Curley advises Gaylord students on success

Rob Curley emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the need's of one's audience.
PHOTO: Miranda Sanchez

Students of Gaylord College were lectured last Monday by a guest speaker on the importance of utilizing online content and serving an audience.

The presentation given by Rob Curley, deputy editor of local news at the Orange County Register, is one of many events planned to by Student Media to study campus media. The lecture explained how to keep its audience interested, a problem for some university papers.

Uninterested students have led to less advertising in papers like The Daily Illini, NPR reports. A handful of students told NPR they had no interest in reading the paper, and even if they did pick it up, it was just to do the crosswords.

When Curley worked at the Las Vegas Sun, he implemented techniques that were discussed during the lecture to prevent the Sun from losing readership. Instead of just preventing a loss, he managed to increase readership eight fold.

“We do (multimedia) really well, but we figured out how to use that to grow our audience,” Curley said. The Las Vegas Sun sent its videos to the local news channel to publicize the media it produces.

Despite the quality of the multimedia the Sun produced, Curley said their success came from paying attention to their audience’s interests and finding stories based off that.  

Kate McPherson, a journalism junior, agrees with Curley’s emphasis on audience.  

“The stories that journalists thought were good stories weren’t things that their audience were interested in, so they weren’t serving their audience,” McPherson said. “That got me thinking about how do you define a community and am really serving the community that I’m supposed to be?”

According to The Daily, the next Student Media event is a discussion on Sept. 23 at 3 p.m. in the Governors Room in the Oklahoma Memorial Union.