FAIRFAX, Va.--- Rob Curley, the director of New Media for Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive and "Internet nerd from Kansas", spoke to a class of online journalism students at George Mason University on March 4, 2008. Curley began by quoting one of his heroes, William Allen White. White knew in 1931 that no matter how technology changed, people would still want to know what's going on.

Curley said there's four things people do on the Internet:

(1) Practical things, like getting directions to go somewhere or reading consumer reviews before making a product purchase.

(2) Passions, like following your favorite sports team, shopping online or whatever people are passionate about they will go online for.

(3) Playful things, like doing crossword puzzles, watching YouTube videos or browsing Facebook.

(4) Porn. Newspapers don't really deal with this one, but it's still a reason people go on the Internet!

How does a print newspaper live on the Internet? In order to do it well, a news site has to have breaking news, database-driven coverage, rise above multimedia overkill, and have evergreen content.

By multimedia overkill, Curley means TV news stations. They are winning. More people today visit the website of their TV news station website than their local newspaper website, Curley said. That's frightening. TV news stations get viewers over news sites for breaking news coverage, because they will have it. Being a good news site, like WashingtonPost.com, requires getting the video of that community on fire uploaded on the site first.

"You write it once and it lives forever," Curley said about evergreen content, deep content about something that won't change.

A news site should embrace platform-independent delivery. Test to see that your content works on all technologies - cell phones, iPhones, iGoogle, etc. Also, news should be presented as a dialogue, not a monologue, Curley said. The importance of giving the community a voice cannot be stressed enough. Newspapers are behind with a lot of basic stuff, like allowing readers to post comments on stories.

And the most important tip for a newspaper site to do well?

"You have to build websites to work the way the Internet really works," Curley said. "Not the way you wish it worked."

Curley showed the students some of the Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive series, like Jennifer Crandall's OnBeing, as well as other ways in which he and his colleagues embrace the Internet and interactivity to deliver the content people want.