Rob Curley, Newspaperman of the Future

DJANGO, MEDIA

I find Rob Curley interesting for many reasons:

  • Until recently, he worked as director of New Media and Convergence for The World Company of Lawrence, Kansas, which sounds kind of weird and obscure if you don’t know that LJworld.com is possibly the most award-winningest, cutting-edge local news site in existence.

  • The World Company and its web projects gave birth to Django.

  • He is at heart a newspaper guy. Two or three careers ago I was a newspaper guy too (though the paper was weekly rather than daily).

  • He delivered a fascinating keynote address to the Integrated Media Association. I didn’t even know there was an Integrated Media Association.

So where is this Rob Curley? Well, about two months ago he moved to Naples, Florida to work at NaplesNews.com, taking a few Kansans with him. Little did he know that he’d almost immediately get the challenge of covering Hurricane Wilma. On Monday, Poynter Online (which had previously covered Curley’s move) ran a “What They Did” story detailing Naplesnews.com’s adaptations to the extreme circumstances. Among other things the site established a special storm edition, which Curley talks about in this MP3 interview.

Earlier this evening I listened to a Paul Graham talk in which he gave a grim prognosis to media outlets unable to learn from the bottom-up world of blogs and open source. Curley gets it. The entities heretofore known as “newspapers” are not long for this world in their traditional form. But they’re not going to just get obliterated by a stochastic cloud of blogs as some believe. No, there’s a way for coherent media companies to survive; Rob Curley is demonstrating the way forward right now, to those who are paying attention.

Share: