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.

Enlarge

Across the parking lot from the Daily News newsroom, the new-media department is a hectic and cluttered cross between a startup and a college paper. There's a large-screen TV, XBox console, restrooms labeled women.com and men.com, a kitchen that doubles as a podcast studio, and a dark couch that gets plenty of use. The small fridge in the corner, stocked with Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and other sodas, empties fast. "Informal" doesn't do it justice; site manager Levi Chronister pads around the office in shorts and bare feet.

Welcome to the nerdery. It's not hard to imagine that in five years, this is what a newsroom will look like.

After Curley wowed the senior execs from the Washington Post Co. in Naples last March, Len Downie, executive editor of the paper, asked him to address the newsroom staff. A few weeks later, Curley flew to Washington, more nervous than he could remember ever being for a presentation. "Dude, I was fricking terrified. I was afraid my ideas wouldn't matter to them," he says. "By nature, journalists are cynical, and these are the best in the business."

More than 100 reporters and editors from the Post and Newsweek listened to him for more than two hours. Once he saw them nodding and laughing, he relaxed. They got it. "What he's really good at is getting people fired up," says Brady. "He helps them understand and dream about the possibilities of the Internet instead of just seeing the limitations of the paper."

Soon after, Little, CEO of the interactive subsidiary, offered to create a new position for Curley--vice president of product development. As one of just nine vice presidents, he would run a small team whose role was to innovate, and innovate fast, across the company, for the Post, Newsweek, and Slate. "We're looking for tools and databases to make life easier to live in Washington," Little says. "This is an experiment: How do we develop and release new products more quickly? That's Rob's specialty."

He was stunned and flattered, to be sure, but he didn't accept. His wife was days from having their third baby. Also, unlike many newspaper journalists, Curley had never aspired to work at the Post or The New York Times. He had a different journalism goal, which sounds simple, but is equally ambitious: "I just want to build cool s--t."

A few months later, though, when life had calmed down, he and Little reconnected. Curley accepted the job. He was set to start in early October. And despite his insistence that he's not out to save the industry, he nonetheless realizes that he can have a bigger impact by working at the Post. "I want to prove that what I do can work anywhere," he says a few days after deciding to make the leap. "I don't want to be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I want to make it float again."