May 19, 2008
Making History in the Desert
Las Vegas Sun Goes Back in Time
 This is how you do it.
Any newspaper looking at developing a history of their local market (one of the suggestions of Newspapers Next) should go to www.lasvegassun.com/history.
This project on the history of Las Vegas goes far beyond repackaging archives. It includes panoramas, videos of implosions, interactive casino development maps, podcasts, and features on local "personalities". In addition, the home page captures a ton of non-casino events, including the diversion of the Colorado River and the Nevada Proving Grounds bomb tests.
The only weakness seems to be that there’s a lack of super-relevant advertising. The first few sections of the project I visited had ads for Vonage, iRobot and an online education company. Nothing from the Nevada tourism association, an airline or hotel.
From an editorial standpoint, however, the team in the desert did some amazing work.
The following is a guest posting from Dave Toplikar*, new media managing editor at the Las Vegas Sun, with details about putting together this project.
We started the history project, “The History of Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada,” back in the fall and hoped to launch it in January when we launched the new Sun Web site. Then the more we got into the history project, the more we found and we decided to delay it’s launch until we had lots more cool elements. We picked May 15 to do it because that’s Vegas’ birthday.
Here are some more details, in no particular order:
We brought in seven UNLV journalism interns in November to help us work on the history project and other evergreen projects prior to our Jan. 10 site launch. Five of them were the students we met at the Online News Association conference in October 2007 in Toronto, who were part of the the Knight News Foundation’s grant for creating new innovative ideas for storytelling on the Web.
 I assigned special projects editor Andy Samuelson to organize the interns and map out the project. They spent many days working in the Sun’s morgue, looking for old stories and photos. Andy spent numerous days working with the interns, lining up interviews with local historians, and working with UNLV special collections people and with KLAS-TV.
Those interns and two others we brought in helped us scan more than 1,000 photos and locate lots of old video footage. They also typed-in some 150 vintage stories from the Sun’s morgue that weren’t part of the electronic database. They also helped us write cut lines for the photos.
We brought in two Sun veteran writers, Mary Manning and Ed Koch, to help us write some of th 30-plus project specific stories and do research to help us find more photos and information.
The interactive functionality of the casino map and the clickable historic timeline was created by Zach Wise, our senior multimedia producer/editor who came to us from Ohio University, where he lead the Soul of Athens project.The artwork for the casino maps was created by our own staff, including one of our interns, Bethany Acree, and Billy Steffens, a multimedia technician we brought in from [the Lawrence Journal-World], and Todd Saligo, our new media art director, who we brought in from [the Naples Daily News].
The 11-part documentary, “Boomtown: The Story Behind Sin City,” was developed by Sun videographer Matt Toplikar, who is has a film degree from the University of Kansas. The documentary is broken up into decades, from the time the city got its start as a railroad stop, to the year 2000, when it became “the entertainment capital of the world.” Matt researched and wrote the narrative for the documentary and did all the production and sound work. Brian Greenspun, the Sun’s president and editor, narrated the documentary. Many members of the Sun’s new media staff helped in the preparation of the documentary.
Mob interactive: This include a lengthy story written by senior Sun writers Ed Koch and Mary Manning about the connections Las Vegas’ early casinos had with mobsters from Chicago, New York and other cities. After that story was written, Todd Saligo, our senior designer, worked with Andy Samuelson to create an interactive graphic that shows how the mobsters were connected to each other and to certain cities.
The project also includes several stand-alone videos by Zach Wise and Trent Ogle, former Arkansas-Democrat Gazette videographer who also worked as a TV news videographer in Little Rock, Ark., for 10 years.
The final design was created by Todd Saligo, senior designer, and Tyson Evans, the Sun’s new media design editor, and Samuelson and others.
The Sun’s newroom helped us with the editing and final reviews of the project.
* Disclosure: I worked with Dave at the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World in 2003 - 2004.
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