I just wanted to make a few thoughts/clarifications on your post:

– The Fast Company article came after Rob had already been in Naples for months, not before Naples/Scripps hired him. Also, I’m 99.9 percent sure the photo idea was from their people, not Rob himself.

– Rob did not take “most of his online staff” when he left Lawrence for Naples. In fact, I was the only full-time Journal-World employee to go to Naples. Two interns also went, but the very large majority of full-timers stayed in Lawrence.

– I can’t speak exactly to Naples revenue numbers, but I’m again 99.9 percent sure that the sites/projects we built were financially strong. I will readily admit that revenue there had every bit as much to do with having a publisher (John Fish) who was a master salesman and a hard-working ad staff as anything Rob or the rest of us did, if not more (which I’m sure Rob would readily admit also).

– “Hyperlocal” was not a buzz word Rob created (or thought of) for the Post job. It’s a term that’s been around since at least the time we were in Lawrence (based on this article). I can’t remember the first time it was used to describe the work we were doing, but I know it was before we came to Washington.

– To say that the Bivings Report blog post was “abandon(ing) his teachings and pointing out his flawed plan” is a large amount of hyperbole. Mr. Zeigler points to three takeaways, only one of which (the first) can be placed squarely and solely on the shoulders of Rob/our team (and which Rob takes the blame for at the end of the WSJ article). The other two are organizational issues that share blame all around.

– Similarly, your “reporting today the emperor has no clothes” link goes to a blog post that is, a day later, responded to by the original writer, who admits he “inaccurately noted that LoudounExtra.com hadn’t yet rolled out high school sports”. His original post also mentions the lack of community-publishing tools, which the WSJ article explains. I don’t see where Mr. Krasilovsky points out anything along the lines of Rob being a fraud or any such thing. I might be to close to all of this to see the forest for the trees, though.

– I’ve said this in response to other blog posts, but saying that Rob “took most of his staff” is pretty darn offensive (accidentally so, I have no doubt) to those of us who have chosen to go to Las Vegas as well. We have all given a lot of thought to our options, which included staying at WPNI or looking for a job somewhere else entirely. We are leaving on our own terms, not just blindly following or being brought to Vegas on leashes.