This NYT article points to the newspaper of a college city in Kansas as being an incubator for some very interesting experiments in moving journalism online.

An excerpt:

EVERY Little League player in this town of about 85,000 people can be a star. Regardless of how he or she hits or fields, each tyke and teenager is eligible for a personalized electronic trading card - replete with a picture, biography, statistics and an audio clip of the player philosophizing about the game - that can be posted on the Web site of the local newspaper, The Lawrence Journal-World.

"I don't think of us as being in the newspaper business," said Dolph Simons, the editor and publisher of The Lawrence Journal-World.

Lawrencians buying tickets for University of Kansas football games can visit the same site, LJWorld.com, and find photographs offering sightlines from each of Memorial Stadium's 50,000 seats. Law aficionados can find transcripts of locally significant court cases posted on the site and participate in live, online chats debating the pros or cons of some cases - sometimes with experts who are involved in the proceedings.

A related Web site, lawrence.com, is aimed at college readers. It allows visitors to download tunes from the Wakarusa Music Festival, find spirited reviews of local bars and restaurants and plunge into a vast trove of blogs, including the Gay Kansan in China Blogger, who recently had his first "disgusting" experience with a woman, to the Born-Again Christian Blogger, who offers videotaped huzzahs to the Nascar legend Dale Earnhardt Sr.

The steward of this online smorgasbord is Dolph C. Simons Jr., a politically conservative, 75-year-old who corresponds via a vintage Royal typewriter and red grease pencil while eschewing e-mail and personal computers. "I don't think of us as being in the newspaper business," said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper's parent. "Information is our business and we're trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible."