Rob Curley, the director of NDN Productions, talks with Denise Spidle, the anchor for the company's news program, about the show at his office in Naples. (Darron R. Silva/Naples Daily News)

Rob Curley finds that building the newspaper of the future is like erecting a Jenga tower

by Kate Schwab

Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with the saying, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.”

And if you move to Nevada with a dream team composed of former Washington Post staffers to launch a multi-million dollar, multimedia-laden website, an army of journalism critics will camp on your doorstep to overanalyze your every move. This is especially true if you’ve already left an intriguing trail for them to sniff, namely a series of newspaper websites across Kansas, a video webcast program in Naples, Florida, a video portrait series (onBeing) and LoudounExtra.com, a controversial, local community website for The Washington Post.

A self-described nerd from rural Kansas, Rob Curley, 39, didn’t plan on hogging the new media spotlight. His controversial philosophy of pursuing “the obvious” continually plants him there, yet he’s immediately clear on one thing: The Las Vegas Sun is a team effort.

It’s a good one, too. The Sun took the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for public service after running a series on workplace safety and construction deaths. Several members of the Sun’s Web team were part of that effort, said Sun owner Brian Greenspun.

“I am blessed every day,” said Curley, who has served as the Sun’s online editor since 2008. “I get to work with some of the smartest people I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A pre-existing joint operating agreement between Las Vegas’ competing newspapers set the stage for Curley’s team. It offered a unique opportunity to study what readers really wanted without fear of hemorrhaging advertising dollars by pitting print and online editions against each other. In 2005, Greenspun arranged for the Sun’s print version to be distributed as an exclusive insert in the competing Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“What if you could start completely over and try to build the newspaper of the future?” Curley wondered. “What would it look like?”

Thus far, the experiment has been largely a trial-and-error process, with plenty of national attention and brutal sideline criticism devoted to each false start and revised idea.

Curley’s previous track record isn’t completely rosy, either. Despite a couple of dozen accolades, his published résumé cites seven different positions within the past decade. A former Washington Post colleague of Curley’s declined comment for this article, but as Curley was hitting Vegas, The Wall Street Journal ran a scathing piece denouncing the website Curley had built for the Post as “a flop” based on low reader counts.

“It’s stressful,” Curley said. “This is hard. Everybody says the newspaper industry needs to be able to take chances. What happens if somebody fails? When the newspaper industry does take chances and fail, there’s a whole bunch of people who can’t wait to write about it.”

Fortunately, there are also people still willing to assume some risk for the sake of innovation. After more than a year, and in spite of heavy financial commitment and losses that led to recent staff cuts, Greenspun says he still believes in the project as a learning experience.

“I saw in Rob, and the people he would bring in, a bunch of bright, excited and creative young people who could see clearly into the future of good, credible journalism,” Greenspun said. “The only way to tell if what they saw was the correct path was to bring them to Las Vegas and let them try.”

From a business standpoint, the rocky economy hasn’t exactly boosted results.

“The critics had no impact; the economy has just forced us to be much smarter about how we do this,” Greenspun said. “So far, I think the results are mixed. The journalism and technological aspects are stellar. The economic returns are at the other end of the spectrum.”

Of one thing Curley is certain: Today’s struggling news world won’t be rescued by multimedia technology, but rather by the same savior it has always clung to — old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting.

“On the print side, I can’t tell you how many newspapers when you pick them up and read them, they don’t realize there is CNN and the Internet,” Curley said.

Despite online and broadcast sources offering the same information at a faster pace, after a major disaster or a big game, newspapers “still feel compelled to lead with it the next morning, even though it’s been 24 hours since it happened,” he said.

That doesn’t mean print news is doomed, Curley maintains. But it does mean print journalists may need to redirect their writing habits to stay relevant. At the Sun, print reporters focus their attention on explaining why and how events occurred rather than reiterating the fact that they did happen.

“In the world I live in, when people see smoke, they look at the website,” he added. If a story providing the reason for the smoke is not promptly available, Curley said, a reader’s natural reaction is to question the site’s credibility.

“They think, ‘Oh my God, these guys suck. I’m not going back there,’” Curley said. “If people are going to the Web for new news, print needs to be something completely different. It needs to be why that happened. I do think there’s a place for print. But is it what it looks like now? I don’t know.”

That philosophy appears to be working. Online ads don’t cover all of the expenses, Curley said; the Greenspun family has made a big investment in multimedia journalism. But focusing on local sports, politics and other reader interests is paying off.

“Our traffic has exploded,” Curley said. “We went from less than two million page views per month in 18 months to more than 14 million page views a month.”

No one rises to Curley’s level of reluctant prominence without catching flak from at least a few critics.

Curley’s famous “hyperlocal” approach, or strict focus on community coverage, also remains highly controversial in American media circles. One of the toughest attacks has been that zeroing in too tightly on local news has led to a plethora of fluff stories at the Sun.

“The people who say that aren’t really looking at our site,” Curley said. “There is perception, and there is reality. We used to produce tons and tons of Flash. We couldn’t get people to look at it.”

Las Vegas, he admits, is “a goofy town” that frequently hosts national spectacles such as NASCAR. But those things get covered because they are local news. In the same vein, Curley said, the Sun staff writes about Harry Reid, but they do it because he happens to be Nevada’s senator.

Local focus makes sense because modern readers run Internet searches or seek out newspapers covering the area where a major event has taken place, Curley said.

“I see us as old-school,” Curley said. “You’re not the authority on world news; why pretend that you are?”

In the past few years, hyperlocal coverage has gotten a tarnished image. Critics naturally began wondering what had gone wrong when they started posting items such as Little League Baseball stats and the promised readers failed to come pouring through the floodgates.

Perhaps that’s because finding local news is only half the job. In Vegas, Curley’s team has had to make some “very, very hardcore decisions” about what to cover based on what subscribers are actually reading.

For example, by monitoring site traffic, Curley’s team soon learned which high school games readers wanted to know about. They were always the same ones, long-established schools in a city that has seen its overall population double in the past 10 years.

The same rule applies to multimedia. Common sense has to come first.

“I’m not here to try to save the industry,” Curley said. “I’m here to make sure the Las Vegas Sun does the most cool and innovative things.”

He’s learned that sometimes being innovative means resisting the urge to play around with multimedia technology simply because it’s there.

“Those things don’t drive traffic,” Curley said. “People go to the Web for things they’re passionate about. A cool piece of Flash animation does neither of those two things. How do we inform people and give them information about their daily lives?”

It still starts with basic journalism, Curley concluded. Each story published on the Sun’s website gets two editorial reads, but not before it goes live. It’s up to the reporter to get the story out as accurately and swiftly as possible.

“The No. 1 skill you need to be a great new media journalist is you need to be able to write your backside off,” Curley said.

Greenspun agreed. The Sun, he said, is most proud of its journalism contributions, both multimedia and traditional.

“If peer review is any sign of success, the Las Vegas Sun is very successful,” Greenspun said. “We have learned through this process not to spend a fortune during a depression, and that with the right people, you can accomplish almost anything.”