Some forward-thinking Statesman employee had reserved the domain name “hookem” more than a decade ago. All it needed was a purpose. This past summer, we gave it one when we launched the niche site just before the Horns football team started 2-a-day practices.

The Statesman had a Longhorns forum for more than a decade, but it was built in old software and wasn’t actively managed. Without oversight, the forum was a place for racial bashing, threats, expletives and everything else that happens when you let the mice play. In March of this year, the Statesman started the transformation to the new site by re-launching the forum under the hookem.com umbrella, using new software and moderation. To ease the workload of moderation, we deputized some good board members and gave them the power to delete posts and put other community members in timeout.

We then proceeded to build the site in WordPress. Building it in WordPress instead of our paper’s CMS allowed some flexibility and speed in design and implementation. WP is also a very easy system to push content through, no matter where you log in.

Source: OMNT and HT to Journerdism.

Seems like a great idea – and hope for journalism – to me. Go read the whole thing, let me know what you think. Oh yeah, no one comment here. Heh.

Seriously, though, this is pretty cool, imho.

Old Media New Tricks