On a sunny, warm Wednesday afternoon in Newport Beach, Calif., surfers
took in some waves in the cold Pacific Ocean waters, people shopped
along the boardwalks and the lone content producer for Hookem.com was combing the beach for University of Texas Longhorn fans.

Thousands
of people decked out in the distinctive burnt orange clothing were in
Southern California for the BCS championship game, and Hookem’s Dave
Behr was on a mission to find, talk to, video and photograph as many of
them as possible. He was to be the eyes and ears for the fans who
couldn’t make the 1,400-mile trek from Austin to California. Along the
way, he rode in an RV full of rabid UT fans, got Darth Vader to flash a
“hook’em” sign in Hollywood, posted blog entries about his first taste
of In-N-Out burgers and met tons of tailgaters.

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.

From the beginning,
Hookem was planned as a site that leans heavily on aggregation (an
editor choosing stories from dozens of sources and linking off to them
from our site). Our guy in California, Behr, has been curating the
Longhorns sports news all season long. He also finds photos, videos and
more from all over the Web to link to from the site. There is some
original content, in the form of blog entries by Behr and the content
produced in the forum by our community.

We also wanted to use
social media to help market and distribute Hookem’s content. During
Longhorns games, I personally ran the @HookemFans Twitter account, and
we often update our Facebook page. Both accounts actively engage the
community. The Twitter account has more than 1,800 followers, and the
Facebook fan page has about 700 fans.

The site is distinctly
different than the Statesman’s coverage in a few ways. For one, since
the information is curated from all across the Web, it does not rely on
staff reports. Another big difference is that there’s a little license
to have more fun than we can have when publishing material at the
Statesman. The name of the site itself, “Hookem,” infers some bias. We
run with that, and had no shame in having a good time in California
with the rest of the fans.

We think that Hookem.com
provides a one-stop shop for Texas fans, and the traffic has increased
solidly in each month of the site’s existence. We’ve been very happy
with the site’s financial success in its first year as well. We’ve had
no problem selling ads on the site, even during an obviously difficult
advertising period.

Although Behr didn’t get to see the game
from inside the Rose Bowl (he spent it in the stadium’s parking lot
with the people who run a rival site, Hornfans.com),
he did have a great time, and he gave our site some great exposure. He
told me he handed out tons of marketing cards to fans at the game.
Although the Horns lost a heart-breaker, the site has been a winner all
year long.

I’m surprised more newspapers haven’t done
something like this: it’s relatively easy to build a niche site, and
not hard to maintain it if you use aggregation and social media to
their full effect.

Robert Quigley is the social media editor at the Austin
American-Statesman, the editor of Hookem.com, and he is a blogger for http://oldmedianewtricks.com.