PressEthic

In a recently published article, Fastcompany.com looks at a local journalist that is addressing the popular question, “what will print media do with dwindling subscription numbers?”

Fastcompany.com published an in-depth profile of Rob Curley, a digital journalist who is combining what he feels is the basis of journalism, a focus on the local community, with the “new media” format available online. Curley is a self-professed “Internet punk” that is being courted by executives at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times for his “hyperlocal, multimedia” approach to online newspaper sites.

One executive said,

He's clearly an icon in the industry, partly based on what he's done and partly based on his personality," says Randy Bennett, vice president of audience and new business development at the Newspaper Association of America. "There's so much gloom and doom that gets bounced around this industry, people are hungry for his wild-eyed optimism. They look at what he's done and say, 'Wow, who knew a newspaper could do this?'"

An example of this approach is kusports.com. This is one of his more notable projects, according to the article, that covers the University of Kansas Jayhawks in ways, he says, the local paper 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.

We all know that newspapers are dealing with a downturn in readership and coming up with creative ways to increase advertising revenue to make up the shortfall from subscriptions. The online/digital business is, on the other hand, up 31% this year and readership is growing. According to the article, old media is buying into new media to survive. The New York Times, for example, recently sold off some of its TV stations and magazines to invest more in its digital business.

The author of the article believes that the irony of the situation is that Curley, through his hyperlocal approach, is “teaching newspapers to do the very thing they did so well for so long: cover the local community.”

Maybe the problem with major media outlets that serve a large metropolitan area, like New York, is that the idea of “local” news is so foreign in a global society. Is Curley’s niche a way to combine the best of both worlds—local beats and new technology?