My friend Tim Bishop points me to some reality checks today, suggesting that the Washington Post’s much-touted experiment in hyperlocal web publishing has lost its leader and perhaps its way. Rob Curley is one of the newspaper industry’s new media and I have lauded in this blog about 10 months ago. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Curley has taken five associates with him to Las Vegas where he and his condotierri will build a working hyperlocal site — not like the large and costly flop they are leaving behind in suburban Virginia. WSJ writer Russell Adams concludes his article by saying:
As he decamps with five colleagues to take on an Internet venture for the Las Vegas Sun, Mr. Curley acknowledges he didn’t get out into the community enough. “I was the one who was supposed to know we should be talking to Rotary Club meetings every day,” Mr. Curley said. “I dropped the ball. I won’t drop it in Vegas, dude.
Wow, that’s great work when you can get it!
Meanwhile, iconolanistic blogger Scott Karp writes that the Washington Post’s front web page proves of no use in helping him decide whether or not thunderstorms in suburban Virginia would snarl traffic or cause office closures. But, as Karp blogs, he must use a search engine to find the map, posted by the local power company, of downed trees and other obstructions. People want news they can use. But newspapers give them all the news that editors think is fit to print.
Oh, well, this won’t happen in Las Vegas now that Rob Curley’s crew has arrived. For one thing thunderstorms are rare in the Las Vegas desert and other than the occasional decorative palm, there are no trees.
I am a programmer who worked with Rob at the Post and worked on the Loudoun site, and I’d just like to take issue with your assessment that Loudoun Extra was a “large and costly flop.” First, even though the headline on the WSJ article uses the word flop, I don’t think that’s really the heart of the piece, and second, the article certainly doesn’t describe our work as large and costly.
In fact, I would say one of the failures of Loudoun Extra is that it was only one small part of a lot of other things we were asked to do. We were one part hyper-local dev team and one part try-new-things team. We were never really able to settle in on one project with our whole attention for more than 3-6 weeks at a time. The Post most know this, too, creating two teams in place of our single unit after we leave — one for experiment development and one for hyper-local.
So I have no idea how you can determine that Loudoun Extra was “large and costly.” It was a small little site built at the same time that many other projects were built. The WSJ article focuses on that site alone, without any context of the other work we were asked to do. While I think the criticisms are relevant and worth considering, it’s also useful to know the greater context in which that one site lives.
Thanks for the comments, which are well taken. It’s easy to be flip when being critical and since I have no first-hand knowledge of the WP situation you are right to scold me. Tom