Hope for Newspapers Yet

Sharks must continue to swim, or they die. That was essentially the point of Rob Curley’s speech on Monday night. He pushed for the evolving of newspapers to not merely survive, but thrive.

Curley did not tell the audience of about 100 how to do fix all newspapers; he only told what he had done at past publications and how it worked for him. Above all Curley pushed for newspapers to be aware of what their audience really wanted, and then give it to them.

Curley presented the listeners with 5 P’s for giving the consumer what they wanted. These were Passion, Practical, Playful, Personal Communication, and Porn. Before any article is published they must be in at least one of these categories. Curley also stated that instead of focusing on the classic formula of Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How he is now focuses on only the How and Why. He feels these are the most pressing questions that face the readers.

One of the most powerful images that Curley used was a bar graph that compared the steady rise in population with the stagnant sales of newspapers over the years. Stephanie Wingfield said that the graph was one of the most surprising things about the speech.

A large portion of the night was spent talking about Curley’s time at the Las Vegas Sun, where the readership increased eightfold from the time that they started to integrate multimedia.

 The management at the Las Vegas Sun noticed viewers were reading the online versions of stories longer. They found that this was due to a point in a webpage where advertisements are no longer a distraction. This is called the “book zone,” where a reader is able to focus on only the article. A reader never reaches this zone in a print newspaper and so therefore they rarely read an entire article.

Curley went over some of the more glamorous facets of the Las Vegas Sun, such as a virtual history of Las Vegas with information on the past mob ties of the city and a virtual strip that can be altered by changing the year and seeing the corresponding buildings that were on the strip at that time.

Curley ended the talk with asking the question of how to increase the amount of readers of the Oklahoma Daily.  It is an important question, and a seemingly much more positive outlook than many give the newspaper these days.