Q&A With Online Innovator Rob Curley

By: Jay DeFoore When you point your browser to BonitaNews.com, the first visual clue that this is no ordinary newspaper Web site is the 960-pixel wide photo that jumps out from your monitor. But go deeper into the site and you soon learn that there's much, much more to this little Web site than splashy graphics.

The site, which is the younger sibling to the bigger Naples (Fla.) Daily News, is a testing ground of sorts for parent company E.W. Scripps, which is letting new media director Rob Curley and his ever-expanding online team build the site largely to their own specs.

In addition to the daily news, features, and multimedia storytelling found on the site, BonitaNews.com is bursting with innovative offerings such as daily podcasts, video clips, searchable databases you can download to your iPod, and thousands of pages on high school athletes.

Curley says the site is a model not only for the soon to be re-launched NaplesNews.com, but also for all that a newspaper Web site can and should be. Curley answered the following questions about the site, his thoughts on citizen journalism, and the benefits of open-source Web development.

How are the redesigns of NaplesNews.com and BonitaNews.com coming? What can we expect to see from the new sites?

We're hoping to launch a new temporary re-design/update of naplesnews.com before Christmas. To be honest, if I have to look at that old naplesnews.com site much more I'm going to jump off Naples Pier with a meat vest on. After we get this temporary design up, we'll then come back and give naplesnews.com a proper re-design sometime in 2006.

The very first thing we were asked to do when we got here was build a new site for our revamped Bonita daily newspaper. That whole process has felt more like a start-up than I thought it would, and that's been just fine with me.

We're taking lots of chances with everything from content to presentation to advertising to how we run the daily operations for our geeks working in the nerdery.

This is the youngest staff I've ever worked with because most of the folks that came with me from Lawrence were actually interns there, and it's been a blast to see them not only work so hard that you can hardly believe it, but come up with these cool new ideas that make you just want buy them another Red Bull with a Mountain Dew chaser.

They're fearless, and they have the talent and work ethic to back it up.

Every time I look at the new BonitaNews.com, which we quietly launched in September and had only four-to-six weeks of work behind it, I can't believe how much is on there, nearly all of which had to be built from scratch.

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The restaurant guide is more useful and has more information in it than I've ever seen on a site. And it can work on your iPod or your mobile phone.

The entertainment calendar has so much detail, it's almost staggering. Of course, it has all of the local music events, art openings and stuff like that, but it also has so many dang church study groups, community meetings and middle-school concerts, that it almost freaks me out.

The high school sports stuff is total overkill. There are nearly 1,000 local players in our local football database. The team pages are so detailed that you can click on a seat and see the view of the field from there. Heck, the site will even call your mobile phone as often as every time the score changes at the high school game of your choice.

The multimedia coverage of the high schools seems really fun to me. The videos look great, and we're even producing a weekly preps podcast that drips with personality and is being incredibly well received from the community.

Our new daily news podcast also has turned out even better than I expected. Heck, we sold the sponsorship of our daily podcast before we had even one listener.

And I was extremely proud of our Hurricane Wilma coverage, where we pulled out every tool from our toolbox.

I've been totally blown away with how the newsroom has helped us with breaking news, the podcasts and every other thing we've asked for help with.

We're definitely going to expand from using more than just the Internet. The focus of our department is evolving so much that we're changing the name of our group from the Naples Daily News Online Services or Naples Daily News New Media or whatever it's called to NDN Productions.

If people thought we were a little out there with the stuff we were doing in Lawrence, just wait a few more months. The stuff we're doing here in Naples takes it all to a whole new level.

My best guess is that it could really, really be something special, or when I get fired, it will be referred to as the "Naples Incident."

What factors need to be in place for great online journalism to succeed, both from a content and from a revenue standpoint?

If the publisher wants to do something special and innovative, and is giving more than just the standard lip service that you hear nearly every publisher dish, then half the battle is over.

I've always thought that Scripps had all of the right elements and mindset to do some really kick-ass new media journalism that not only made an impact on the community but made some serious moo-lah, and when they hired John Fish to run this newspaper in Naples, I knew things were about to get interesting in southwest Florida as far as multimedia journalism was concerned.

There's not a better a new media publisher in the business than Fish, and I'm not saying that just because Scripps gives its department heads raises in January.

This is guy who is not afraid of trying to reinterpret traditional media, and let's face it, if the publisher really wants to make this happen, it's going to happen.

Since I left Kansas, I've had some friends in the industry ask me if I thought it was going to be harder to do all of this within not only a huge media company, but a huge publicly held company. I'm telling you, it's been just the opposite. We have the same buy in here in Naples from the highest level of the Scripps corporate folks as we did from Dolph Simons in Lawrence.

Scripps is the perfect company to try to do these sorts of new things. This is a company that's wired a little differently than most others that own newspapers. People thought they were a little nuts when they started things like HGTV, and that has always made Scripps seem cool to me.

Look at how they've handled new opportunities in the past, like HGTV and the Food Network, or even how they're handling more recent things like their new broadband channels and the purchase of Shopzilla. This is a company that not only has embraced taking smart chances, but understands niche markets and multimedia content.

You layer in a local publisher who really gets this stuff, and you've got all of the ingredients to make this work.

It always takes a little time to win over some of the editors and reporters, but once they understand that all you really want to do is create world-class local journalism that they can really be proud of, then they're on-board.

Convergence is really all about the journalism, not the medium.

So what's your definition of a converged newsroom? What should online journalists do, or what new skills should they be arming themselves with, in order to adapt to the new challenges and expectations convergence brings?

Right now, I think convergence is much more of a mindset than a skillset. A good journalist is a good journalist regardless of the latest technology.

A converged newsroom is nothing more than a group of reporters who are more concerned with the news than how it is distributed.

To me, this is a hugely important time for newspaper journalists. It seems like everyday you read about another newspaper cutting its newsroom staff or doing buy-outs. Then you read about print circulation and revenue declines because of the shift in how people are using media.

I know that is going to seem like a little tangent, but what's the most surprising to me is that most of the reporters I talk to are really pretty insulated from this sort of information. Maybe it's because I've never really worked at a newspaper that started gutting the place while I was still there. Still, it always surprises me how little most reporters know about the state of their own industry.

But, in spite of all of that, newspapers don't realize that our readership is bigger than ever before. We have more people turning to us than ever before, it's just that now they're getting their news from us on the Web or through e-mail or through RSS feeds, not to mention all of the new devices that our content is perfect for. As an industry, print circulation and revenue may be going down, but overall readership is up and new media revenue is where all of the growth is.

When newsrooms get past the ink on deadwood, they realize that we're more relevant and important than ever before. Our journalism is what matters, not whether it lands a on a driveway wrapped in a rubber band.

And the thing is, it's not that hard for a traditional print reporter to really make an impact in this world of changing media.

Recording interviews is not a hard thing. Giving the editor a few paragraphs of an important breaking story is not hard. Bringing in the court documents that are mentioned in a story so that they can be scanned in and posted is not hard. Talking about the facts of a story for a podcast is not hard. Having the mayor stop by the office to do a live chat with our readers is not something you need to go back to college to learn how to do.

I'm not naive. You can't win over everyone. But if I were still reporting, I'd be doing everything I could to show just how invaluable I was to a news organization's ability to survive all the changes were going through.

Is citizen journalism the newspaper industry's savior? Are there any pitfalls to a strategy that relies on the community for its content, or only upside? And what are you ideas for harnessing this new journalistic force?

The idea that our readers might know things that we don't isn't new. And the idea of citizen journalism certainly isn't new either.

I remember one time when I was still a reporter back in probably '95 or '96 at the Topeka newspaper and I saw our newspaper's KU Jayhawks basketball beat writer looking at a KU message board. I asked him what he was doing, and he said something along the lines that he was working on a basketball recruit story and that he was always amazed just how good the information that some of the posters had. He said he would see what things he might be able to learn from the message board and then try to confirm it for his own story.

That was 10 years ago.

Now more than ever, I believe newspapers need to embrace the idea that we should be having a dialogue with our readers. Our products absolutely can not be a monologue.

I know that our coverage of Hurricane Wilma -- especially in regards to photography -- was much more complete and helpful because of all of the great shots we were receiving from our readers. We were also getting text updates about different communities directly from our readers, and even the director of the local zoo posted an update about the status of the zoo's animals on our community publishing tools.

He didn't contact a reporter. He just did it himself.

You layer blogs into this mix, and to me, it just makes things more interesting.

The thing is, with all of this information out there -- and the fair amounts of misinformation -- I think that professional journalists become even more important than they've ever been.

What we can't do is ignore that things are changing and hope that they will magically go back to the way they were in the '70s. To me, newspapers can only become more helpful to our communities if we embrace the idea that a lot of our readers can help us in our goals of keeping people informed.

I don't know that I'd go as far as calling citizen journalism the industry's savior, but we better not screw it up, either.

You say you're planning to use a lot of open-source software on the site. Tell us what's open source and what third party vendors have developed? What are the advantages/disadvantages to using open-source?

I am really blessed because I got to work with uber-smart programmers like Adrian Holovaty (now with The Washington Post) and Simon Willison (now with Yahoo) while I was in Lawrence.

While we were building our content management system back in Kansas, those two were really showing me the power and value of the open-source community. And once we had our system in a reasonably good spot, they asked me what I thought about releasing the underlying programming infrastructure that powered our publishing tools as open source.

We did and it's called Django.

So, once we made the move to Naples, we licensed the publishing system -- called Ellington -- that had been built while at the Lawrence Journal-World, and we then began looking for a programmer of our own for here in Florida, which was easy because we turned to the Django open-source community and found this brilliant young guy by the name of Eric Moritz.

I can't even count all of the enhancements we've made to the publishing tools here in Naples using the Django open-source infrastructure.

As of right now, the only pieces of our Bonita site that aren't done in-house are our classifieds software, the verticals, and the print-ad conversion. But because we want our sites to be one huge relational database, we will be migrating as much as we can to our internal applications, built primarily with open-source tools.

One of the advantages with doing things in this manner is that you really are controlling your own destiny. The downside is that if something breaks, it's your fault and there's no vendor to blame.

Though to be honest, I'd be completely comfortable with blaming a vendor anyway.

Our other geeky tools of the trade are Apache, Python and PostgreSQL.

You are building the sites largely independent of the Scripps tech system. How can a media company as large as Scripps foster a culture of innovation while still profiting from economies of scale?

What's cool about Scripps is that this one of the few traditional media companies that I really think understands that when a disruptive technology comes around, you better be willing to deal with it in the same way that your new competitors are.

What's essentially happening is that Scripps is currently running the rest of its newspaper Web sites in a fashion that capitalizes on the economy of scale that a chain can bring to the table, while at the same time they're saying: "We're also going to let the new media team down in Naples do it however they want so that we can see if they can innovate and come up with local solutions that allow us to battle these new competitors."

Well, that's not exactly what they said. It was more like this -- "Go down there and kick some ass, while maximizing and monetizing everything you do."

Like I said earlier, this could either be really cool, or it's going to be called the "Naples Incident" and I'll be writing obits for the weekly paper in my hometown back in Kansas.

But if things do pan out well down here, you can bet that you will be seeing some of these ideas on all of Scripps' sites.

OK, last question. What's been the biggest change in going from Lawrence, Kansas to Naples, Florida?

There are a lot of things in Florida that can eat you and hurricanes really suck.