Hyper-Local Hero

By: Chuck SalterWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:14 AM

Ten years ago, Rob Curley was covering city hall for the Topeka daily paper. Now he's lighting up the entire industry. How a "nerd from Kansas" discovered the web, and hit the big time.

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On a Saturday afternoon in August, Rob Curley is holed up in a video-production studio in Naples, Florida, with a couple of sleep-deprived colleagues. Between yawns and sodas, they're editing high-school football footage that's scheduled to air tonight on the Web (and on iPods and PlayStation Portables), as well as on local cable. These are only preseason games, but this being football country and all, Curley, the head of new media at the Naples Daily News, wants PrepZone Playbook, his team's newest creation, to rock. Pulsing music, action-packed highlights, slick animation--the works. So he keeps nitpicking. When a reporter appears on-screen, unnamed, to offer postgame analysis, Curley interrupts: "Okay, we have to say who that is right away." The rest, though, looks "fricking awesome, like something on ESPN!"

This may not sound like newspaper work, let alone serious journalism. And Naples--a haven for powerboaters and putter-wielding snowbirds on the Gulf of Mexico--may seem an unlikely hotbed of innovation. But executives at The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and throughout the beleaguered newspaper industry think otherwise. They believe that Curley, a 35-year-old overcaffeinated and entrepreneurial "Internet punk" (per robcurley.com) is onto something. "He's clearly an icon in the industry, partly based on what he's done and partly based on his personality," says Randy Bennett, vice president of audience and new business development at the Newspaper Association of America. "There's so much gloom and doom that gets bounced around this industry, people are hungry for his wild-eyed optimism. They look at what he's done and say, 'Wow, who knew a newspaper could do this?'"

Curley--"just a nerd from Kansas," as he puts it--hasn't won a Pulitzer or worked at a major daily. But since teaching himself to build Web sites 10 years ago, he appears to have figured out what most newspapers haven't: how to do the Internet right. He calls it "hyperlocal" multimedia journalism, and his news and entertainment sites are sucking in audiences, advertisers, and revenue; they're racking up national and international awards; and, most important, they've begun delivering profits. The sites Curley and his team build grow out of an uncanny feel for what matters to customers and an ability to translate that knowledge into imaginative, indispensable tools that forge a connection and habit with readers--just as newspapers once did. But his sites allow readers to do far more than they can with print: Users can compare historical home prices, street by street or neighborhood by neighborhood; receive a text alert about a Little League rainout, the weather, or the fishing report; click on a map to assess local hurricane damage; chat with the subject of a story or its reporter; check out a weekly high-school sports roundup and daily news "vodcast" (short for video on demand).

"Most people still think of a newspaper Web site as a digital version of what went on the press last night, but that's a small part of what we do," Curley says. "I want a site to be so cool and important to people that they talk about it the way you talk about having a great park where you live. It's a local amenity."

The newspaper industry, meanwhile, has come to resemble a once-mighty tree now in sad, slow decline. Since 1989, papers nationwide have lost 8 million subscribers; the percentage of adults who read a daily during the week has plummeted to scarcely half the population. Not surprisingly, total ad revenue, which saw double-digit increases in the 1970s, was up just 1.5% last year. And papers consequently have been laying off employees, offering buyouts, shuttering foreign bureaus, and cutting costs with a vigor they once reserved for exploring meaty stories.

To make matters worse, the same digital shock waves that are transforming a host of industries--music, photography, advertising, movies, you name it--have given newspapers an identity crisis as well. When Craigslist offers free online classified ads and Google and Yahoo link to breaking news, what's the role of a newspaper exactly? What do you do when your core product is, literally, yesterday's news?

You go online. Online advertising across the newspaper industry is up 31% this year, online newspaper readership is growing, and during the past 18 months, there has been a flurry of investment in new media by the old. True, the rates and the number of advertisers are still considerably lower than those in print (online ads typically represent less than 10% of a paper's total revenue), but it's clear newspapers believe the money will come.