“Of course as long as man lives, someone will have to fill the herald’s place.  Someone will have to do the bell ringer’s work.  Someone will have to tell the story of the day’s news and year’s happenings.”

Okay. So?

”A reporter is perennial under many names and will persist with humanity.”

That’s nice.

“But whether the reporter’s story will be printed in type upon a press, I don’t know.  I seriously doubt it.”

Wait.  Run that by me again.

“I think most of the machinery now employed in printing the day’s, the week’s, or the month’s doings will be junked by the end of the century and will be as archaic as the bell ringer’s bell, or the herald’s trumpet.  New methods of communication I think will supercede the old.”

These were the words of William Allen White in a personal letter to Lyman B. Kellogg in 1931.  And this is how Rob Curley began his presentation on the changing face of reporting Tuesday, Feb. 27th at George Mason University.

Curley, the newly appointed Washington Press-Newsweek Interactive Vice President of Product Development for new media, is, like White, a Kansas native.  From 2000 to 2002, Curley was the new media director for the Topeka Capital-Journal and until 2004 held a management position in the interactive operations and editorial departments for the Lawrence Journal-World.

Within these news organizations, Curley developed his “Strategies we better not be afraid of.”  These strategies range any where from covering local breaking news in depth, to database-driven coverage, evergreen content and multimedia overkill.

“Embrace platform-independent delivery is another strategy,” Curley said.  “Send content any way people want it.  Whether that be email alerts, texts on their cell phones, or on their iPods. Do what they want.”

Wouldn’t that make it more of a dialogue?  News is traditionally a one-way communication. 

“It’s much more interesting to have a seat at the table, instead of just leading the discussion,” was Curley’s response.  “So thinking that our readers are smart shouldn’t be such a novel of an idea.”

Curley’s brainchild is the idea of “hyper-local”.  By taking the website edition of the print newspaper, one can go much more in depth.

While working on the Kansas University basketball team website, KUSports.com, Curley perfected Hyper-local.

“It was stats on steroids,” Curley said.

The website dedicated to the Jayhawks shows every statistic from every game played.  Each player’s statistics include his high school games.  If the players graduate and move onto the professional leagues, the site has statistics on those games as well.

Animated playbooks, the X-factor, an X-Box simulated game predictor, and even weather predictions for that week are all features on the KUSports.com website making it closer to home.

“When you look at the weather, it gives the wind direction from one of 36 different landmarks that are student recognizable,” said Curley.

“My favorite is Due-South: the Burrito King,” he said.

Some of the students attending the speech were amazed at some of the features that Curley’s websites housed.

Jian DeLeon, 21, said, “I couldn’t believe some of the stuff that he had on his pages.  And the ways he gathered all of the details and information was pretty clever: intern-knowlegy.”

Intern-knowlegy was Curley’s way of saying the interns did the tedious work of collecting little bits of information for the websites.

“Have an intern with a digital camera and sit in 16,000 different seats taking pictures.  They come in handy,” he said.  “That’s how we got the images for the KUSports.com seating floor plan and views.”

After being appointed to vice president for Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive, Curley plans to bring his hyper-local reporting skills and web designs to the Washington Metro area.

He and his team plan to cover things like politics more in depth and give greater detail to the local teams.

“Our secret sauce is how we cover the communities,” Curley said.  “We’ve broken the greater DC area into 18 sections and we’ll knock out one at a time.”

Curley is already hard at work at the first section, Loudon County.  He will open Loudonextra.com in the near future.  The site will have comprehensive information on restaurants, churches and calendar events just to name a few things.