When the University of Louisville canned coach Rick Pitino after yet another scandal at the school, The Courier Journal didn’t do one big opus story.  They did a ton of them. This is a great example of how to break out sidebars to dive deeply into worthy stories.

And, as Poynter.org reported, the readers flocked to the coverage:

Joel Christopher, the paper’s editor, tells me that two-thirds of a 65-person reporting staff have worked the story over two days. It’s broken all online readership records by various indices (and the vast majority are local readers), he says, and prompted surprisingly little negative response by pro-Pitino diehards in a town where college sports is everything, especially since there are no pro teams.