Editors as Curators: What's Taking So Long? These are tough times for editors. Senior editors are being forced to make deep, painful cuts in their newsrooms. Assignment editors are being phased out at some papers, seen as extraneous layers in the production process. Copy editors are seeing their jobs consolidated or even outsourced. And many reporters, by their nature, never had much use for editors of any stripe to begin with.
But the news judgment skills of editors should be more valuable now than they've ever been before to newspapers and other news organizations. That's because, in a world in which the walls around journalistic walled gardens are being (slowly) torn down, editors can play a vital new role in deciding how to choose content from all over the Web and package it for their readers' edification. The buzzword for this is "curation," and that's a good way to think of it. The buzzword for that is "aggregation. " On the Web, you're not limited only to the content you own. PS: Must be Curation Day. Capitalizing On Curation: Why The New Curators Are Beating The Old. Barring the invention of a "time turner" like the one Hermione Granger sported in 3rd Harry Potter novel, most of us will never have enough time to consume the information we might otherwise want to absorb.
There's simply too much info and too few waking hours. Enter the notion of curation, a relatively new term that is not unlike the editor of old, a trusted person or organization that filters information and aggregates it in an organized fashion for others to enjoy. According to Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, "curation is the new way of organizing the web going forward. " And no doubt he's right. Curious about why new curators like Thrillist and PSFK were thriving while the traditional publishing world floundered, I spent some time with their respective founders, Ben Lerer and Piers Fawkes. These conversations plus one with Eric Alterman, the founder of a new curation engine called iFlow, revealed four insights that could help you too capitalize on the curation phenomenon. Capitalizing On Curation: Why The New Curators Are Beating The Old. Curation - The Third Web Frontier. Posted by Guest Writer - January 8, 2011 Here is a guest article by Partice Lamothe - CEO of Pearltrees (Pearltrees is a consulting client of SVW.)
This is a lightly edited version of "La troisième frontière du Web" that appeared in the magazine OWNI - Digital Journalism - March 2010. The article argues that the founding pricinciples of the Internet are only now being implemented and that the next frontier is in organizing, or curating, the Internet. By Patrice Lamothe Everyone realizes that the web is entering a new phase in its development. One indication of this transition is the proliferation of attempts to explain the changes that are occurring. Although these explanations are both pertinent and intriguing, none of them offers an analytical matrix for assessing the developments that are now underway. The "real time web," for example, is one of the clearest and most influential trends right now.
In contrast, other explanations are far too broad to serve any useful purpose. Curation. Twitter and the Anti-Playstation Effect on War Coverage. As I follow the remarkable political transformations ongoing in the Middle East and North Africa through social media, I’m struck by the depth of the difference between news curation and anchoring on Twitter versus Television. In this post, I’d like to argue that Television functions as a distancing technology while social media works in the opposite direction: through transparency of the process of narrative construction, through immediacy of the intermediaries, through removal of censorship over images and stories (television never shows the truly horrific pictures of war), and through person-to-person interactivity, social media news curation creates a sense of visceral and intimate connectivity, in direct contrast to television, which is explicitly constructed to separate the viewer from the events.
Although it is the first factor most people think of, I believe that the distancing effect of TV isn’t just because TV is broadcast and social media is interactive. The Shared Web: Making curators of us all. Scoop.it masterclass. I've written about Scoop.it several times recently, but I'm still getting blank looks from lots of folks, so here's the how, and more importantly the why, of Scoop.it: Curation, it's all about curation. What is curation? Adding value to information.
Activity - publish, don't just read. Share - don't just publish. RSS - use Scoop.it's "RSS everywhere" to keep up to date with what your community is doing on the site, especially topics/followed. If you like playing games, remember to check out the leaderboard. Don't try to reproduce a community you are already a member of on another network, create a unique Scoop.it community composed of the best contributors. The Big One: Why do I want to do this? Capitalizing On Curation: Why The New Curators Are Beating The Old.
Content Curation: It's Going to Be HUGE. It's counter-intuitive--especially to Americans. But often less is more. When Erin Scime wrote a blog titled: "Content Strategist as Digital Curator", it's pretty clear that she didn't expect to stir up a whole lot of emotions and anger. Yet, that's what she did--at least in part. "I feel like there are a lot of bitter librarians out there," Scime told me. It's ironic, in part, because all her early training was in library sciences. But the buzz around curation threatens more than librarians--there's a posse of PhD's with pitchforks and torches that didn't much like what Scime had to say. What heresy did Scime actual dare to blog about? Scime today is the Content Strategy Lead at HUGE in Brooklyn--whose clients include CNN IKEA, Pepsi, Jet Blue, IVillage, and Penton Media. For a former student of Curatorial studies and information sciences to embrace the democratization of the word "curation" rattled some cages.
One example Scime points to is the relaunch of iVilliage. Curation - The Third Web Frontier. Posted by Guest Writer - January 8, 2011 Here is a guest article by Partice Lamothe - CEO of Pearltrees (Pearltrees is a consulting client of SVW.) This is a lightly edited version of "La troisième frontière du Web" that appeared in the magazine OWNI - Digital Journalism - March 2010. The article argues that the founding pricinciples of the Internet are only now being implemented and that the next frontier is in organizing, or curating, the Internet. By Patrice Lamothe Everyone realizes that the web is entering a new phase in its development. One indication of this transition is the proliferation of attempts to explain the changes that are occurring. Functional explanations emphasize the real time web, collaborative systems and location-based services.
Although these explanations are both pertinent and intriguing, none of them offers an analytical matrix for assessing the developments that are now underway. In contrast, other explanations are far too broad to serve any useful purpose. Power Tools for Content Aggregation and Curation. Maybe you don't have the resources to develop a lot of content, or maybe you're a professional association that wants to serve its members better by being super helpful.
Add that there are many more content creators, inside and outside organizations, and you see how curating information as content strategy could be a very elegant option. Noting the evolution on the World Wide Web quickly to show you a pattern that went in lockstep with use. You had forums and discussion boards, many still very active, Web sites, then journals, which evolved into blogs with RSS (real simple syndication) capability to package and read feeds, social bookmarking and networks, and then media sites to upload and view videos, photographs, etc. Each set of tools building on the next, thriving when filling a specific need, and evolving or morphing into something else as appropriate. Real time logs I suppose I'm quite old fashioned to be still using a blogging platform in a blog format to publish content. So what? New Facebook Patent: the Huge Implications of Curated Search. Maria Popova: In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship.
Editor’s Note: Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curation of “cross-disciplinary interestingness” that scours the world of the web and beyond for share-worthy tidbits. Here, she considers how new approaches to curation are changing the way we consume and share information. Last week, Megan Garber wrote an excellent piece on whether Twitter is speech or text.
Yet despite a number of insightful and timely points, I’d argue there is a fundamental flaw with the very dichotomy of the question. While Twitter can certainly be both, it’s inherently neither. And trying to classify it within one or both of these conventional checkboxes completely misses the point that we might, in fact, have to invent an entirely new checkbox. I, of course, make no claim to using Twitter as it “should” be used. Twitter as discovery Like any appropriated buzzword, the term “curation” has become nearly vacant of meaning. And lest we forget, text itself is an invention, a technology.