Hyper-Local Hero

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On joining The Topeka Capital-Journal that year, fulfilling a childhood dream, he took to enhancing his stories with additional material online. For a piece on two new roller coasters, he included video shot while riding Mamba and Mr. Freeze. Eventually, the editors asked him to become the full-time new-media editor. "I made them promise I could come back to my reporting job," he says. "But I never went back."

Instead, in 1998, he took a job propagating the sort of dynamic Web content he'd created in Topeka across the Morris Communications chain, including stops in Hannibal and Augusta. Because the prevailing fear was that free online content would cannibalize the print audience, many papers at the time treated Web sites as an afterthought, a place to pile up print content, not scoop yourself on tomorrow's headlines. New media, the skeptics argued, wouldn't last. "I had one publisher tell me, 'Look, this is like the second coming of the CB radio,'" Curley recalls.

He didn't buy it. Newspaper sites weren't profitable, but he believed it was only a matter of time. The business was in its infancy. "There's a Warren Buffett quote, which I'm paraphrasing, that says there has never been a venture that's accumulated massive eyeballs and audience that's failed," he says.

Although Curley had won a number of awards and had been recognized as an industry pioneer by that point, working for the Lawrence Journal-World from 2002 to 2005 elevated his profile. The paper was a privately held, family-owned outfit known for being cutting-edge. When Curley arrived, the company's print, Internet, and cable TV staffs already shared a newsroom, making it an early textbook example of media convergence. Literally a textbook case: It was written up in journalism books. Papers would visit Lawrence to see how the Journal-World worked, and they'd find Curley, Mr. New Media, managing the entire converged newsroom.

He was also tackling one of the industry's toughest problems: how to engage the elusive 18- to 24-year-old set. His team did it by remaking lawrence.com, a site separate from the paper's online home, as an alternative-entertainment hub for college students. The sarcasm and profanity sounded authentic to readers, but behind the attitude was a sophisticated approach to service and interactivity. Databases of local-music gigs and daily drink specials made the site useful. Offbeat reader blogs made it unpredictable. "The site belonged to them, not us," Curley says. That was an important editorial and philosophical shift and one that traditional-minded newspapers are loath to accept. The other smart decision was taking the online content and putting it in an ad-rich weekly tabloid called Deadwood Edition, an oft-cited example of reverse publishing.

At E.W. Scripps Co., which owns the Naples paper, Curley arrived in fall 2005 to be "a disruptive missile," says Bob Benz, the company's general manager of interactive media. "Someone who's thinking, 'What if,' from the time he gets up to when he goes to bed." There's no question Curley found the winning formula: Online profits in Naples are expected to double this year. Nor is there any question that his hyperlocal approach resonates in an industry in which 85% of papers have circulations under 50,000.

But the solution isn't as simple as replicating what he does, particularly at larger papers covering local, national, and international news. "A newspaper the size of the L.A. Times is a lot more complicated," says Los Angeles Times managing editor Leo Wolinsky, who visited Naples last spring. Reporters can't call every bar or restaurant or photograph every high-school athlete in L.A. And managers can't expect a veteran staff to work the long hours and practice the style of multimedia journalism that the mostly young, single staff in Naples does. Curley insists it's about working differently, not necessarily more, but that's sure to be a hard sell at union papers, where the question of expanding job responsibilities is not insignificant.

Also, a new business that Curley created to pay the new-media bills--assigning a few animators and designers to create agency-quality commercials for local companies--treads too close to the sacred line between advertising and editorial for some. That's "not something I can imagine our editorial department doing," says Wolinsky. Still, despite his misgivings, Wolinsky thought Curley's overall strategy and execution were impressive. "The newspaper world is definitely moving in Rob's direction," he says.

Curley doesn't claim to have it all figured out yet. But he does believe that hyperlocal journalism is the best approach, even if the specifics vary from one market to the next. The crucial ingredient, regardless of a paper's size, is the right culture for multimedia innovation. In Naples, the environment is fearless, driven, and playful. Fish, the publisher, whom Curley calls "the grown-up in the room," gives him free rein, allowing him in turn to give his staff a lot of room, as anyone can see who makes the pilgrimage to Naples.