Curation and journalism
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There's a new world order emerging around media and publishing. Producing original content is simply too expensive to sustain alone for all but the largest media companies. New models are essential -- and emerging. The solution that is emerging is known as curation.
Media Curation Is Now Consumer-Generated
SXSW blog, day three: Meet the curators | The Economist
At one level, this comment just looks silly. The page at the Atlantic that it links to, which is a list of useful resources for following the Japan earthquake, doesn't "cover" the news. The sources it links to do that. If nobody wrote "here's what happened", nobody would be able to say "here's how to follow the story".
The future of publishing
By now, you should have heard about Paper.li . (If you never experienced a real paper.li issue, check out my latest Uwe Hook Daily And, if you have an iPad, I'm sure you checked out Flipboard , a stunning application that selects news items based on what is shared by your Facebook friends and who you follow on Twitter. That's just the beginning: C urated.by just launched, collecting and organizing tweets into topic based streams that can be shared or embedded anywhere. Keepstream , curating real-time content into visual collections. Storify , a next-generation storytelling platform that lets you build stories from social media.
There is a trend evolving at media companies both big and small that promises to have a remarkably positive impact on what you read, watch, and share on the web: Curation. It's not a popular thing to say that things are okay in media. In fact, the changes taking place are useful, necessary, and will in short order result in better editorial experiences, because as shown in the press daily, the sky is falling in old media. But, happily, the future is right around the corner. First, media companies need to shed their historic connection to their delivery systems.
Can 'Curation' Save Media?
The Role Of Curation In Journalism
from the don't-knock-it dept Jay Rosen points us to an article out of France that takes a stab at presenting what a modern internet-era newsroom should look like . The point that I find most interesting, that helped clarify a few different ideas for me, is that it splits "journalism" into three distinct categories, all of which have a role in the newsroom:
Curation in Social Media
Curation , the word of 2008-2009 within the eCommerce world, popularized first by the entertaining shopping site Woot , has now officially expanded to the social media space ( see examples ). It used to be the long tail that made the internet so full of potential, but it seems information reached its peak and we can no longer search, find and make sense of it ourselves. We only need one result–maybe even just one result per day–if we’re expected to take any action. And action is the key word here. Even Google has tried to make search easier. Instant search gives you exponentially more results but more importantly, allows you to self-curate as you type each little letter of your inquisition.
The 'interestingness curators' of social news
Maria Popova calls herself an "interestingness curator". On average 55 times a day, the 35,000 followers of her @brainpicker account are sent links to "stuff that inspires, revolutionises, or simply makes us think". It might be vintage photos she's discovered of Soviet schools in the LIFE Magazine archives, "21 films to inspire entrepreneurs", or a fascinating new book about sex and consumer behaviour. In a world saturated in information, Popova sees her mission as helping her readers "become interested in things they didn't know they were interested in", thus enriching their "creative capacity".