If I had to summarize a review of the documentary in a word: Wow.

As a journalist, the documentary succeeds in allowing the soldiers themselves tell their story. It wasn't heavy on "reporter commentary" and there wasn't any political slant one way or another injected into the film ... for the most part the grunts of Bad Voodoo told their own stories. They were candid, conversational and by the end of the hour I was left with a feeling of knowing these guys a little bit better, knowing what their mission was all about.

To advance the story, the filmmakers added a web element which as a web guy I found interesting. You see, Bad Voodoo's story aired last night but is far from over ... they don't get home until May. They're still out there running convoy operations from Kuwait to Kirkuk, and both the Frontline website and platoon's personal site is helping to advance the story to help people continue to understand what they're dealing with out there on the roads in and out of Iraq. There are blogs, extended video clips and behind-the-scenes footage which help add the context into how they created this complex documentary that gives an unfllinching view of these men. This isn't re-purposed content that was the same stuff you saw during the documentary or raw footage for the sake of being raw footage but truly additional, compelling content.

The other thing about this documentary was that it was offered up on-air last night but was simultaneously available to watch in its entirety online. Here's a 30 second promo for the documentary:

This documentary in my mind succeeded where others have failed, and not just with the war in Iraq. In other documentaries I've watched I've seen time and again the misconception that the journalist had to tell the story, interject their thoughts and ideas to help draw in the audience. Bad Voodoo's War proved that wasn't the case, that people are able to tell their own stories free of agenda, leaving the audience able to draw their own conclusions.

As a former grunt, everyone will have their own opinions and thoughts about the war or this one little slice of it. My opinion was that the documentary left me feeling drained and shaking. It made me feel claustrophobic all over again, sitting in the passenger seat of an uparmored Humvee cradling my M16 in my right hand and the radio handset in my left as we drove on some random mounted patrol through our AO.

It was intense for me as a former grunt in the same way it was successful from a journalist's point of view: You saw the soldier's eye perspective, you heard the soldier, not the journalist, tell the story, and in that it added a sense of realism. When the bad thing happens - you can watch that promo up there to see the 'bad thing' - the moments leading up to it I had a sense of dread that it wasn't going to be a milk run for the guys of the Bad Voodoo platoon. You just know something will go wrong and even when it does you feel that dread.

Every spring Jeff takes one for the team to man the KXLY4 Spring Break Hawaii Bureau. For a week Jeff hunts for stories while snorkeling, riding catamarans chasing dolphins and body surfing on the Big Island and Kauai. Jeff learned the ropes of being a TV reporter by going to work with his dad back in the day, so Jeff has done the same with his family, taking them to the Hawaii Bureau each year with him in search of great surf and a story or two.

So without further adieu, here's Jeff's story:

Getting out of Hawaii like the fall of Saigon

KONA, HAWAII -- Travelers leaving Kona and Hilo Monday were greeted at airports across the islands with the stunning news that Aloha Airlines was unceremoniously canceling passenger service Monday, March 31st.

"Oh my God Rob, it was like the fall of Saigon at the airport," Lori Humphrey said. "It was like everyone was on the rooftops scrambling to get on the helicopters."

While the Humphreys had advance notice of Aloha's shutdown many travelers were unaware of what was going on until they got to the airport, leaving many stranded at the airports trying to find alternate connecting flights to other islands.

"Pandemonium" was one word used to describe the frenetic activity at the Aloha ticket counter with frustrated fliers trying to find out what happened to their flights.

The Humphrey family, which had flown to the big island from Honolulu last week on Aloha, were able to get on "the last flight" Aloha had out of Hawaii to their next destination, Kauai.

Jeff Humphrey took the incident in stride, focusing instead on the more important news of the day for Kauai residents and tourists.

"Dude they found a 10-foot long Tigershark in Hanalei Bay this morning and they closed the beach," he said.

"Someone pulled a Chief Brody huh?" I asked, making what for people who were born after 1975 won't understand is a Jaws reference.

In other news from the KXLY4 Spring Break Hawaii Bureau Jeff related the other big news was stepping on a sea urchin while surfing and have "an allergic reaction", which caused him to get a 104-degree temperature and inadvertantly miss out on a good 24 hours of in-depth investigating of the surf zone off Hawaii.

"Dude, you're having like a Clark Griswold Hawaiian Family Vacation this year," I told him over the phone from the mainland.

"Yeah but I'm all better now and I'm in Princeville and they're getting ready to seat us at our table with a beautiful view," he said as he was sitting down for dinner at a resort restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Coming up next from the KXLY4 Spring Break Hawaii Bureau: An in-depth comparison of body surfing on Hawaii and Kauai, how not to step on a sea urchin and a short, family-friendly commentary about how much more enjoyable the Hawaiian climate is in March compared to last weekend's snowfall in Spokane.

The airline shut down passenger service today and posted the obligatory "So long" message on its website. At first I thought wow, this is a big deal. I remember flying Aloha Airlines from Honolulu to Maui on vacation way back when.

And then nostalgia slipped aside when I looked up on the Internet and found a Wikipedia list that documents all of the defunct airlines of the United States.

Pan Am, Eastern Airlines, Western Airlines TWA, Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA, the planes with the smiley face on them) and Braniff all carry name recognition for those of us that have been flying "the friendly skies" for years, and all are out of business now. The list of airlines that have shut down also features scores of smaller regional carriers that have fallen victims to everything from corporate mismanagement and a turbulent ecomony to rising fuel prices and competition with no-frills, low-budget airlines.

Earlier this month the list of defunct regional carriers grew by one when Big Sky Airlines which operated out of Butte ceased operations on March 8th, another victim like Aloha Airlines and countless other airlines of economic conditions and rising fuel costs.

Aloha Airlines and Big Sky Airlines will be missed by some with passing nostalgia of that one time they flew on those airlines, but here right now, with an increasingly volatile American economy and fuel prices that have continued to shoot through the atmosphere, it will be interesting to see how long it will be before the government weighs in on whether or not its going to take steps to save the airline industry from financial collapse.

If nothing is done I fear we're going to be saying Aloha to more airlines in the coming days.

The clip, an in-flight safety video that highlights those rules and regulations you're expected to follow when you fly the friendly skies, was posted last month and has attracted more than 360,000 views.

The Delta flight attendant featured in the clip has been dubbed 'Deltalina' for her passing resemblance to Angelina Jolie and you know what ... I watched. And not just because I'm an Angelina Jolie fan.

It was the first time in years of flying that I watched and paid attention to one of those safety videos because most have the quality and attention-grabbing skills of those teensploitation films of the 1950s we were forced to watch in elementary school.

I won't even be flying Delta Airlines anytime in the near future, but I watched, I listened, I paid attention, and hundreds of thousands of other people are watching and paying attention too. And if you're reading this blog and clicked on the video clip above to see what I was talking about you watched too.

How powerful is the message and the means of distribution when someone becomes a willing volunteer to spread the word about the perils of tampering with bathroom smoke detectors and the use of cellphones during your next flight? And what are the chances that this simple but sexy safety video helps sell airfares for Delta?

I might have to talk my wife in to going on holiday. Movies are always better in the theater ... even if they're at 30,000 feet above the ground.

The player served us well, but when the opportunity came to kick things up a notch we moved forward with the deployment of the new video player.

When you look at the two side-by-side the first thing you'll be struck by is the size of the player. We moved the additional content below the video window so that you would see a larger video presentation. Though one thing about this new video window is that you're able to click on the little box to the lower right side of the player and enable full screen mode to watch the video and nothing but the video.

See how the picture is blowing out the dimensions of the blog? Well that's the full screen size at 1280 pixels wide by 1024 pixels high.

But the new player's functionality doesn't end there ... I know this is going to sound like a Cal Worthington (and his dog Spot) type of sales pitch but wait there truly is more.

First up: E-Mail a video clip to a friend.

Now, you can't physically e-mail the clip to someone, but you can send them an e-mail which will direct them to where they can view the clip. If you want to download clips, head over to our Podcasts directory and you can subscribe to our videos and download them from our podcasts.

Next up: Grabbing the video

Now I said you can't physically e-mail a clip to someone - again with the shameless plug to check out our Podcasts directory - but the new player will allow you to grab and share the video on your personal blog. It features both an embed and a permalink option to share the video on your website.

Finally: Share the video

Here you can share the video with others using a number of popular services like Digg, Facebook, del.icio.us, Live, Yahoo and my understanding is that many more sites will be added in the coming days and weeks to give you many more options to share video clips with whoever you'd like to share them with.

So there you have it, the down and dirty details on KXLY.com's ginormous video player. So what do you think? Love it? Hate it? Let us know.

Imagine if you will, the modern media's coverage if they had observed other famous battles in our nation's history.

Aug. 16, 1780

CAMDEN, SC -- In other news tonight, the Army of the Republic led by Major General Horatio Gates suffered an overwhelming defeat at the hand of Major General Lord Cornwallis at the Battle of Camden, South Carolina today. Union forces suffered 1,050 killed, wounded and captured at the hands of the British Army, which suffered roughly 330 casualties.

NOTE: The following September Lord Cornwallis surrendered his forces to General George Washington at the siege of Yorktown.

July 3rd, 1863

GETTYSBURG -- General George Meade's victory over General Robert E. Lee's Confederate forces at Gettysburg has proved to be one of the costliest battles of the Civil War, with 23,049 Union and 28,063 Confederate soldiers losing their lives in the three day battle. Our sources reveal that there are additional grumblings about Gen. Meade's lackluster efforts in pursuing the retreating Army of Northern Virginia forces from the field of battle.

Some in Congress are calling for a Congressional hearing on Gen. Meade's battlefield performance ...

NOTE: While the war raged on for two more years, the Confederacy never recovered from its losses at Gettysburg.

June 26, 1918

BELLEAU WOOD, FRANCE -- A forest in France is safely in Allied hands tonight, but the cost proved high for American forces as a combined US Army - Marine Corps force has secured the Belleau Wood, suffering more than 1,800 killed in action, one of the single costliest struggles for our doughboys serving over there.

On the first day of the battle on June 6 the Marine Corps forces suffered their highest casualty rates from any single battle they've participated in for any war they have fought in since their inception during the Revolutionary War ...

NOTE: The Belleau Wood was a key piece of ground that was located some 50 miles west of Paris. The failure of the Army - Marine forces in defending it would have caused a break in the front lines the Germans could have exploited to capture Paris. The success in the Allied forces in defending the wood likely changed the outcome of the First World War.

June 6, 1944

NORMANDY, FRANCE -- American forces have landed on European soil today and while reports are still sketchy we can confirm that the invasion appears to have floundered, with US troops suffering more than 6,000 casualties on a strip of Normandy beaches military planners are calling Omaha and Utah. General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself had prepared a message accepting full responsibility for the failures of our forces ...

NOTE: It's true that Gen. Eisenhower had prepared a message that confirmed the D-Day invasion had failed and he accepted responsibility for its failure. It was a message never released since the invasion, while costly, ultimately succeeded in opening up the long-anticipated second front in Europe, leading to Germany's downfall and surrender the following May.

If today's media had covered these past conflicts the way they do today with Operation Iraqi Freedom / Operation Enduring Freedom, I wonder if the results ultimately would have been the same?

Would media coverage have fanned the flames of public opinion in such a way to have caused a shift in domestic or foreign policy that could have led to consequences we dare not contemplate?

NBC17 in Raleigh, North Carolina found an ingenious way to show highlights of the Duke - Belmont game:

I'm sure that once word gets back to the NCAA, they'll find a way to ban local stations from posting homemade highlights involving stuffed frogs and toy chickens, too.

The difference this time ... I'm not going. But some of my friends are, and I know what they're going to face when they're over there and all I can say really is having already endured one combat tour in Iraq they're better prepared than we were when we went over to Iraq back in '04.

The message comes at a time of a covergence of events for the 81st Brigade:

March 1st was the third anniversary of our return from Iraq in 2005.

April 2nd will be the fourth anniversary of our deployment in Iraq.

Today, the day they got their official notification, is the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq.

Washington Army National Guard's 81st Heavy Brigade Combat Team Receives Mobilization Order

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 20, 2008

CAMP MURRAY, WA - The Department of Defense has issued a mobilization order for the 81st Heavy Brigade Combat Team (HBCT). The 81st HBCT received an alert order in October 2007 and has been diligently preparing for the prospect of deployment.

According to the order, the 81st HBCT will mobilize and deploy in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The 81st HBCT is scheduled to be placed on federal active duty in mid August, conduct pre-mobilization training at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin and deploy to Iraq this fall. Under the current Department of Defense policy, the 81st HBCT is scheduled to be on federal active duty for 12 months plus any leave time they accrue.

Although specific missions for the units within the 81st HBCT may vary, their overall focus will be on security and force protection operations. The soldiers will take individual equipment with them (individual weapons, communications equipment, etc), but will receive unit equipment and vehicles already in theater.

The 81st HBCT is headquartered in Seattle and is composed of approximately 2,900 citizen soldiers from around the State of Washington with an additional 900 soldiers from the California Army National Guard. The 81st previously
served in Iraq from March 2004 to March 2005.

I've read a few of his books, but the one piece of work that shook me to the core was the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I own a copy on DVD and a copy of the original theater poster hangs in my TV room. From the sighting of the first monolith at the dawn of man to Astronaut Dave Bowman's final journey I have always been left in awe at his and Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece. And there never has been a monster in cinematic or literary history quite like the cold, mechanical killer Arthur C. Clarke created in the HAL 9000.

Rest in peace sir. You fired the imaginations of generations of kids that dreamed of the stars with your visions of what the universe really looked like. And now you finally know the answers to all of the questions you've raised in your work.

For me the fifth anniversary doesn't carry much weight. I was working the assignment desk at a local TV station when Dan Rather broke into programming to report Tomahawks were dropping all over Baghdad. The troop buildup and UN Security Council meetings had been going on for months, so the first pictures of the fireworks show over downtown Baghdad came as a bit of an anti-climax. Less special effects than Die Hard 4.

The war for me didn't start until a year later. My Iraq War started four years ago April 2nd and ended three years ago March 1st. I went overseas with a platoon of nearly 40 teenagers, fathers, alcoholics, college students, drug users, corrections officers, husbands and carpenters.

I came home with a platoon of weary, tired, frustrated, disillusioned and angry men. More of them were using alcohol and drugs than before we left. One of the men suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI) from a serious vehicle crash where he was ejected from the vehicle. Another one nearly had his left arm amputated from an improvised explosive device while he was a machine gunner on a Humvee.

One came home in a casket draped with an American flag.

Post-traumatic stress disorder and divorce were commonplace among the rank and file of the guys I served with. Some of them have coped well with their return to 'The World' while some not so much. One guy hasn't been seen by anyone since we returned home. It's rumored he's hiding out in his parents' basement at the bottom of a bottle. One guy I got to visit behind a plexiglass window at the Adams County Jail where he was doing a stretch for assault. One guy I got a phone call from at half past midnight when he was standing in a motel parking lot telling me he was waiting for some drugs and he really didn't want to buy the drugs but he couldn't live without them.

Some coped by locking up Iraq in a cardboard box along with their salt-encrusted desert uniforms, photos, combat boots and memories and put them in the back of the closet. Some took the humiliating step of admitting they could no longer suffer in silence and sought out to climb to the summit of red tape in front of the VA Hospital to get treated for psychological wounds that don't rate a Purple Heart yet inflicted nearly as much damage as a gunshot or shrapnel wound.

There are some guys who came home and got married, celebrated the birth of their children or are expecting children. Some went back to their jobs, got new jobs, went back to college and got their degrees.

Regardless of how they live their lives back in 'The World' they are all good men. They may be wearing an orange jumpsuit and matching shackles, shaking from their craving for a Crack fix long overdue, packing up their lives into cardboard boxes because their wives just don't get them anymore, seeing a blurry world with their lips wrapped around the mouth of an upended bottle of Jack Daniels but they are all still good men.

They are good men who stood their ground and fired their weapons as RPG rockets flew at them.

They are good men who kept driving while their buddy lay in the back of the Humvee, his blood splashed all over the inside of the vehicle as the medic frantically tried to save his life.

They are good men who fought back the fear as they put on their war gear, locked and loaded a round into the chamber of their rifle and stepped into their Humvee knowing there might be another IED out there on the patrol route today.

They are good men who lost friends in combat one day and went back out on patrol the next.

They chose to serve in the National Guard. They took an oath, they swore to defend the country. They didn't choose the war. The war chose them. They didn't debate the justifications for the war and then run to Canada like cowards, breaking their contact with the American people to protect them in good times and bad.

My Iraq War wasn't about liberating a country. It wasn't about defending a new regime. It wasn't about enforcing UN sanctions or projecting American military might in the Middle East to protect our strategic national interests in that region. It wasn't about making sure the troops had their earplugs in, Wiley X sunglasses on and that they weren't wearing doo rags and cuffing the sleeves of their blouses so they looked good for the media which occasionally popped their heads out of their Green Zone gopher holes.

When it comes down to remembering the legacy of the Iraq War for me it was all about serving with good men, looking out for the man in front and behind me in the patrol column as we spent a year walking through the tall grass along the banks of the Tigris.

This month the moose has lost the interest of the mass media, so the attention has been on wall-to-wall coverage of former death row inmate Chico, who among other things is or rather was a monkey. The monkey escaped from his home and bit three people. If Chico had been a dog, he probably would've been put down in due time with due process out of concern for rabies.

But you see the story of Chico and The Man was different because there was this huge outpouring of grief and disbelief that a monkey might be put to death for biting a human or in this case three of them. Was Chico a Dangerous Primate? I don't know. Kind of irrelevant at this point since he's now an ex-Primate.

Do I sound indifferent to the plight of the dead monkey? Yep, I sure do, because honestly, I couldn't care about whether or not the monkey lived or died. Here's what I do care about. All of these people that were protesting this monkey's incarcaration and euthanization, all of this public concern and outcry about the death of this monkey ...

Did you notice all those potholes around Spokane?

Did you notice Spokane has a homeless community with no clear solution to that problem?

Did you notice energy prices keep going up but, Mother of All Coincidences, so are the profit margins for energy companies?

Did you notice there's a recession that is already being felt within our community and that local residents might be facing serious financial problems in the foreseeable future?

Did you notice that five years later we're still fighting a war against Islamic Extremists in the Middle East and nearly 4,000 servicemen and women have been killed in action?

Too bad all the attention placed on this primate couldn't have been focused on something that really would matter or make a difference in our neighborhood.

As Charlton Heston once said, "It's a Madhouse."

The reason why? While television has a long-standing system of gauging ratings of television programming, there is no one system available online that can give an accurate view of everyone’s viewing habits online.

Ratings periods, which occurs three times a year – February, May and November – are used to determine the strength of a TV station’s newscasts and is also used to set advertising rates for that station.

Here’s the thing: There is no single system used by the media orks to track the traffic habits of surfers who are browsing the Interweb. A TV station can conduct a scientific poll where they cold call a fixed number of people to get a sampling of people’s online viewing habits, but while scientific if conducted properly, doesn’t give you an accurate view of your traffic trends vs. the competition.

There are websites like Alexa and Compete which offer services where you can gauge the traffic of your site against another site but there’s one thing that really isn’t mentioned upfront: The traffic reports are generated through the use of a toolbar plugin, which you need to download to your web browser of choice, and then that toolbar plugin tracks your site viewing habits. It doesn’t track everyone’s viewing habits, just the people that go to that website and download that toolbar gadget.

That means, if I wanted to jack up viewing habits of my site over a competing website, I could provide a link to that gadget, tell people “download this gadget to optimize viewing habits of our website” and the more people that download it and continue to view your site, the more jacked up your site traffic will go.

The only solution something that won’t be happening anytime soon. Websites by and large have internal traffic reporting systems that gauge the number of visitors, unique visitors, pageviews and referring sites where people are coming from.

In order to have a neutral reporting system that will accurately analyze site traffic side-by-side with other websites you would have to grant access to your server logs to this mythical third-party traffic analysis system. That in and of itself raising numerous questions as to allowing public access to proprietary data, large site hosting companies like Broadcast Interactive Media, WorldNow and Internet Broadcasting – which host hundreds of local TV websites – allowing access to their server networks, and whether or not publicly traded media companies would really want the world – particularly their investors and their competition – know just how well or poorly they are doing in attracting surfers to their sites.

When I became a full-time interactive news journalist back in 1999 local TV websites were in their infancy really compared to where they are now nearly a decade later. But now more and more studies are showing that people are shifting more of their news gathering time from television to the Internet, more advertisers are shifting their budgets over to the Internet, and yet there is no system in place like the Nielsen rating system for television or Arbitron for radio to effectively gauge just how successful your site strategy is in reaching out to the masses.

So until the day comes when there is a neutral traffic reporting system that can fairly report how much traffic a website gets and do a comparison between this site and any of our competitors, I am happy to say that this website is the #1 News and Information website for the Inland Northwest and I await with eager anticipation the data that will prove me wrong.

So while we go about airing the community's dirty laundry with those goals in mind, where does that leave the listeners, readers, viewers and surfers when they want the whole story? In the case of the Internet, they are left with having to surf from site to site to get the big picture, all the different angles on the story they're most interested in finding out more about.

But what if a website takes the step of adding one more goal to the mix so that not only are you producing the news of the day and trying to gain more audience than the competition but also embrace the competition and include them in your coverage of the news?

The experiment began on our old site when we would post direct links to stories posted to other news websites in Spokane and outside the Inland Northwest. The idea was that if a major story is happening Joe SixPack wants one place they can go to in order to get as much information as possible. They don't care about Nielsen ratings or Households or Demographics. They just want news.

So we served them up the story we had, and then we provided them links to other websites for the rest of the story as told from other angles. The response from people within the media industry fell into two camps: “Why would we want to promote their content?” and “Brilliant.”

When developing the new version of KXLY.com on the WorldNow platform we looked at our previous aggregation of content and decided that we needed to kick things up a notch. In a brainstorming session with News Director Jerry Post we laid out the foundation for our content aggregation – called 'The Feed Room' based on where our market lies.

Spokane's market area includes Idaho, parts of Montana, Eastern and Central Washington, a slice of Northern Oregon and parts of Canada so the big question was where would we draw the line in content aggregation. Would we only aggregate content as far west as the Cascade curtain? Would we aggregate content from news sources in just Missoula and not the rest of Montana? How far south would we go into finding news sources in Oregon?

Jerry asked me if we had to draw a line. Our site traffic indicated we have a number of visitors from all over the world, but we do get a large amount of traffic from Seattle and Olympia. We get moderate traffic from Montana, Canada and Oregon as well, so should we really limit the content we would display.

We decided the answer was no and we would aggregate news content from as many sources that had RSS feed content. That meant aggregating news not just from a slice of Montana but all of Montana and not just Northern Oregon but all of Oregon. Not just North Idaho but all of Idaho. And Central, Eastern and most importantly Western Washington as well. In Canada we ferreted our resources that covered news in both British Columbia and Alberta to serve our site visitors from those regions.

The Feed Room launched with seven different news feeds from geographically distinct regions to give the community a big picture view of everyone's headlines of the day. Since its launch we've continued to bring in more of the community with Notes from the Blogosphere, adding RSS Feeds of content from Northwest bloggers, a MilBlog feed of popular military-themed blogs, political blogs and even a new RSS feed that scrapes data from Congress parsed out into individual House and Senate member categories so that site visitors can see which pieces of legislation Northwest leaders – everyone from Representative Bill Sali to Senator Maria Cantwell – are supporting in Congress.

After all if we're going to be in the business of airing dirty laundry, why not make it easy for the community by helping to air everyone's dirty laundry all from one convenient location?

While building the site for the month of December was one major challenge, keeping our then-current site updated while simultaneously updating the new site to build up an archive of content on the site was a completely different challenge.

News Director Jerry Post understood that to get our site where it needed to be more people in the department had to be well versed in being able to publish content to the web, and over the coming weeks and months we began integrating news producers and assignment desk staff to take on dual roles of producing their individual newscasts as well as produce content for the website.

In November of 2005 we had one full-time content editor and one assignment desk editor who were posting content to the site. In December of 2007 as we were looking to take our site through its next generation of upgrades and redesigns we had two full-time interactive staffers publishing full-time and four assignment desk staffers and newscast producers publishing to the site part-time. We had another four newscast producers trained to fill in on content publishing and had set up systems to get video from our photographers to the web fairly easily, had set up a style guide and a series of protocols on how to cover breaking news, get news from reporters in the field and had trained many people in the newsroom on what it takes to get news from the field to the web.

So fast-forward now to our site construction last December. For the majority of the month while I was building the site the rest of the Interactive staff we publishing content to our old website. Every story, picture and video clip in December had to be double-published, once to the old site and once to the new site simultaneously to insure a smooth transition.

However because our site had grown so much with our content offerings in the last two years, it was no easy feat. Every day we publish roughly a dozen or more original stories with related videos to our site, in addition to the 30 or more stories and related videos we publish to categories like Nation, World and Arts & Entertainment among others.

To put that in perspective when the first generation website was active in November of 2005 we had News, Weather and Sports sections on our site and that was about it. Take Sports for example ... when we launched the new site in December, we didn't have just one Sports category as we'd had in November of 2005.

In keeping with the concept of making our content as easy to access for the user as possible, we had niched out as much content as possible so that when our site launched we had the following sports categories ready for the world:

November 2005 Sports Content Categories:
Sports

December 2007 Sports Offerings:
Sports
Prep Sports
Shining Stars
Friday Night Sports Extra
WSU Cougars
Gonzaga Bulldogs
Idaho Vandals
Eastern Eagles
Whitworth Pirates
Spokane Shock
Spokane Indians
Spokane Chiefs
Race of the Night

In addition to building graphics, video players and story categories for each section we had to post content - stories, pictures and videos - to each of these categories so they were ready for the site launch and again keep in mind the Sports section is just one segment of our content. In all there are approximately 45 different content categories that have both story and video archives. Our goal was to have each category populated with 10 or more stories by the site launch, which meant more than 450 stories and video clips published to the site in the span of less than 10 working days while also posting them to our old site as well.

Also since we were moving from one content management system (CMS) the site producers had become very familiar with since April 2006 it meant that while we were building the new site we had to conduct training daily on the new CMS with each staffer so they learned how to publish as well as re-writing all of our guidelines for publishing content on-the-fly again in less than 10 working days.

Needless to say after the first week in December when we began building the site out in earnest, I had two days off - Christmas Eve and Christmas Day - and that was because my wife "requested" that I not touch my computer or access my e-mail during those two days. Since I bought her a handgun as an early Christmas present and had taught her how to shoot it, how could I refuse her request?

Every other day including weekends myself and other members of the staff worked 10 to 12 hour days to prepare for the site launch.

On December 27th, after conducting a last minute phone conference with our client services manager at WorldNow, the site managers for KXLY.com decided we were ready to flip the switch and transfer our site's domain to the new website during the early morning hours of Friday December 28th.

While the reaction to the site was swift that day and in the days that followed - some applauding the new site while others condemned it - not one person complained there wasn't anything to read or watch on the new website.

If you've been to KXLY.com at any point in the last eight weeks you'll notice our site underwent a major makeover. We changed site hosts from an internally developed solution to WorldNow, one of a number of turnkey web solutions for TV stations. Getting from Point A – old site - to Point B – new site – I guess really started in late 2005 when I came to KXLY.

However by late 2006 / early 2007 it was becoming more and more apparent, particularly as traffic on our site increased, that we needed a more robust platform that could not only meet today's web user's needs but also exceed them and be cutting edge enough so that the initial investment could keep the site going for two years or so until the next big makeover would need to be done.

The platform we developed and launched in early 2006 – Super Bowl Sunday to be exact (I remember because I'm a Seahawks fan and my wife is a Steelers fan. Enough said.) - tripled in the number of unique visitors to the site and our video traffic was increasing as well. Our success was our failure however; the more traffic we had the more we broke our site with the bandwidth limitations we had and the more success we had the more it was apparent that we didn't have the infrastructure to support our site's continued growth.

So in April of 2007 we began looking at a wide variety of vendors to build and host our new platform. We looked at local internet developers and shake-and-bake companies with turnkey solutions. In the end the corporate decision was to move forward with WorldNow for a number of business factors. The whole process of selecting a vendor, from cold calls to sales calls to contract negotiations to signing a contract took about six months.

A lot of power lunches and phone calls later I became very knowledgeable about the different offerings of WorldNow, Internet Broadcasting and Broadcast Interactive Media among others.

WorldNow seemed attractive from a business perspective but I will admit some of us had one big reservation: Another station in town is hosted by WorldNow and that would make our job that much harder to differentiate our site from theirs when we launched.

The other thing was we had to figure out a way, working within the the WorldNow platform, to curb the amount of clutter on our site. People want clean sites with easy to read content. We also need to determine how best to promote our what we identified as our three core content areas: News, Weather and Sports. How do you build the platform that gives equal regard to those three core niches. A lot more discussion and papers and e-mails exchanged before we struck a balance between the three.

One thing that we had that was an advantage was willingness to innovate. A core group of Young Turks in the company that see the power of the Internet over media content distribution today. Back when I got in Internet publishing full-time in 1999 the media industry by and large looked at as a lark, an added value platform for advertising inventory. There was a changing of the guard but it is a still struggle, a generational shift, between traditional content distribution streams and the Internet.

Think of the old days, back in the long, long ago, when radio was in its infancy and newspapers were king. Or perhaps when TV started becoming mainstream and encroaching on radio and newspapers: That's the position the Internet holds now ... the latest content distribution system that has been fighting an uphill battle for supremacy.

Anyway, back to the Young Turks, the revolutionaries who understand the power of the medium. They had the foresight to look at what was working on the current KXLY.com platform, what wasn't working, and then looking beyond the site to other local sites and beyond to find the best and worst examples of how to build and manage a local media website. Keeping in mind the three core content areas we set about designing the site around them, using best practices we saw from other local media platforms and shying away what was obviously not working for other sites.

One other thing we identified early on was the overriding goal of the site: It's not so much about beating the competition so much as it's about giving each community member who visits the site a rich, easy-to-navigate experience. Making the site user friendly filled with content relevant to the user was our goal. In the end if the site is clean, easy to navigate and is being updated as often as possible, and the content posted to the site is held to a high set of standards then we'll end up eating the competition's lunches and taking their milk money too.

This post is a probably a cure for insomnia, but I felt it was necessary to set the groundwork for a series of posts where in the coming days and weeks I'm going to lay everything out on the table like a dissected frog and show you all the guts, all the inner workings of the website. Some if it's messy and some is really fascinating stuff, and I think this would be a good venue for everyone to understand what it took to for the Young Turks to incite this virtual revolution.