image above to view a .pdf of the page. |
The Southeast Missourian produced a 16-page basketball section covering its 39 teams, including Southeast Missouri State men’s and women’s basketball. The cover was the realization of a long-held dream of the sports department and photography staff to set something on fire for a preview section: Basketball, meet rubber cement.
The Missourian also launched a text-message service for high school football and Southeast Missouri athletics this fall and will be providing the service for the 37 high school basketball teams and Southeast Missouri State. In addition to scores for the teams in the Southeast Missouri coverage area, Semoball.com text-alert subscribers receive scores and headlines for the entire region. …
The Southeast Missourian is moving to the smaller Web width, taking our page print area down to 10.125 inches when the change is implemented in the middle of January.
