This week I started my internship as a member of Greenspun Interactive in Las Vegas. Coming to this city from Ohio is quite a change, and I had a lot to learn about the Greenspun Media Group when I arrived in Vegas this week.
It’s a little complicated to understand what all falls under the umbrella of Greenspun Media. This group encompasses the LasVegasSun.com and LasVegasWeekly.com, and also closely interacts with the print side of both publications as well as the suburban papers called the Home News. Also, Greenspun Interactive has a sports show that airs on a basic cable station each week and additional television programming on the website 702.tv.
And all of this emerged from traditional print operations. Talk about new media.
First, here’s a little background about the Las Vegas Sun…. Due to a strange Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) with the other newspaper in town, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the print edition of the Sun runs as an insert side of the Review Journal. The print version of the paper is much shorter than big-city dailies, only running about eight pages in length.
The paper doesn’t include many of the things that you find in traditional dailies around the country, and it places a larger emphasis on columns and investigative pieces rather than covering every breaking news event. For example, the print version of the Sun has no sports section, and for a person like me interested in sports journalism, that sounds a little sobering at first
But that is where the website comes in to play.
The “newspaper” has shifted the breaking news coverage to the online world, specifically producing web-only content that will never see the print version.
While the print edition has no sports page, the website has individual pages for UNLV and prep sports, and also covers Vegas events like UFC and boxing like crazy.
It’s pretty cool, innovative stuff.
So what will I be doing during this quarter-long internship? A little bit of everything.
It seems like everybody in the office is very versatile in what they can do.
Reporters who would normally just be writers also bring cameras and take photos at events. The television reporters shoot their video, go on air and then come back and edit everything. Videographers shoot and edit video, and also write stories to go along with the videos.
For me, I’m primarily going to cover the Las Vegas sports scene by writing stories and shooting/editing video for the web. There’s a lot going on in Vegas, so I’ll have no shortage of things to cover.
Some of my assignments this week include writing an article on a high school basketball game, attending a UNLV basketball practice with the TV crew, shooting video for another high school basketball game and writing on a boxing event covered by ESPN2.
Like I said, a little bit of everything.
Throughout the quarter I’ll update this blog about what I’m doing and try to bring some perspective of the new-media world based on my experiences. I’ll focus some of my attention on the interaction between the publication and the audience, specifically user generated content.
I’m excited to see how this internship unfolds. The people I work under are flexible on what sports I cover, and they mostly just want to know I’m busy and putting out good work. And I like that.
I have a background in sports media and marketing and I work on the digital team of the