For Rob Curley, paper and ink is just a starting point.
Curley lives in a world of Web sites and online broadcasts, where the same story can hit not only the front page, but also your iPod, your cell phone and even your Playstation.
“The newspaper business isn’t about ink on paper,” said Curley, the new vice-president for product development for the Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive. “It’s about keeping people informed. We are in the ‘news’ business, not the ‘paper’ business.”
Curley, a 2001 graduate of Emporia State University, knows where he’s coming from. He’s been a “new media” pioneer at The Topeka Capital-Journal, The Lawrence Journal-World and most recently The Naples Daily news in southern Florida. At Lawrence, he was one of the first online editors in the country to lead all of a newspapers’s print and broadcast news operations.
These days, he told an audience at ESU on Wednesday, online editions mean that newspapers can be more community-oriented than ever. In fact, it’s vital.
“Local media outlets have to own their community’s news,” he said.
His work at Naples is a case in point — several cases in point, in fact. The paper’s site adopts a relentlessly local focus.
Want to go out to eat? The paper has a database of 700 restaurants in the area, offering everything from directions to daily specials to whether dogs are allowed. It even points out which restaurants will let you wash dishes in exchange for a meal.
“We found that out of 700 restaurants, five would accept barter,” Curley said.
Interested in Junior’s football game? The site has rosters, individual player statistics, schedules, matchups and updates sent to your cell phone with every score, if you want. Hunting a church? How about a short message from the pastor, an outline of available programs and a 360-degree view of the sanctuary? And for those worshipping on the links, there’s even a podcast of the services.
“This is your spiritual mulligan,” Curley joked.
There’s plenty of room for more traditional news, too. One of the more extensive projects, a study of housing costs in the area, analyzed 100,000 real estate transactions, conducted 500 interviews and produced 33 stories in the traditional paper. But it also created an online database of home sales from 2003 through 2005 and an analysis of the average home cost for each of 1,600 neighborhoods — including a picture of a home in the neighborhood that sold for that average price.
The one thing the site does not do is national and international news.
“You can’t out-CNN CNN.com,” Curley said.
The key question from a business standpoint, of course, is whether it makes money. So far, Curley said, the answer seems to be yes. When he left, the Naples site had a revenue stream of about $600,000 a month — far more than it cost to build and operate.
Profit aside, there’s the sheer fun of operating a site like this. Curley grinned as he brought up a picture of a local football stadium.
“Just for giggles, you can click on any seat and you can see a view of the field from that seat,” he said. “It’s called intern-ology — putting an intern in every seat with a digital camera.”