News
MEET BISNOW: GENERAL EDITOR CURTIS RAYE
September 16, 2010
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| Today begins a new series where we pull back the curtain on our Bisnow editorial staff. Whether you're actually curious what we look like, or just need to know who to smack, we hope you enjoy. |
| Curtis Raye, left (with Stefan Lawrence of sketch comedy group Elephant Larry), is the general editor of Bisnow, where he oversees 13 publications in a burgeoning news empire. He first came to our attention several years ago when “first banana†Mark Bisnow asked the Dalai Lama who he turns to for spiritual guidance and one-liners. Curtis graduated from George Washington University with a degree in political communications, or as he puts it, “a fancy word for combining media and politics.†He grew up 270 miles away from Bisnow's HQ in the town of Wantage, NJ (population 10k), where cows outnumbered people until fairly recently: “This was a big moment in Wantage history, when the people finally caught up with the cows.†|
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| Curtis once watched a movie starring Al Gore's college roommate, Tommy Lee Jones. This generosity paid off years later when Hillary Clinton tapped him to be a field organizer in the key state of Iowa during the '08 presidential race. She excelled in his rural counties, so we presume he talked his friends, the cows, into caucusing. Curtis spends a lot of his spare time doing improv comedy (pic above), and on many nights, you'll find him performing with DC's Washington Improv Theater. On weekends, he volunteers as a Kennedy Center tour guide. Curtis also created a Web series in which he visits the final stops in the DC Metro system; in it, he revealed that the cars are sometimes driven by geese. Despite his early stint in politics, Curtis is a stickler for accuracy and clarity. He enjoys the storytelling aspect of news but prefers doing it in unorthodox ways: “I like the challenge of finding unique ways to impart information.†|
