GoDuke Prepares Duke-UNC Extravaganza

Duke only plays North Carolina in Cameron Indoor Stadium once a year, and for Wednesday's matchup, GoDuke.com, the official site of Duke athletics, plans to take full advantage of the special occasion.

The website, which has expanded its arsenal of full-time writers and videographers in recent years, will feature new articles and videos on the hour, every hour from 9 a.m. until 8:30 p.m., in a package entitled Rivalry Exclusive. In total, 12 videos and six stories will be posted from sources ranging from GoDuke columnists Al Featherston, Mike Corey and Michael Tomko to video analysis from Jason Williams and a video introduction and conclusion from Mike Krzyzewski.

The project is the "baby" of first-year Director of Video Services Brad Jones, said Jon Jackson, Duke's associate director of athletics for communication, and it should help GoDuke retain traffic on what figures to be one of its busiest days of the year. The collection of content coincides with the athletic department's—and specifically, the men's basketball program's—push to have a voice in the national equation, to control part of its message.

Part of its plan to do that is to beef up a site like Duke Blue Planet. Another is to offer more content on GoDuke, the official site.

"It's not so much controlling your voice. It's having a voice," Krzyzewski told The Chronicle two weeks ago for a forthcoming story about Duke Basketball's media strategies. "I'm 61 years old. I don't even understand all the voices out there.... But the fact is, they're all out there. We needed something to tell our story correctly, because there was so much misinformation, and to show a face—a friendly face, a happy face, an excited face."

"One of the things was, in order to maybe offset [Duke hatred] a little bit, you've gotta personalize your message," Jackson said. "People need to start seeing our young men as people, and not as entities. If you're able to see what a young man goes through here at Duke... it gets to be a little bit hard to dislike them, because it's a good group of men. That was part of the strategy, like: Hey, why not put our guys out there? If you put them out there, you may not want them to win, but there's a big difference between not wanting them to win and not liking them as people, and that's the area we're trying to attack."

Some of the notable segments from the festivities: