By Megan Scott
AASFE Diversity Fellow
 Newspapers should be kicking television stations’ butts -- to put it nicely.
 That was the message from Rob Curley, VP of Product Development for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, to features editors at the AASFE conference in Savannah, Ga. Curley was talking about the fact that television websites are visited in far greater numbers than newspaper websites.
 Curley, an interactive pioneer, said washingtonpost.com is the lone local news website among the top 10 websites in the U.S. (The paper is considered local because no one outside of the D.C. metropolitan area can get it.) Others on the list include CNN.com, Nytimes.com and usatoday.com. Still, none of those sites are attracting visitors like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, which get billions of page views per month.
 The bottom line: “Newspapers need to build websites that work the way the Internet really works,” said Curley, “not the way an old-time publisher or editor wishes or thinks the Internet works.”
 The ‘I work at a small newspaper’ is no excuse.
 Before coming to the Post, in 2006, Curley brought hyper local media convergence to the Naples Daily News and the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, which Editor & Publisher named in 2004 as one of the top 10 newspapers in the U.S. that does it “right.” He even built the Mark Twain website when he was working at the Hannibal Courier-Post in Hannibal, Mo. Twain’s hometown.
 Curley is modest in his accomplishments, referring to himself as “just a nerd from Kansas.” He taught himself how to create websites and says anyone can do the same.
 
 In this video from the AASFE conference, Curley shares some tricks on how reporters and editors can web-ify a story.