For Immediate Release:

Contact:
Andrew M. Scott, Communications Coordinator, (317) 927-8000, ext. 215, ascott@spj.org

LAS VEGAS - Greenspun Media Group New-Media Division Editor Rob Curley is revolutionizing the latest news coverage techniques in the digital age and sharing his innovations with fellow journalists.

Curley spoke Tuesday on these advancements during “Re-imagining News: A Conversation with Rob Curley,” a session at the 2010 SPJ Convention and National Journalism Conference in Las Vegas. A leader of the online arm of the company that owns the Las Vegas Sun and Las Vegas Weekly, Curley outlined creating a unique “hyper-local” approach to covering the news.

The Sun is employing three different models to each medium of their news coverage in the areas of print, online and mobile. According to Curley, the daily print edition centers on “why” rather than “what” and focuses on investigative journalism.

“We don’t tell you what happened, we tell you what it means,” Curley said.

The Sun’s online edition serves as the breaking-news/real-time function of their coverage while simultaneously engaging audiences. The Sun’s sports section is entirely online with live blogs, tweets and podcasting as well as “fan pages” devoted to regional teams with statistics, player biographies and past Sun articles on teams.

“We wanted to build something readers could get lost in,” Curley said of the Sun’s website.

The Sun has also created an intricate system of databases covering a variety of topics, including the progressive history of the Las Vegas Strip, residential water use in a desert region and “City Center,” which provides detailed information on each resort and casino.

Prior to the Sun, Curley was Vice President of Product Development at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive for two years. Before joining WPNI, Curley was director of new media and convergence for the Naples Daily News and its sister publications along Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Curley gained national attention when at the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World he became one of the first online editors in the nation to lead a news organization’s entire print and broadcast news operations. In 2004, Editor & Publisher magazine named the Journal-World as one the 10 newspapers in the United States that “do it right.” Focusing on the newspaper’s innovative approaches to hyper-local media convergence, the cover story noted that “the paper’s Web innovations are far too numerous to list here.”

He was recognized in 2001 when the Newspaper Association of America named Curley the industry’s New Media Pioneer of the Year. Curley’s ground-breaking work has been documented in everything from college journalism textbooks to industry and mainstream magazines and white papers to even a 20-minute segment on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” In a 2005 Sunday business story, The New York Times referred to Curley’s work in Lawrence as “the newspaper of the future.”

In 2006, he was named by the Newspaper Association of America’s PRESSTIME magazine as one of the top “20 Under 40.” In 2007, Curley was named to Washingtonian Magazine’s annual list of the Washington D.C. metro area’s “40 under 40.”

Founded in 1909 as Sigma Delta Chi, SPJ promotes the free flow of information vital to a well-informed citizenry; works to inspire and educate the next generation of journalists; and protects First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and press. For more information about SPJ, visit www.spj.org.