Behind the scenes at YourHub.com

Published May 7, 2005 at midnight

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The race to go live with YourHub.com is over.

The race to make YourHub.com an important part of the daily life of the metro area has just begun.

Why do I say race? Because it's all happened so quickly. And we have so much more to do - and so little time.

I thought you might appreciate a bit of the back story of what it took to create in a matter of months a new news operation, starting with 40 Web sites, one for virtually every community in the seven-county metro area.

The concept wasn't approved until late January. And the truth is we knew its future was iffy until we reached a labor agreement with the Denver Newspaper Guild on Feb. 25. That the union, which represents newsroom employees of the Rocky Mountain News, was supportive and worked with us so quickly to make it possible is something I deeply appreciate.

Days later the Denver Newspaper Agency hired a Denver software company, Indigio, which specializes in consumer Web sites, and gave it an impossible deadline of April 21 to "soft launch" YourHub.com.

There we were - it was the beginning of March - and not one employee had been hired. But the key leaders were in place. Bill Reynolds, VP of circulation for the newspaper agency, is the YourHub.com general manager. Mike Madigan, assistant manager editor/weekend of the Rocky, is the editorial coordinator. Fran Wills, the agency's interactive VP, oversees the Web operation.

The two people who made this project happen, Jonathon Berlin, 29, an assistant design director at the Rocky, and Becki Dilworth, 25, of the agency's interactive staff and previously a Rocky Web producer, were already hard at work. Those two talented and adventurous journalists essentially created the Web site and newspaper section, working in a skunk works operation hidden elsewhere in our building.

Of course many others - from finance to information technology - helped. For example, one of the first things we needed was a name. How can you develop anything without a name? Credit for the idea of a "hub" goes to the Rocky's news editor, John Boogert, who at a Feb. 9 brainstorming session in my office helped move us off typical newspaper titles to something that represented what we saw this new service actually doing - connecting people in the digital age.

But today it's not enough just to choose a name. We had to find out whether somebody already "owned" the name we wanted. And sure enough, Hub and TheHub were already taken. But we did find a willing seller for YourHub.com - which we liked because it expresses a central idea behind what we're doing, that this is the user's site - and we were off to the races. (By the way, if the idea takes off we could have hubs all over the world. All we need to do is add the name of a community after YourHub.com and we've got a new hub. So who knows, billionaire Phil Anschutz may not be the only Denverite dreaming of a national media company.)

By March 8, we had printed two prototypes of a 20-page tabloid newspaper section filled with community news, something the advertising department would need to share with businesses considering buying ads.

It wasn't until the end of March that we hired the newsroom leader for YourHub.com, Travis Henry, 32. We needed a special person, and we found one in Travis. The Metropolitan State College of Denver journalism grad grew up in Thornton. He's worked editing weekly and daily newspapers, most recently in Longmont. And with his drive and enthusiasm, we knew he was somebody who belonged at the Rocky.

Before he even started work, Travis attended our big kickoff event for the sales team on April 4.

So much had to happen to make that meeting possible. The agency's marketing department and Bradley/Reid Communications, an Alaska advertising agency, made it look easy. They produced an entire campaign about a product and service the likes and scope of which no one had seen.

On April 9, YourHub.com's first two employees showed up for work in our new newsroom on the first floor of the Rocky Mountain News building, Steve Shultz and Terri Cronk. (It was Steve's first job right out of Metro State.)

And on April 28, the site went live, thanks to the total commitment of the Indigio team, especially Jason Wicker, the project lead; Jennifer Searls, director of service delivery; and CEO Tim Higgins.

We had our bumps. But when the site truly went public on Thursday, there was barely a glitch. More than 15,000 pages were viewed by more than 1,400 people in the first 24 hours.

Next come the first YourHub.com print sections, which are scheduled to be delivered to Douglas County subscribers of the Rocky and The Denver Post on May 26. By August, we plan to roll out 15 such sections.

In the end, though, no matter how much we do on this project, it won't be successful without you.

So, please, jump in.

You will find scores of stories and photos uploaded by visitors to YourHub.com and links to stories about your community from a wide range of news organizations.

I promise you that YourHub.com is easy to use. Perhaps you could give it a try this weekend and share your prom pictures, or honor your mother for Mother's Day.

If you do, you'll be writing the next chapter of this story, one I'm dying to read.

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