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.

At first, the suits gathered here are reserved, uncertain what to make of the fast-talking Web whiz in his beaded choker, rectangular Versace glasses, and black short-sleeved shirt and black slacks. But Curley, with his infectious zealotry, wins them over one slide at a time. "He's the king of the dog-and-pony show," says Naples Daily News publisher John Fish, who also worked with Curley at papers in Topeka and Augusta, Georgia. "Nobody does it better."

Curley demonstrates three news sites, for Naples and nearby Bonita Springs and Marco Island; like his earlier work, they are based on certain core strategies. For starters, "master the obvious." Twain in Hannibal. Politics in Topeka. Basketball in Lawrence. Real estate in Naples. Each topic defines the local community. Obvious, yes, but the genius is in the execution. And there, too, he follows a deceptively simple rule: "There's no such thing as overkill." On the bottomless Web, there's always room for more detail, more depth. That, in essence, is the "hyper" in hyper-local. With national and international news now practically a commodity online, the value of local and regional papers, he says, is in using the Web to cover not only "big-J journalism" but also "small-J journalism"--events that rarely make headlines but loom large in our everyday lives. "We can't out-CNN CNN. But we can make sure that no one out-Naples us."

The irony is that Curley is teaching newspapers to do the very thing they did so well for so long: cover the local community. "I don't think I'm new media," he says. "I'm old school. I think newspapers lost their way and started focusing on big investigative stuff and forgot to cover the prom or 10-year-olds playing baseball." Not the Daily News. It's running a yearlong series exploring the lack of affordable housing in the area, including an online database of 100,000 home sales during the past three years. And it's "covering Little Leaguers like the New York Yankees," says Curley.

He shows the Chamber of Commerce what he means by hyperlocal--video of a football coach sizing up his squad's offensive line and running game as if he were Bill Parcells. Cut to the players: tykes in oversized helmets, teetering like bobbleheads.

He also shows the audience Studio 55, the daily-news vodcast. Shortly after arriving in Naples last year, Curley capitalized on the absence of a local station by hiring a young broadcast-oriented staff and building a studio. In less than six months, the Daily News was in the vodcast business. ("We wanted a newscast you could watch on your iPod at the beach," he says.)

Studio 55 consists of news items based on the print reporters' stories for the next day's paper, and those reporters are also interviewed as experts on the show. Thus the virtual news reinforces the physical paper, a shrewd extension of the brand. "It's an infomercial," Curley says, without shame. PrepZone Playbook also epitomizes the collaboration between old and new media that papers are eager to emulate: A print reporter, still photographer, and videographer cover the same game in their respective media. Then, building on the game story in the paper, the Web site features a contest for the big hit of the week, marching bands' halftime shows, cell-phone alerts with quarterly updates, photos submitted by readers, reporter podcasts, and "stats on steroids." And how do a couple dozen employees do it all? "Internology," says Curley, only half-joking. He relies on a staff that's mostly young, single, and "willing to go through a wall for Rob," says Brady, the washingtonpost.com editor. And he relies on the new tools they've mastered: "This is what journalists will look like in five years," Curley says.

Before the digital bug got him, Curley grew up with ink in his veins. His devotion to University of Kansas basketball and football cemented his loyalty to The Topeka Capital-Journal, starting in the third grade. His father, a plumber, and his mother, an office manager, were more than happy to pass along the sports section--and their newspaper habit. "Other kids wanted to be a policeman or fireman," says Curley. "All I ever wanted was to work at the paper."

His first experience with Web development came in 1996 after an editor at The Ottawa Herald, in Ottawa, Kansas, asked the cub reporter to help out with the paper's nascent online site. Curley picked up a manual and built his first Web page that night. The following year, a Philadelphia Inquirer series called "Blackhawk Down," later a best-selling book, served as his digital awakening. As riveting as the catastrophic military mission was on paper, the online account had chats with author Mark Bowden, Pentagon video, and audio interviews with surviving soldiers--their stories, their voices. "It was like doing journalism in black and white versus doing it in color," Curley says. "How could you not want to tell stories that way?"

New media wouldn't last, skeptics told Curley. One argued that it was "like the second coming of the CB radio."