Madeline Farbman is the Online Editor at The Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y. Reach her at farbman@poststar.com

IN THE BASEMENT BELOW THE OFFICES OF A COLLEGE-TOWN NEWSPAPER in Kansas, one can find an antidote to the fear that currently hangs over the newspaper industry: that print is dying and that news will soon be either online or obsolete. That’s the home of lawrence.com, an office furnished with bean bag chairs and a Play Station 3, and staffed by young employees who feel free to wear shorts and baseball caps to work. The Web site has become something of a phenomenon that newspaper and Web site editors aspire to imitate.

THAD ALLENDER | LAWRENCE.COM Above, left to right, Frank Tankard (Lead reporter, blogger), April Fleming (calendar editor, podcaster and blogger), Patrick Giroux (print layout and art director), Gavon Laessig (podcaster, blogger an dpun master), and Phil Cauthon (editor).

	Covers from the Deadwood Edition, a 9,000-circulation print spinoff of lawrence.com.

The content of lawrence.com includes articles, videos, audio clips and an interactive calendar, the supposed look of the future. And for all its multimedia content, the site actually spawned a spinoff print product.

You can check what restaurants are open at 5 a.m. Tuesday or 11:30 p.m. Saturday, whenever you happen to look online. And you can get a listing of today’s drinks specials at local bars ($2 domestic cans at Astro’s or $2 draft beers at Zen Zero).

The employment listings section is called “Get a frickin’ job,” and the tone to some articles can be similarly irreverent.

The heart of lawrence.com is its searchable events calendar where users can seek out parlor games or career fairs, Old Timey music or Goth/industrial, and then get lost in the circle of links that take them through articles and listings and multimedia work.

Click on a link for the Bluegrass Barn at Apple Valley Farm – where an upcoming musical performance will take place – and you are also offered a chance to read, “For those about to drink, we saloon you!,” an article from May 2006 about the Grainery Saloon at Apple Valley Farm.

Nearly all the content on lawrence.com, as well as the presentation, has a tone of adventure: You never know what you’ll stumble across online, or what community activity it will lead you to.

The work going on in that basement may also provide a reprieve from the deadly serious tones in which all of the “state of the news industry” conversations take place. Based on the lawrence.com model: The journalism of the future just might be more fun.

Next — How it all started