The Curley method is to convert small regional newspapers into powerhouses on the Web and make them indispensable to their communities -- as indispensable as print newspapers once were, or should have been, to the regions they served. He counsels newsrooms to focus their resources on gathering local news. With the Web, national news has been "commoditized"; you can get national news anywhere, and local newspapers aren't going to beat out bigger papers -- or other news sites, such as Yahoo -- that provide national coverage. Indeed, Curley's very definition of a newspaper involves local news.
Curley calls himself "platform-agnostic," by which he means that he feels no particular sentimental attachment to a printed daily in broadsheet format. A newspaper isn't a physical object, he says, but is instead an expert organization built to "chronicle the local history" of a community.
When papers embrace their mission to provide local news thoroughly, efficiently and in any manner people choose -- in print, online or whatever other device people may want to start using tomorrow -- audiences will flock to them, Curley says. He points to his efforts in Lawrence, Kan., where the three Web sites he created for the Lawrence Journal-World became the center of that college town's daily life. (His sites have also been weighted down with many awards.)
Beginning in late January, the Naples Daily News published an extensive multipart report on the problem of human trafficking and slavery among immigrant populations in Southwest Florida. The series, which documented the plight of South American families and girls who were smuggled over the border and kept in indentured servitude on farm fields and as prostitutes, would have made for compelling journalism in any format. But Curley's Web operation greatly enhanced the paper's reporting. First, as with every story the Daily News publishes, the series was made available on multiple platforms -- you can read the story on your cellphone or on your iPod in addition to reading it on the Web. Online, every story can be discussed in a forum, much like you can do on blogs (or Salon).
But Curley's team added even more. On the paper's Web site, they created an enormous photo gallery from the series, and there are audio clips from the victims, and from reporters who worked on the stories. Such extras accompany many stories on the Daily News' site. For one recent feature on the annual Naples charity wine festival, Curley's team produced more than a dozen video clips from the event; Naples has no local TV news station, so the video -- which you could play on your iPod if you liked -- was the only place to get a picture of the festival.
Multimedia features like these are routine for papers 10 times the size of the Naples Daily News -- the New York Times and Washington Post, for instance, include online videos and chats with reporters and editors on their Web sites. But you don't see this kind of thing at a small paper dealing with news of a small region.
Newspapers collect and distribute information, Curley points out; that's their primary function. In addition to news, newspapers have access to detailed local weather reports, they've got experts who know the ins and outs of restaurants in an area, they know sports scores and upcoming events and the worst place in the city to live if you're afraid of getting mugged. People who read newspapers understand this; for folks reared on newsprint, reaching for the local daily or alt-weekly may seem like a clearly obvious way to learn about what's happening in town.
That's not the case, though, for people who don't read newspapers; those unaccustomed to print may not understand that the paper's where you go to learn about restaurants in town, and they may not know, further, the idiosyncrasies of the town's particular paper -- that, say, Wednesday's edition covers dining, and Friday's the day for reviews of local music. As Curley sees it, newspapers will gain young readers only when they put this information online in a format that's a pleasure to use.
Curley's far from the only person in the newspaper business with this idea; newspapers big and small, including Juice, have retooled their sites to provide readers greater access to useful civic information. But few if any newspaper sites provide this information in as useful and easy a format as Curley does. He takes advantage of the simple fact that the Web, with its nearly infinite storage space, can present a whole lot more information than a newspaper ever can.
Note Curley's vision of the ideal way a newspaper should provide information on local restaurants on its Web site. "I wanted a huge in-depth restaurant database," he says. "You do a local restaurant search in most towns and it's terrible. I want to know everything about a restaurant. Are they vegetarian friendly? Are they locally owned? I want a guide that'll allow me to search on who's serving sushi right now and it's 10:30 at night. Or I want somewhere to look when I'm driving around and listening to music and I've got a hankering for some ribs. If I could get something that told me that, dude, I'm all about that."
At Lawrence.com, one of the sites he built for the Lawrence Journal-World, that's just the kind of restaurant guide Curley and his team created, and now he's got a similar thing running at BonitaNews.com, one of the sites he's running for the Naples Daily News. He's got scores of such ideas for making newspaper Web sites more appealing. "We have it set up so that for your local high school football games our site will call your phone to tell you the score," he says. Or you can have the newspaper send a wakeup message to your phone every morning and tell you the weather forecast.
You might wonder what the difference is between what Curley's doing and what the niche weeklies are doing; if Curley is just giving young people more efficient arts coverage, isn't he also pandering? Isn't it possible that some people might just go to his pages for the pop cultural coverage and ignore the stories on slave trafficking?
Yet there's a fundamental difference in tone between what Curley's doing online and what other papers are doing with niche tabloids. Papers like RedEye and Juice seem to picture young people as essentially vacuous and hyperactive, incapable of any sustained attention. This explains their brevity; they take it as a given that people my age want to know less, not more -- so they give us only tiny nibs of info.
Curley, on the other hand, gives you more. Where other media pander, he attempts to attract young people with comprehensive features -- like video, audio, discussion forums, and databases -- rather than taking them away. "I'm trying to build a Web site that you can't imagine not being there," he says. "I think newspapers should be trying to build Web sites that are so good and so powerful that when real estate agents are talking to people who want to move there, they'll talk about the newspaper just like they'd talk about good schools or a nice park." And once people are spending as much time at these newspaper sites as Curley hopes, the thinking is they'll inevitably be roped into the paper's other features, including its news reporting.
So far, nobody's come up with a business model to support such vibrant Web journalism. Newspapers make their money through the print newspaper, and there's no sign that if print circulation declines, ad rates on the Web could make up for lost ads in the paper, even if those Web sites become substantially more robust than they are today. According to Nielsen//Netratings, the New York Times' Web site is the most popular newspaper site in the country. But when I asked Robinson, the Times CEO, if she could envision the paper producing costly, in-depth, investigative journalism on the strength of its Web revenue, she said, "It isn't fair to put the burden of our wonderful newsroom on the shoulder of our newly formed online operation." The online operation, she explained, is just 10 years old; in time, perhaps, a business model will come.
Curley, too, didn't have all the answers on the business questions. But he did point out that compared to the costs of producing a print newspaper, the costs of building a news Web site are small. So even if revenues from a Web-only operation are lower than from a print model, profit margins may actually turn out to be higher.
His approach seems plausibly lucrative. If his sites do become indispensable, attracting both old people and young, advertisers may follow. It's a thin reed on which to hang the future of the newspaper industry. But a reed nonetheless.
About the writer
Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer.
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