What I learned about suspended Spokane editor Rob Curley when I reported on him years ago

You may have seen the disturbing news that Rob Curley, executive editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, has been placed on administrative leave.

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Amaris Castillo reports for Poynter Online that publisher William “Stacey” Cowles cited “several personnel complaints,” and that the newsroom union has voted no confidence in Curley’s leadership. It appears that a dispute over coverage of the recent Spokane fires led to what has been described as “a verbal confrontation.” Here’s the statement from The Spokesman-Review.

I have a bit of insight into Curley, having reported on him for my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls,” when he was editor of the Orange County Register. Curley was cordial and engaging, but he would not give me an on-the-record interview during my visit in March 2015.

As I learned in conversations with several staff members, he was unpopular in the newsroom, at least among some, and that he’d had issues at previous career stops. Here’s what I wrote about him:

[Washington] Post executives hoped to develop a new revenue source through online hyperlocal journalism. “Hyperlocal” is a word that means different things to different people. Most, though, agree that it involves a heavy focus on community affairs, from local government meetings to youth sports. [The Post’s] experiment in hyperlocal was called Loudoun Extra, which covered Loudoun County, Virginia, about twenty-five miles west of Washington. With a population of about 310,000, the county was on the large side for a hyperlocal site. The project did not go well. Although Loudoun Extra was overseen by Rob Curley, a respected digital news pioneer, the site failed to attract much traffic. The Wall Street Journal pronounced it a “flop” in June 2008, about a year after its debut. In an interview with the Journal and in a post on his own blog, Curley blamed the site’s woes on poor integration with washingtonpost.com and on a lack of outreach to the community. He wrote that “both of those problems were my fault. Completely.”

The Loudoun experiment may also have been harmed by tensions between Curley and Jim Brady, then the editor of washingtonpost.com and now the founder and publisher of Billy Penn, a mobile-first local news service in Philadelphia. Curley has a reputation for being difficult to work with, a reputation I learned about through a number of confidential conversations with people, most of whom were commenting on his stint as the editor of the Orange County Register from 2014 until early 2016. Brady chose his words carefully when I asked him about his own relationship with Curley. “He’s a talented guy, for sure,” Brady said. “He got put into a situation that assured that he and I were going to bump heads. And we did. And I think there was a little bit of a battle over control of the future of the site because there was a bit of a battle over very different styles. We seem to have made some peace with it. I still trade messages with him on Facebook every so often. But it was a tough time. The time he was there was time that we didn’t innovate as much as we should have because there was too much of a power struggle going on there, which I’m just as much to blame for as he is.” Curley declined to comment on the record, but I have no reason to believe he harbors any animosity toward Brady.

And:

By the time I arrived at the Register the following March [2015], Aaron Kushner [principal owner of the Orange County Register] was one day away from stepping down. Curley declined to be interviewed on the record and offered no insights into Kushner. Curley was an early innovator in digital journalism, earning national accolades for his work at the Lawrence Journal-World of Kansas and the Naples Daily World of Florida. In 2006, Fast Company magazine published a gushy profile, calling Curley a “hyper-local hero” who “appears to have figured out what most newspapers haven’t: how to do the Internet right.” But Curley proved to be a controversial, difficult figure when he moved on to The Washington Post and, later, at the Las Vegas Sun — and, as I learned in the course of my reporting, at the Register as well, which was perhaps inevitable given that he had succeeded the popular Ken Brusic in early 2014.

Curley once wrote a post for his blog saying that Brusic was one of his “heroes” and that Brusic had recruited him to succeed him as the Register’s editor. Both Aaron Kushner and [his business partner] Eric Spitz confirmed in my interviews with them that Brusic had indeed recruited Curley. Brusic did not respond to several requests for an interview. In any case, I have no reason to believe that Curley had anything to do with Brusic’s departure. It is more likely that Brusic decided to retire once it became clear that Kushner was going to have to dismantle what he had only recently built up.

This isn’t much, but perhaps it offers a few clues to what’s going on in Spokane. Curley’s backstory is of someone who enjoyed splashy success at a young age during his stints in Kansas and Florida, and then proved to be a difficult colleague at his subsequent stops.

He seemed to have found his calling in Spokane, where he’s worked for the past decade, and where he’s leading an effort to convert the paper to nonprofit ownership. Unfortunately, his future is now in jeopardy pending the outcome of the internal investigation.