“The most important part of the word ‘newspaper’ is ‘news’ not ‘paper’,” Rob Curley, the Director of New Media for Washington Post-Newsweek, reminded George Mason University students during a presentation.
Curley sees news as more than hard hitting investigative journalism. He seeks to bring new media journalism back to the original roots of the art: community. In his mind you create a news page in order to get people to stay on the site.
There is an easy rule of thumb Curley uses to explain the reasons why people go on the internet in the first place and the reasons they would stay. He calls them the four P’s:
- Passions
- Practical Things (directions, hours of operation, etc.)
- Playful (The internet is an “inherently playful place,” Curley said.)
- Porn
While one may not want to put the fourth onto their news site, if you keep these ideas in mind a journalist will develop and maintain a reader base online. “How often have you heard someone say, ‘I went to the Washington Post site and got lost for hours’? Never,” Curley said.
The innovative director sought to change this. Curley and his team developed OnBeing for the Washington Post. The Post, which Curley describes as a national, local paper, needed a more personal aspect.
The project, OnBeing, posts videos of interviews with regular people from the Washington D.C. metro area. They are interesting, touching, funny, and unique. The site, which was the first to offer full screen video, allows the reader to “get lost” on the web, keeping people coming back for more.
On top of this Curley stresses that online news outlets must, “own breaking news,” have “hyper-deep coverage” complete with databases and interactive models etc., contain “multimedia overkill,” and have “evergreen content” which is data that once it is written it “lives forever.”
All this is how one of the best in the new media field, Rob Curley, suggests keeping journalism a “dialogue, not a monologue.”
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