The Rising Need for Content Curation Skills and Capabilities.

Picking up on the theme from last week’s post, Tech Reporters Losing Control of the Story to Social Media, here was an interesting tweet that could a lot of play at SXSW.

 @robinsloan The way to cover big news in 2011 is not "here's what happened." It's "here's how to follow the story" http://t.co/sMqGOuh

It was reported and commented in Economist article, Meet the Curators. The article notes that that "aggregation" or "curation" of other people's coverage is becoming recognized more and more as one of the indispensable elements of journalism. They add that, “Being able to scan a vast range of material, determine what's reliable, relevant and sufficiently objective, decide what will actually interest your particular readers and arrange it in a way that they can use are not trivial skills.”

It goes on to state that Richard Sambrook, a former senior editor at the BBC says that news organizations now face three main roles: coverage of breaking news and live events, deep specialist niche content with analysis and expertise, the aggregation and verification of other sources of information. The article close by stating that social media is “likely to become as much part of the journalist's toolkit in the 21st century as the dog-eared address book was in the 20th.”

We saw this close in hand as the PBS St. Louis affiliate, KETC, made use of the Darwin Awareness Engine to monitor the news on immigration in the US.  Our friend Rob Paterson used the Awareness Engine as part of this effort. In his words, “the value of Darwin is that on a daily basis it starts to reveal patterns of content on the Web. It could be immigration but it could be anything. What I am finding is that by spending an hour or two on Darwin a day looking at what is happening with immigration through a series of filters that allow me to inspect various parts, I can begin to see the patterns.”

This is content curation in action and we were glad to be part of it.

Looking further at curation from a user’s perspective, Aaron Kahlow writes about the information curation potential of social media in his post, 2010: Social Media Removes the Dam of Gutenberg-Google. Aaron comments that social media can help break this new dam. Now we can “get good information through tweets of those we follow, Facebook Sharing, and from others within our networks who are usually connected online. We have a new discovery outlet and a new way to find stories, whether mainstream or from an unknown blogger. We find things based on recommendations of trusted colleagues, friends, etc.”  This is how I found Aaron’s post.

Peter Cashmore raises a similar point in his predictions for 2010 than I commented on earlier (see Reflecting on Peter Cashmore's Web Trends to Watch in 2010). Peter wrote that, “The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint… In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter… Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption.”  I certainly agree here and Twitter has served this role for me.  Much of what I write about on my blogs comes from my Twitter friends, including the link to Peter Cashmore’s predictions, as well as the Economist article that started this discussion.

 

 

Comments

[PerfectSearchIT]

Its true that content curators are a valuable asset in today's information glutted world. However, those curators should be people, as opposed to algorithms. I watched Eli Pariser's TED presentation on the "filter bubble" and he talks about how search engines and other online portals are filtering out information based on the information you seem to favor most. The problem with this level of customization doesn't take into account the multifaceted character of information consumption. Sure one might spend a lot of time looking at fashion or celeb gossip news, but if this is all the algorithms take into account, we miss out on the more important and less fluffy news.

[bill Ives]

I agree with you point curators should be people, as opposed to algorithms. This is why we focus at Darwin on content visualizations that make it easier and more efficient for people to do the curation and find the less fluffy news. Thanks.