The Inside Story: Humorous Vegetarian Runs Web Site!!

By: Carl Sullivan A sense of humor and a creative spirit go a long way if you're a Web editor, especially if you're the lone soul with that title at a large metropolitan daily.

So Vance Lehmkuhl seems well suited for his role as online editor at the Philadelphia Daily News, a job he accepted in early 2000 after serving as online editor for The Intelligencer of Doylestown, Pa., and the first Webmaster for the Pew Charitable Trusts in the mid-1990s. A vocal vegetarian, he's the author of a cartoon collection, "The Joy of Soy," and the founder of a satirical pop band, Green Beings. His writing has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia City Paper, The Humanist Magazine and Z Magazine, while his cartoons have been syndicated by the New York Times Syndicate and featured on the Modern Humorist Web site.

In a recent interview, Lehmkuhl spoke about the unusual division of Web duties in Philadelphia, and how his site stands apart from its big sister, the Inquirer.

1. Philadelphia is an unusual market, with two strong newspapers both owned by Knight Ridder. The Inquirer and Daily News essentially have subsites within philly.com, which is more of an overall city guide. How do you maintain a Daily News identity within the larger site?

Lehmkuhl: Yeah, we have one tabloid and one broadsheet, both different size operations with different demographics, both in direct competition with each other, sharing space as siblings on a parent site. It makes for some interesting issues sometimes, in figuring out how things should be commensurate, and how, even with two different-looking home pages, we can both be represented on the front in a way that still says it's one coherent Web site. In terms of content, one d?tente is that rather than both papers fighting to get breaking news up there, we've ceded that to the Inquirer and instead provide original content -- which has historically included longer stuff than would fit, or additional stuff that didn't fit, in the paper. But more recently we've been concentrating more on Weblogs.

2. Tell us about your blogs, and how you think they'll evolve over time.

VL: I think some key aspects of blogs -- immediacy, personality, passion, connecting to readers -- are things that match up particularly well with what the Daily News does, and so I think there's a lot of potential there if we use the medium right. The key is finding how to translate a style that's been honed for print into something that takes advantage of online culture, and also how to do them so they're an asset to the newspaper as a whole, not just an extra bauble on the Web site.

That's an ongoing exploration, as we've had varying levels of success with different blogs. When I was hired in 2000, I proposed a couple of Weblogs along with a bunch of pie-in-the-sky ideas, and of those we did limited Weblogs for the presidential election that year (both of those one-night bloggers later became regular Daily News bloggers, one becoming a columnist in the interim).

But we really got going in 2002 with an Eagles Weblog and a women's fitness blog. Obviously the Eagles one got a lot more traffic and comments even without being written by one of our "big name" columnists. And while the Girlfriends' Guide to Getting Fit, as it was called then, filled an obvious niche, it was helmed by three women who weren't all that fit and didn't seem all that driven to get that way. There were lessons there about the persona and credibility of the blog author, but there were also some logistical issues in that only one of the women was a journalist, and the others had to be cajoled into filing copy on time. And it was only being updated once a week, which was a poor fit for blog culture. Finally it was handed over to Theresa Johnson, and with her at the helm it became The Girlfriends' Locker Room, where all the participants were either newsroom staffers who actually work out regularly, or fitness trainers for fact-checking, and the content was breezier and more topical, with more back-and-forth between the "Girlfriends." That's been more successful, to the point that philly.com has been able to sell ads on the site, and we've gotten a lot of good comments from women who are actually inspired and motivated to exercise by the Locker Room.

We've done a few other blogs too, including a twice-yearly TV Critics convention blog from our TV writer, and our just-launched Would We Lie, which is an online version of a column that the print edition ran out of space for a while ago. (Lehmkuhl also drew the cartoons for this blog.) We're also using the Weblog format to house our Smarty Jones columns, written from the perspective of the Derby-winning horse, so that on our site it's become the "Smarty Jones Weblog." But that's more of a joke than anything -- it's all hand-coded into our regular article templates, not on a Weblog database. I like to think we're getting better at judging which projects will work better with what amount of effort and in what format, but like I said it's still evolving.

We also have Tour d'Afrique, which chronicles Assistant City Editor Yvonne Dennis' bike ride through East Africa.

And that begs the question of where blogs are going, which I really don't know. But it seems clear that even after the current infatuation stage wears off and the millions of teenagers who started a blog yesterday have grown bored and abandoned them, the medium will continue to inform and infect the institution of journalism. Blogs won't replace newspapers, of course, because the very individuality and by-the-bootstraps impulse of the best ones would get in the way of their generating primary-source material on a regular basis. But they've already had some impact, and I mean beyond the pot-stirring Trent Lott stuff -- if nothing else, I'm surprised sometimes to pick up the morning paper and see a story and say "was it really just yesterday that this broke?" because I've already seen it introduced, picked apart, digested and spit back out on multiple sites. Blogs also serve a previously unfilled need as media watchdogs and fact-checkers -- note how the Spinsanity boys are now part of the inside crowd with their shtick, though my personal taste runs more toward Atrios, whose large volume of readers supply him good tips and reminders of links to stuff from, say, a year ago that belies something just said yesterday. Also, bloggers are now writing books that journalists are eager to read -- Salam Pax, for one, who I heard got a movie deal as well. Bloggers are having an impact on journalism both from within and from without, and it spans the gamut. An excellent blog by Mr. "D. Resin" even parlayed an entry about Paris Hilton's dog into a Warner Books deal! OK, OK, enough about blogs.

3. I understand that you're pretty much a one-man band. Describe your typical day. What are some ways that small staffs can be creative online?

VL: First let me say that I do have one coworker who's an editorial assistant part of the time and helps out with the Web site the other part. But even with two people there are some challenges, many having to do with our weird product cycle -- everything should be right as soon as possible in the morning, but there's no way we can get to all of it at once, or even close to that. Meanwhile, as I suspect a lot of online editors do, I run up against the discrepancy of schedule and urgency -- the newsroom is used to a grand arc of urgency starting at zero in the morning and gradually rising throughout the day until hitting an infinite level at the point the paper goes to press. But my schedule is that, inside out. My most urgent time is first thing in the morning (when print coworkers will mosey over with some grand plan they want to discuss), then drops to around zero in mid-afternoon when the site's pretty much as good as it's gonna get that day, then ramps back up to an extremely high state before I leave as I'm trying to get info on the next day's content and package it for philly.com before I leave in the evening. You know that saying about Ginger Rogers spending her whole career dancing backward in high heels? That's what I feel like a lot of the time.

I have to be familiar enough with the processes and aims of the print editors to figure out how to enhance their content in an online framework, even if they're hazy on what can or can't reasonably be done in my realm.

Typical day? It's all over the map. The only constant is that I'm always trying to get a bunch of completely different and unrelated things accomplished at the same time. Here's an accounting from one morning when I kept track of what I had been doing:

* Update internal Weblog sites
* Update Girlfriends' Locker Room in Movable Type
* Check section order to be sure Daily News content is showing up on limited section pages (above wire content)
* Find old column and link to it from today's story about the outcome of the situation described earlier
* Ask philly.com to rejigger our component on front page to add column
* Grab philly.com logo, convert to run in paper as standing element for "A Cooks' Off"; coordinate with systems, graphics to make sure they can pop it in [A Cooks' Off is a clever reality-show style contest sponsored by the Daily News where culinary students competed for a job at a famed local restaurant. Each week, a loser heard the phrase, "You're flamb?ed."]
* Find photo that has woman of a certain name in it who is not this guy's mother (calling from outside) and send him the link
* Edit article to extend end date of photo mentioned above, which had expired Feb. 11, so photo will show up on page
* Answer question from editor on behalf of promotional partner about which cities have Knight Ridder Web sites
* Check and confirm for sports writer, calling from Mississippi, that his story is online (it's halfway down on the Sports section page).
* Find caption contest page from Feb. 9 for cartoonist's friend who's looking for it; send them the link
* Rewrite Girlfriends Locker Room headline and main blurb on Daily News homepage to reflect today's topic
* Help coworker figure out headline formatting (H1, etc) on Daily News site she's building
* Find sports story that didn't post, paste into article template online; check why it didn't post and relay this info to editor
* Set up afternoon meeting with staffer about possible blog

In terms of how small staffs can be creative -- the Daily News persona is kind of an underdog, so we can play to that. And our job is to be ready to zig and zag with the print folks, and to be flexible enough to work on different-size things, and different kinds of things, at the same time. So while on the one hand I'm helping to come up with long-term ideas for interactivity on a special section on our community, I'm also working with philly.com to get a poll up on a big story, and coding the latest Smarty Jones column into a faux Weblog entry. Because if they've decided that the Daily News is going to have a celebrity horse as a guest columnist, I should be there to give it the kind of online play that makes an already fun idea as fun as possible (what with the Smarty-written headline links to news coverage, the "Clip-clop here to continue," etc.), to try to match whatever tone they're going with and translate it into the Web medium.

4. Speaking of creativity, you were involved with a committee that helped to restore some individuality to Knight Ridder sites after a corporate decision in February 2002 to make them uniform was widely criticized. What was that experience like and how would you describe your relations with KR Digital today?

VL: Well, it was good to be able to share ideas and priorities with other KR online editors from around the country, hear commonalities, get new ideas for ways to solve things and so forth. And even though the overall design is still very similar, we did get more flexibility in choosing entry points, promo spots and the like. The thing for me was that this whole across-the-board implementation happened only nine months after I'd finally gotten our own Daily News-designed home page up, and I had made sure there were lots of spots to swap in and out different kinds of refer links to different articles or online features, and the page was punchy and bright and in-your-face, so I didn't enjoy seeing it changed. In other cities of course there were some newspapers who had no home page yet at all and for them the whole thing was more of a boon. So it was good to hear from their perspective stuff that was bugging both of us vs. stuff that was unique to our situation -- and believe me, we have quite a few.

5. Let's dream a little. If you had more resources, what are the things you would most like to do on your site? What are some of the more innovative things you've seen lately on other sites?

VL: Well, more interactivity, in terms of having readers able to customize how our content is received, and to submit some of their own content within our framework, lowering that wall of what-we-tell-you and what-you-say-to-us.

Also, more integration of the different stories into a web of stories -- you know, with a robust multiple-keyword database that would allow users, starting from one story about a politician, to access all the recent stories about a given politician, or to get to all the Eagles-vs.-Giants game stories --however far back -- from one of them. I'm a firm believer in giving users as many ways as possible to find a given story, and I think in the future we'll see more attention paid to grouping and connecting stories by possible areas of interest. In that way we can take our core content, which is, for the foreseeable future, the written story and still images, and give it added value.

I'd also like to develop this idea, which some papers have started doing in smaller ways, of having a spatial interface that will allow you to find stories by the physical area they're related to -- I think we're going to see more new and different ways to give the public access to information, and more integration between the hard news story and "news you can use," as well as, hopefully, more integration of supposedly divergent stories to provide ever greater associative connections, really making use of the Web as a web instead of a pincushion.

I won't go into detail about the cool things I've seen, because those that I like I'm busy trying to find ways to subtly rip off. Hey, we're the underdog over here, give me a break!

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See Lehmkuhl's personal Web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~soyjoy/index.html.