Sponsoring news organization: Lawrence Journal-World
Founded: 1892
Location: Lawrence, KS
Owned by: The Lawrence-Journal World is a family owned business, owned by the Simons family; the umbrella organization, The World Company, also owns a number of other newspapers and a television station.
Community engagement initiative launched: Lawrence.com was launched in February of 2002. The newspaper has been on the Web since 1995 and also operates KUSports.com.
Director of New Media: Dan Cox
Software used: Content Management: The Lawrence Journal-World wrote their own content management system, called Ellington, using the open-source Django web framework. Ellington is for sale commercially and used by a few other news sites.

Is the Lawrence Journal-World the most successful news organization in the U.S. in terms of engaging its audience online? They might be: and they're not done yet.

With most organizations, it's easy to draw a box around their efforts to engage the community they serve online: here's the site we've set up to allow community contributions; here's our blog hub.

With the Lawrence Journal-World, that's nearly impossible. In addition to the two standalone sites that they run -- Lawrence.com and KUSports.com -- interactivity has been woven into so many parts of the Lawrence Journal-World's main Web presence that it's become a core building block of the site.

The Lawrence Journal-World has also ventured into an area that not all newspapers have been willing to enter: putting comments sections below nearly every story; they've struck gold by turning the police blotter into a blog, where readers thoroughly enjoy themselves commenting on the actions of people -- often logic-challenged people -- who have fallen afoul of Lawrence's law enforcement. Sections like "Game" are produced through a partnership between the Journal-World's staff and the parents and coaches of youth sports athletes, who contribute photos, stories, and information about schedule changes. Game has become a commercial success, attracting advertisers to the weekly section distributed along with the newspaper.

The site bristles with other interactive features such as interactive maps, chats with local newsmakers, blogs, and polls.

How has the Journal-World managed to launch and maintain so many online features and sites? The company made a significant investment in technology, building a new content management system from the ground up. This, more than anything else, exemplifies the possibilities and the challenge of renewing a news organization's relationship to its community online. Building an elaborate and robust content management system from the ground up is an expensive and risky proposition -- it's an effort that could have failed. Most news organizations are in a tough spot: their legacy systems aren't flexible enough to allow them to innovate and experiment with new ways of talking to the community, but buying or developing new ones is expensive and may take months or more than a year to fully implement.

In an era of shrinking circulation, how many news organizations have the capital -- and the tolerance for risk -- to really do what it takes to enable their own staff and their community online? Perhaps the differences between news organizations in community engagement boil down to a simple calculus of risk.

Further reading:

• The Newspaper of the Future, New York Times, June 2005; article on Lawrence Journal-World's online efforts.
• Lawrence boldly goes..., News and Technology, September, 2003
• A May 27, 2005 entry on the Citizen Paine-Citizen Journalism blog, about a presentation Rob Curley made at UC Berkeley. Curley's presentation was titled, "Let's Stop Building Crappy Newspaper Sites," and there's a link within the blog entry to the Webcast of his presentation.