It's great to see Rob Curley just some of the attention he deserves. Rob, VP of Product Development at washingtonpost.com/Newsweek Interactive delivered a keynote at OSBC 2007 and made my day. Now Fast Company has a special feature on him.
In light of a dying newspaper industry...
...along comes Curley, unburdened by pieties about "how we've always done it." Unlike previous ink-stained generations, he and his mostly young charges practice journalism with software code, video, podcasts, audio, slide shows, blogs--whatever works. Multimedia storytelling comes as naturally to him as satire did to Mencken. Likewise, interactivity: The notion of a newspaper as a conversation rather than a lecture doesn't strike fear in Curley, the way it does some newspaper purists. It's exciting, full of promise.
And he does it all with open source. In fact, as he said at OSBC, he couldn't do the same sort of thing with proprietary software. Cost prohibitive and innovation prohibitive.
The next time you experience the news in an interesting way, thank Rob Curley. And open source.