The experienced journalist provides an interesting
point of view on media evolution
“Internet
punk”, “media nerd”, “web guru”: these are the words that, according to the
flyer sponsoring the event, introduce Rob Curley, metro editor of the Orange
County register and the former reporter at the Washington Post and Las Vegas
Sun.
Curley
spoke yesterday night at 7 p.m. at the Meachum Auditorium, Oklahoma Memorial
Union. Someone could think that talking about news on the internet, newspapers’
websites and advertising could be matters for professionals, teaching staff or
future journalists, but actually the Pulitzer Prize-winner discussed about the
strict link between journalists and news media and the audience, specifically all
of us citizens.
According
to a graph showed several times during the speech, in the last decades the
number of newspapers hasn’t followed the increase in world population at all. Curley
used this figure as anti-model in order to warn all the people committed in
news reporting. The solution to attract as many readers as possible, in an era
of declining in newspapers, seems to be a combination of five characteristics
that content needs to have: passion, newspapers have to provide items which
people have strong feeling for; practicality, readers looking for news want to
find themselves in serendipity; playfulness, since people need to escape from
life’s difficulties; and impressively porn, thought as a mindless hunger for
compelling matters.
It
is clear from this that Rob Curley is not the typical old-fashioned journalist,
he is a thoughtful professional aware of the revolution happening in world of
news. Lindsey Ruta, journalist for The Oklahoma Daily, was pleasantly impressed
by Curley’s “different mind-set”, which is so far from that of traditional
reporters; “it is a refreshing point of view”, she said. Although Curley showed
what the huge possibilities of the internet platforms could be, his journalism
is very committed in the true essence of the profession: serving the audience. He
thinks that old media and new media can compensate each other in a sort of
co-existence. Then he added: “to avoid the death of press we should make print
products less crappy”, that can sound obvious but actually it is not, in this
day and age.
There
were about hundred people at Meachum Auditorium and not all of them were
students; Kristi Moser found Curley’s speech very innovative. Agreeing with him,
she said that she hopes that new and old media would be concerted by news operators.
An
hour in to the lecture, Robert Curley, though tired because of the speech and
the trip, made himself available for numerous students of journalism to answer
to their questions and opinions; as a good journalist, he didn’t forget his
main mission of serving the public.
No comments:
Post a Comment