By: Jessica Nam
Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Current Vice President of Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive, Rob Curley, walked into George Mason University’s Online Journalism class in his “I’m a Mac” T-shirt, full energy, and great amount of knowledge to share with the students.  

Curley is known for his creativity and his remarkable knowledge for online journalism. He shared not only his work and visions for online journalism but he shared much more than that—his passion for news and journalism spilled color all over the room.

“The most important part of the word newspaper is news not paper,” said Curley.

Those were his first words once his presentation began. The room fell silent and Curley was able to capture every single one of the students’ attentions. His abundant energy and passion took action more than his words, which made the presentation all the more interesting.

Curley spoke about the importance of news and writing. News. It’s what people read. It’s what is delivered to the people all over the world. He stressed the importance of how news is written for the people. How we are in the newspaper business for the news, not the paper business.

“You write it once and it lives forever,” said Curley.

His presentation seemed to only get better and better.

The works shown to the students were things they’ve never realized before. Curley gave the students just a glimpse of how online journalism has been taken up to a whole new other level. He showed off him and his teams’ proudest projects, one of which was “onBeing”.

The project “onBeing” were video clips of interviews of ordinary people talking about their lives. It was as simple as that. No celebrities. No artificial add-ons. It was pure. He mentioned how he somehow wanted people to get sucked into journalism like they do with youtube and facebook. This did just that.   
“Is this journalism? I don’t know,” said Curley.

Curley’s projects like “onBeing” and another, “LoudonExtra”, seemed to puzzle students in amazement. Is all of this really journalism? His purpose for online journalism seemed clear. He had visions. He seemed to know that online journalism could only get better from here.

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