Hyper-Local Hero

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• Rob Curley's Greatest Clicks
  Curley and his teams are famous in newspaper circles for their addictive, "hyperlocal" microsites. Here's a parade of their hits.

Which leaves them with one last problem: Once you're online in a big way, what exactly do you do? Ten years in, most papers are still struggling to integrate digital and print journalism. "By and large, newspapers are in a panic," says Jan Schaffer, the executive director at J-Lab: the Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park. "They don't have a clue what they should be doing with the Internet. They're stuck in the old definition of news and how they cover it. There's a need for drastic experimentation."

And then along comes Curley, unburdened by pieties about "how we've always done it." Unlike previous ink-stained generations, he and his mostly young charges practice journalism with software code, video, podcasts, audio, slide shows, blogs--whatever works. Multimedia storytelling comes as naturally to him as satire did to Mencken. Likewise, interactivity: The notion of a newspaper as a conversation rather than a lecture doesn't strike fear in Curley, the way it does some newspaper purists. It's exciting, full of promise.

What his crews have built at various small papers mirrors that excitement. The Mark Twain site at the Hannibal Courier-Post, in Hannibal, Missouri, is a cross between a library and a museum; it features Twain's letters, stories, books, even video of an impersonator performing his sly, wicked works. The Topeka Capital-Journal's legislative site included texts of every bill and each representative's top campaign contributors. And kusports.com, one of Curley's better-known projects, covered the University of Kansas Jayhawks teams in ways the Lawrence Journal-World couldn't. In addition to live play-by-play, it featured an animated playbook of the basketball team's most effective plays, and a writer who previewed coming matchups by simulating them on a computer game and covering them like real games. The result? Three years after Curley took over, monthly page views soared from around 500,000 to a peak of around 13 million. Not bad for a town with 82,000 residents.

"Dude," Curley recalls, "I'm sitting there at a table with Don Graham and Ben Bradlee thinking, 'This is not right.'" says Naples publisher John Fish, "Nobody does it better."

That's why Curley routinely fields calls from executives who have been in newspapers longer than he has been alive. That's why papers and industry groups fly him to places he has never been--places he never imagined seeing, like Bangkok and Madrid--to hear him speak. Editors, publishers, and programmers from around the country and abroad regularly make the pilgrimage to Naples (circulation: 103,000 in peak winter months) and to Lawrence, Kansas (circulation: 20,000), where Curley first made a name for himself.

Yes, it's pretty strange being Rob Curley at this moment, precisely because he's so of the moment. But wait, it gets stranger.

Last March, while the Washington Post Co.'s senior executives were in Naples for their annual retreat, Caroline Little, the CEO of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, and Jim Brady, vice president and executive editor of washingtonpost.com, one of the top online news sites, toured the Daily News new-media shop (Curley calls it the "nerdery"). And Don Graham, the CEO and chairman of the board of the Washington Post Co., asked Curley to give a presentation. The night before, at a group dinner held at the Ritz-Carlton beach resort, Graham made a point of introducing Curley to "Benjie"--as in legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee. Rarely at a loss for words, Curley was struck dumb. "Dude," he recalls later, "I'm sitting there at a table with Don Graham and Ben Bradlee thinking, 'This is not right.'"

Ordinarily, after being introduced as an award-winning digital journalist (the Newspaper Association of America's 2001 New Media Pioneer), Curley jokes to his audience, "I'm going to try not to suck now." But on a Tuesday in August, at his publisher's request, he doesn't utter a single "suck" or "dude" while addressing nearly 200 business leaders at a breakfast with the Naples Chamber of Commerce. He does, however, warn them that he has condensed a six-hour PowerPoint presentation into 20 minutes (he did it on his laptop at stoplights on the way to the Hilton), and is "jacked up on six Mountain Dews and four Red Bulls." He's kidding, of course. He's only had one of each. So far.