ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 24, 1996 TAG: 9612240059
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: Reporter's Notebook
SOURCE: HALE SHEIKERZ
With 25,000 Virginia Tech students and thousands more fans and alumni around the country, how does an organization like The Roanoke Times satisfy everyone's appetite for news about the Orange Bowl-bound Hokies?
Launching an on-line site about the Hokies' trip to the Orange Bowl was the only solution.
The Roanoke Times' Hokie Highway to the Orange Bowl (http://www.roanoke. com/orange/orange.html) officially debuted a week ago. It strictly includes information about the Virginia Tech football team. It started with links to more than 30 articles. As more stories were generated last week, the number increased to more than 40.
It was not a surprise this year when the Hokies received their bowl bid. It was expected. The Hokies are no longer just another football team - and the fans know it and are crazy about the team.
Hokie fans weren't the only people in a frenzy when the team received it's fourth consecutive bowl bid. The newspaper went into a frenzy with bowl-related stories. Topics included everything from game information and player features to stories about the impact of the Hokies success on the local economy and travel agencies.
An on-line site including all these stories was the only way we could make sure everyone everywhere had access to them. The Internet and the World Wide Web are increasingly becoming the fastest and most convenient way for people to get their information, especially in the New River Valley, home of the pioneering Blacksburg Electronic Village and similar efforts in Radford and elsewhere. In addition, reading sports on line is one of the hottest activities. It is the best way a newspaper can feed fans, readers and even the opponent information. Plus it's fast, cheap and easy - for the readers and the reporters.
The Hokie Highway to the Orange Bowl includes stories written by various reporters during the past football season. The site includes links to five sites that include stories about different topics: player features, past game stories, Hokie business and the Orange Bowl. There also is a Hokie Pokie site where readers can find articles about Hokie-related activities, such as the players big appetites, the mascot and even the team's recent off-field legal problems. Readers can also find links to other Virginia Tech sites and sites about the Nebraska Cornhuskers.
The layout editor Tim Van Riper and I created, designed and compiled the Orange Bowl site. The idea for the site was sparked soon after the Hokies bid. We thought, "Why not put all these stories on line so everyone can read them?"
The last time the NRV bureau tackled such an Internet project was March 1995 when the Virginia Tech men's basketball team won the National Invitational Tournament. Then bureau-ites and newspaper Internet pioneers Keith Greene (who now works in Raleigh) and Madelyn Rosenberg (now a features writer in the Roanoke newsroom) stayed up late each night to update the web sites with the latest photos from the games. Their work proved to be a success with the many readers and fans who visited the site.
In May, The Current's web site (http://www.roanoke.com/nrvhome/nrvindex.html) officially went on line to include daily stories, columns and calendars. With the exception of a few glitches, some computer and some human error, the sites have been updated weekly if not daily.
Since May, the number of hits (number of times the pages have been visited) has increased from the single and double digits to the thousands. In September, Bell Atlantic's Internet Solutions selected two of The Current's sites (the main index page and the business page) as a "best of the net" site. Bell Atlantic then linked our pages from their site.
Working on the site has been overwhelming at times. We wanted to create a site that could compete with the other sport sites on the net. That meant we had to come up with creative names, logos, borders and photos. It had to have pizazz and the feel of a cool site.
In the process of all this, Tim and I had to learn a new HTML program. Of course, it doesn't hurt that we are both hooked on the Internet.
LENGTH: Medium: 76 linesby CNB