George Schlukbier

George Schlukbier is a North American innovator who was among the pioneers in planning and developing Internet website content while devising ways to market access to that content. As co-creator of Nando and NandO Times , he helped build the model for the Internet news website and the online interactive newspaper. As president and chief operating officer of Total Sports he shaped the way web services offer information and game coverage.

=Beginnings=

Born in 1951 in Germany, Schlukbier was the younger of two sons of a career U.S. military officer. His father was of German-American immigrant stock and his mother was of Norwegian-American extraction. The family lived on or near United States Air Force bases around the United States as the boys grew up. George Schlukbier spent his teen years and early adulthood in San Diego, California, where he surfed and balanced the 1960s Southern California youth lifestyle with a love of books and literature. After graduating from the University of California, San Diego, with a degree in comparative literature, he moved to Vermont and then to Montreal, Canada, where he earned a master s degree in library science from McGill University.

=Canadian career=

Settling north of Toronto, Ontario in the 1970s, Schlukbier founded Info Bank, a company that was ahead of its time in anticipating the information age. Although the time and technology for Info Bank had not arrived, the experience he gained pointed to Schlukbier s trend-setting later work.

As a public librarian in York Township, Ontario, Schlukbier developed innovative programs for library users, incorporating his growing enthusiasm for employing new technology for storing and accessing reference information. He also established a public art gallery and oversaw other municipal facilities. As a promoter, he was founder of the Stouffville Magic Festival, an annual celebration of stage wizardry and prestidigitation.

=Return to California=

Schlukbier, by then married and with two children, returned to California in the 1980s when Gregory Favre, executive editor of the Sacramento Bee, hired him to bring its newspaper library, or news morgue into the new age of digital files and computer access. Aside from his entrepreneurial and public library work, Schlukbier had also worked as a newspaper library staffer in Canada. As he updated the news library in Sacramento, California, Schlukbier began reaching out to the Bee s sister newspapers in communities including Fresno, California, Anchorage, Alaska, and Kennewick, Washington. For the company that was then still called McClatchy Company, he became point man in coordinating new technology for information storage and retrieval.

=Nando=

In 1993, the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina hired Schlukbier as director of its newly formed New Media division. With wife Maureen, Schlukbier moved again, this time bringing three children.

With News & Observer editor Frank Daniels III, Schluckbier created Nando, which was named for the newspaper s nickname, N&O. Schlukbier, seeing the importance of reaching out to young people, joined with the N&O Newspapers in Education program to make Nando access free to all North Carolina schools. The strategy worked, and Nando caught on. With ahead-of-their-time services, including games and chatrooms, it was like nothing else on the web at the time.

Schlukbier, the vice-president of Nando, was also instrumental in the development of Nando , the first interactive online newspaper and forerunner to the hundreds of such sites that popped up over the following decade.

=Total Sports=

After McClatchy purchased the News & Observer and its chain of smaller publications in 1995, Frank Daniels III left the newspaper, which had been owned and run by generations of his family, in favor of online ventures such as KOZ community news and Total Sports. Again he called upon Schlukbier to develop a company that became the model for later online ventures. Total Sports was formed as a multifaceted sports information source when Daniels acquired Total Sports Publishing, an organization in Kingston, New York that was known for its Total Baseball encyclopedia. Keeping the book publishing arm and allowing it, under founder John Thorn, to do what it did best, Daniels and Schlukbier used a staff that was made up, in large part, of the same people who had helped them create Nando, in developing a new web presence. Total Sports online offered subscribers instant access to scores, statistics, standings, and soon live Internet coverage of sporting events. The company s contract with the collegiate Atlantic Coast Conference revolutionized the way sports are presented on the Internet.

=Digital news archives=

A falling out with Daniels led to Schlukbier s unseating as president and chief operating officer of Total Sports. (Ironically, and unhappily for members of the board of directors who had engineered Schlukbier s firing, the company struggled after his departure.) Schlukbier turned his attentions to his own companies, Schlukbier Consultants and Green Parrot Media. In 2004 he joined the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the U.S. Library of Congress to help develop strategies and software for the digital preservation of historic newspaper archives.

Schlukbier and family divide their time between homes in Raleigh, Arlington, Virginia, and Parry Sound, Ontario.

==External links:==

*Library of Congress Digital Preservation [http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/index.phpnav=1] *The McClatchy Company [http://www.mcclatchy.com/] *Newspaper Preservation Project [http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/pdf/NDNP_Architecture_0505.pdf] *National Digital Newspaper Project Architecture [http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/pdf/NDNP_Architecture_0505.pdf] *NandO becomes McClatchy Interactive [http://www.mcclatchy.com/news/2005/story/6219720p-6094243c.html]