KU National Championship Coverage
“For the second year in a row, LJWorld.com has earned the Associated Press Managing Editors award for online convergence.” - Source
“For the second year in a row, LJWorld.com has earned the Associated Press Managing Editors award for online convergence.” - Source
Our winning entry consisted of this interactive retrospective of the season comprised of photos, panoramas, time-lapses, stories, videos, wallpapers, audio, and reader-submitted content. Richard Cornish did a brilliant job pulling all the pieces together for the final online design and presentation. Our entire tournament coverage can be found at KUSports.com.
We also published a book on the championship season, including photos by myself, Nick Krug, and Mike Yoder, text by Tom Keegan, Gary Bedore, and Ryan Greene. The designers really took the book design to the next level. Get one if you want.
Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo
About this Project
In August of 2007, I packed up headed out to Phillipsburg, Kan., home of Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo. The resulting story, audio slideshow and photo gallery show were produced for www.ljworld.com.
Multimedia: Audio Slideshow
PHILLIPSBURG, KANSAS
The baritone voice of John Wayne reverberated throughout the arena reciting “America, Why I Love Her†to the thousands of denim-clad cowboys and cowgirls.
A discord of smells, including manure, hamburgers and sweat, wafted overhead as the announcer’s microphone screeched sharply into focus.
“Are you guys ready for some rodeo?†chirped the announcer, bouncing wall-to-wall sound in an overhead booth.
Since 1929, rodeo fans nationwide have transformed Phillipsburg, a small northwestern Kansas town, into a bustling, unpredictable city. Home of Kansas’ Biggest Rodeo, Phillipsburg, about 60 miles north of Hays in Phillips County, is an anomaly in western Kansas, where the state’s population is declining and aging, and communities struggle to find a voice in contemporary America.
“It’s probably what’s keeping this town alive,†said Terry Gitchel, a Phillipsburg resident and past amateur bull rider.
“There would be a lot less money coming into this place, I know that.â€
The population of Phillipsburg swelled to three times its normal size Saturday as an estimated 6,000 people flocked to the annual rodeo. The town’s two motels were booked six months in advance. Long waits at the local restaurants were expected.
The event attracts the biggest names in rodeo, including past and current world champions, homegrown Kansas talent hoping to make it big, and even Frenchman Evan Jayne, a bareback rider from Marseille, who shared this year’s bareback title with Chris Harris, of Itasca, Texas.
“This rodeo has turned into a community event,†said Rod Innes, president of the rodeo. “Class reunions are held on this weekend. Family reunions are held on this weekend. Everyone comes home for the rodeo.”
The rodeo, it seems, is intrinsically linked to life in Phillipsburg.
Peyton Baldwin, a Kansas University senior from Gardner, was busy selling custom ropes, hats, spurs, boots and belt buckles in her family-owned and operated mobile western store. Baldwin and her family travel the country each summer hitting the professional rodeo circuit and state fairs.
“For a little town like this, it’s a big deal,†said Baldwin as she counted change in the mobile storefront parked on the rodeo grounds.
Beneath the stands, rodeo cowboys taped their arms, tucked their Wranglers inside their boots and stretched, preparing for the first and most physically demanding event of the evening: the bareback ride.
Dressed in neon and doused in makeup, Greg Rumohr, a bull fighter from Rio Vista, Texas, entertained the crowd with daring encounters with 2,000-pound bulls in the arena.
“I’ve had my ears tore off,†Rumohr said. “The worst one I took was when a bull stuck a horn on the inside of the cheek of my butt. It didn’t go into my intestines so I was able to fight bulls the next night.â€
24 Hours in Lawrence
An exposure of the night sky as Lawrence glows in the distance.
24 Hours in Lawrence was a collaborative multimedia project between the www.ljworld.com and the Lawrence community. The assignment was simple: Document life in Lawrence on May 10, 2007, from midnight to midnight, in photos, video, blogs, you name it. Using online submission forms, which collected all types of media from the community and fellow journalists and displayed them according to capture time on our website as a multimedia time-capsule of sorts. The result was eye-opening and it put a new twist on user-submitted content/community journalism. The project won the Most Innovative Multimedia Storytelling Award from the Newspaper Association of America Digital Edge.
Personally, I wanted to capture the entire 24 hours of May 10, 2007. I mounted a remote camera to a downtown building and used time-lapse imagery to show the entire 24 hours along Massachusetts Street in downtown Lawrence. The result was a short 60 second time-lapse video, comprised of over 2500 photos. Since I didn’t have a key to the rooftop, I tripped the camera from street level at midnight using Pocket Wizards and had the camera programmed to shoot just the right number of frames to complete the 24 hour cycle. Check out the result here.
I also shot two additional time-lapses, one of myself mowing my lawn and another of shoppers at Target. In addition, I shot and edited a video of our newspaper’s press run during the early morning hours of May 10 and attempted a series of photos of the night sky rotating on its axis around the North Star.
One of the biggest hurdles for this project was automating the media upload process and synchronizing the content with our Web site software, Ellington and its database. Through working with our online department, we wrote a metadata importer that to this day makes uploading photos to our Web site so easy that even my cat can do it (okay, it was accidental, but it did happen.)
Old German Baptist Brethren
Old German Baptist Brethren
