Rob Curley

Rob Curley is the executive editor of The Spokesman-Review and joined the newspaper in 2016. He has previously held leadership positions at The Orange County Register, Las Vegas Sun, Washington Post and Lawrence Journal-World. His work in newsrooms, dating back to the 1990s, resulted in some of the largest and most award-winning news sites on the internet, but local journalism and community engagement have always been the main focal points of Curley’s work. He has started several, large-scale community initiatives through the newspaper — including the Northwest Passages events series and the largest, paid high school newspaper internship program in the country. During his time, the newspaper has become a national leader in philanthropic-funded journalism and the use of Creative Commons. This alternate funding has allowed The Spokesman-Review to become the smallest newspaper in the nation to have a bureau in the nation’s capital, to continue to have a bureau in Olympia, WA., covering statewide issues and politics, and — with one of the nation’s largest Ukrainian populations in the nation — The Spokesman-Review was one of the smallest news organizations in the world to send a reporter to Ukraine to cover the war with Russia through the eyes of its own community. In 2023, the news nonprofit Curley founded -- the Comma community journalism lab -- received its 501c3 status from the Internal Revenue Service, and helped relaunch the region's Black newspaper, The Black Lens.