Making lemonade in Austin

It's Saturday, Sept. 5, the first big weekend of the 2015 college football season. The University of Texas Longhorns open at Notre Dame.

Game time: 6:30 p.m., CDT.

Print deadline for the Sunday Austin American-Statesman: 8:30 p.m., CDT.

Uh oh.

As more newspapers and media companies outsource their printing to save money, this sports staff's nightmare happens more frequently every weekend.

Most newspapers end up putting game stories on their websites. Their Sunday print editions may contain little more than an incomplete story on a game that has been decided long before the paper hits the front yard. Or there may be a photo and a prominent refer to the full story on the website, and that treatment may well leave a reader accustomed to four-page spreads per game feeling cheated.

In the Texas Longhorns' hometown, the Statesman went much further to work around the deadline issue, activating a separate, dormant URL and turning it into all-Longhorns, all-the-time www.hookem.com.

In May of 2015, the sports staff learned that printing of the American-Statesman would be outsourced to Hearst sites in Houston and San Antonio, causing deadlines to be moved up by several hours. A few weeks later, members of the sports staff, digital staff and top editors met to figure out how to make lemonade from some sour lemons.

"I think [for] all of us, when the bomb was dropped about early deadlines, it was a tough pill to swallow sports-wise," said Sports Editor Jason Jarrett. "Not just folks who report on UT, but everybody on the staff."

They wanted to give readers something extra to encourage them to go digital. They decided, said Jarrett, "Let's just jump into the cold water with both feet."

The Statesman had owned the Hookem.com domain since 1995, said Steve Dorsey, vice president/innovation and planning. It is now a full website apart from the existing main site (www.statesman.com).

"We were able to kind of go off on our own and create something that was really unique and really responsive," Dorsey said. "The sports team was really able to own it in a way that also changed their work flows."

Building the new website took six to eight weeks. Conversion from statesman.com/sports to Hookem.com took place just before the first game.

Jarrett said the design was kept simple, accessible and fast, in part to draw traditional newspaper readers and to make it easier on the sports staff to get content posted more quickly than the main news site.

With no need to worry about space, Hookem.com has developed into a combination of "big J journalism" and the sort of viral content that draws in passing visitors, he said. Take, for example, the recent marriage of a former UT player. "It became a little viral sensation because he wore a crown and a cape. That drove traffic."

The site has a pay meter after the first five stories accessed per month, and sometimes big game pieces are free. And yes, Hookem.com has moved out of football and basketball season to covering all UT sports in detail, even though football is always huge news in Austin.

Stories that make the paper or the main website may contain a note that there's more to see on the subject at Hookem.com. Deadline discussions center on what will be published throughout the day at what time. "We're thinking about the whole day and hours of the day instead of just one daily thought process," Jarrett said.

Placement is controlled by sports editors, not by the Statesman.com digital staff who also deal with competing editors from other departments.

In practice, the new system helped the staff break the midseason story about the firing of UT's athletic director. Late the night before, the staff got word that the firing could happen within the week. That night, the UT football beat writer put together 20 inches of B-matter.

At 6:30 a.m. the next morning, another writer called Jarrett to say he had confirmation that the firing would take place in a meeting with the university president at 8:30 a.m. The full story was ready for a read by Jarrett by 7:45 a.m. and went up soon after.

Hookem.com also debuted the Statesman Experience, which arose from a discussion about giving something back to sports fan subscribers for taking away the print stories affected by earlier deadlines. Someone in the paper's marketing department suggested giving readers a chance to go to dinner with columnists.

"Of course I talked to our sports columnists," said Jarrett, "and they said, 'Steak dinner? With fans of ours? Absolutely, we'll do it.'" The first event drew 1,100 sign-ups for a drawing, and three couples won.

Since the UT new year starts with football season, planning is under way for improvements to Hookem.com. "We want to create a 'can't-live-without-it' feeling to the site," said Jarrett. One option is creating story archives and photo galleries capitalizing on the newspaper's historic coverage.

"We are the best historian of UT football. Better than UT, because daily for last hundred years we've covered the program in some form or fashion," Jarrett said. "If we make a PDF of a game story from 1922 microfiche and put it on the website, somebody will come pay for that."

Speaking of revenue, Dorsey reports that total revenue tied to sponsorships, direct placed revenue and programmatic revenue for the September to December 2015 totaled just under $100,000. Previously established @BevoBeat Facebook and Twitter audiences doubled during the 2015 football season.

"It's really been well received. It's been a huge traffic driver. We've had a big sponsorship success with it," Dorsey said.

"It was done of necessity, but it's been done with a lot of care and received very well, I think."

For more information, contact Jason Jarret at jjarrett@statesman.com.

Jane Nicholes

Jane Nicholes, a regular contributor to the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association's eBulletin, is a freelance writer and editor based in coastal Alabama. She is an award-winning veteran of more than 30 years in the newspaper business. Reach her at jbnicholes@att.net. Suggestions for future stories and comments on this piece are welcomed.