Blog 1 - Rob Curley

Emma Kittle

Blog 1

Rob Curley

Last night in Meacham Auditorium in the OU Memorial Union, news guru Rob Curley suggested a different way for news organizations to serve their audience that isn’t taught in journalism school.

Curley said the reason he has found success at prominent news organizations such as the Orange County Register, the Washington Post and the Las Vegas Sun is because they were able to “solve problems in a different way.”

Instead of writing traditional news, journalists should “understand your audiences needs and how each medium fills those needs,” Curley said. Print journalism is to fill an hour of free time, an iPhone or mobile device is to give directions, reviews or suggestions when someone need them and the Web is to give immediate news and information of what is happening right now.

OU journalism student Korteza Adams said Curley “had a lot of good points about where were going and how you can’t really forget your past but you still need to keep moving onto the future and be interactive with people and progression.”

Curley said he thinks the best way to be interactive with a news audience is by covering news that people are passionate about, giving them practical information side-by-side with playful content, creating a personal community through Facebook and Twitter and by distracting people from their hard lives with mindless pleasures.

“You have to understand the ecosystem,” Curley said. “You have to know how are people consuming their content because they consume it very differently.” He said that once you understand this, then you will be able to build a product that essential to their lives.

As the demands for immediate news increase, OU’s student newspaper, the Oklahoma Daily has adapted to fill its audience’s needs.

“For 96 years now the Oklahoma Daily has been a five day a week print product on Mondays through Fridays for both fall and spring semesters” Oklahoma Daily and OUDaily.com editorial advisor Judy Gibbs Robinson said. “We’re still writing and photographing and publishing each day, but in addition we’re blogging, Tweeting and podcasting and video taping.”

Adams said she thinks that the Oklahoma Daily should create a social media app specific to the OU community. “People need to know what’s going on at all times,” Adams said. “Obviously people will be going out on the weekends so will obviously people want to know where should they go.”