I seem to be chasing Rob Curley.

By the time I got to the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan., in September, the multimedia journalism star had already come and gone. He was at the Naples Daily News in Naples, Fla., and folks in Lawrence talked about him in reverential terms.

Among his projects for the Journal-World: kusports.com, a one-stop shopping site for the Kansas Jayhawks, which featured live play-by-play, animated playbooks and computer simulation.

Just a few weeks ago, Curley was hired at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

"I want to prove that what I do can work anywhere," says Curley in the Fast Company profile. "I don't want to be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I want to make it float again."

I'll be visiting the Post's Web operation in November. I've got a request in to Curley for an interview. We'll see if I can catch him.

Meanwhile, the man who apparently calls himself "just a nerd from Kansas," is almost the equivalent of a newspaper rock star.

Fast Company's profile of Curley is a good one because it manages to illustrate the divide that still plagues newspapers and Web sites.

While newspapers are still struggling to integrate the Web and print, from somewhat of a position of "panic," according to Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, the University of Maryland's interactive journalism institute, Curley is on a different level.

"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."