If “eccentricity” was a person, it would be Rob Curley.

Curley builds custom guitars with murals of abolitionist John Brown on them, did coding for Facebook back when the site was less popular than MySpace and says William Allen White is his personal hero.

A native Kansan, Curley is also the executive editor for The Spokesman-Review newspaper based in Spokane, Washington, which, if you hear him describe it, seems to be an oasis of hope in a desert of depressing developments in the local journalism industry.

His mission is to spread the model of community-focused journalism that he’s brought to papers in Lawrence, Washington D.C., Orange County and Las Vegas, among other places.

Despite living over 1,000 miles away from his home state, when Curley received a call to travel to Wichita State University to speak at the Kansas Collegiate Media (KCM) conference on April 21, he immediately said yes. 

No speaking fee, no negotiation. Just pure passion for the future of journalism.

“There aren’t as many Kansas high schools that have student newspapers anymore,” Curley said. “So for many young journalists, this is their first chance to be able to do journalism … I know what’s happening in journalism in my home state, and it breaks my heart because this place has had amazing journalists.”

More than 2,800 newspapers have ceased publication since 2005, mostly in rural locations. Over 2,500 journalism jobs were cut in 2023 — a continuation of a trend where more than half of newspaper jobs have been lost since the turn of the century.

For the most part, Kansas has been insulated from the worst of these layoffs and closures. Curley still warns that the emergence of news deserts has major consequences for communities.

“People aren’t running for office,” Curley said. “When they do run for office, only the incumbents win. Bond issues go up a huge amount of rates because people don’t realize what happens when the newspaper goes away.”

The virtuous cycle

During his keynote speech in the Rhatigan Student Center on April 21 in front of an audience of collegiate journalists, Curley walked back and forth in front of the stage instead of standing behind a microphone because he has “really, really, really bad ADHD, and we pace.”

Hopped up on “19 Red Bulls,” Curley spoke for an hour and a half about his vision for the future of journalism, centered around building positive relationships with the communities reporters cover — something Curley calls the “virtuous circle.”

“The reason all of us love journalism is because we want to make our community better and safer tomorrow than it is today,” Curley said during his speech. “So we want to write the stories that make the bad guys quit behaving badly, and we want to find solutions that make life better, and we want to help explain things like COVID so that people understand it.”

After Curley took on his position with The Spokesman-Review in 2016, the paper’s circulation increased from 68,000 to 82,000 in one year. The newsroom has grown and focused its coverage around what Curley calls the five Ps: passion, practical, personal, playful and pleasure.

“Spokane becomes this great experiment in what happens when media literacy becomes a huge part of what you’re trying to do,” Curley said. “People will care again. And so, to me, that should be really uplifting to journalists.”

‘We Love You Curley’

Todd Vogts, an assistant professor of media at Sterling College, said he became a “fanboy” of Curley’s after hearing him speak at a KCM conference two decades ago when Vogts was a Wichita State student.

After hearing him speak for the first time, Vogts read Curley’s blog, created a fan website and wrote him a parody song changing Bye Bye Birdie’s “We Love You Conrad” to “We Love You Curley.”

“I grew up in a small town,” Vogts said. “I knew the importance of tight-knit and feeling like you know your neighbors type of situation, like my town no longer had a newspaper … But then here’s this person that was doing incredible things, cutting edge, digital, and it still had that same core value of bringing people together.”

Vogts said he hopes that Curley will inspire journalists at the KCM conference to emulate his passion for the communities he covers. After all, Curley is still an inspiration to Vogts.

“I just think he’s the coolest dude,” Vogts said. “I hope one day I get to be like him.”