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:- Reporters -- who go out and do first person reporting -- creating original stories, not just reposting rewritten wire copy.
- Columnists -- who "start conversations and give stories another perspective."
- Curators -- who "'cover' the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible."
Unfortunately, for the most part, newspapers seem to look down on "curating" as if it's some sort of lesser form of journalism, and this is a sticking point that they're going to need to get past if they want to understand how people engage with the news today. These days, everyone is a curator of the news in some fashion: they share news, comment on it, post about it, etc. But they also look to the "pros" to add more value to it as well. But if the traditional press looks down on this function, they won't do a particularly good job of it. It's sometimes tough for a press who used to want itself to be "the final word" on every story to admit that others may have reported it better/faster, as well as the fact that sometimes it's better to involve the community, rather than treating the community as riffraff waiting for the word from the god-like journalists.
If a newsroom were set up with a focus on those three roles (I would add editors as well...), with the understanding that they work together as a team to both bring the most information and community to a particular story, I doubt we'd see newspapers struggling as much as they are today.
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Filed Under: curation, journalism, links, newspapers, reporting
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Hell yes
"(I would add editors as well...)"
Editors are curators.
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Re: Hell yes
and from an SEO side, it is fucking awful to link out.
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Re: Re: Hell yes
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Reporters?
"Reporters" I've talked to, in Israel at least, are unashamedly honest about staging events and interviews to suit their political/personal agenda. In other words, they create "news" and then "report" it.
Reason no. 5091 that newspapers suck.
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2. The Columnists are basically professional bloggers. (Or is it the other way?)
It seems like techdirt is a possible business model for columnists.
3. The Curators seems like a business based on news aggregation. Like www.newsnow.co.uk
Which leaves us with the problem of finding a business model för 1. The Reporters.
1. And this is not a big problem since all you have to do is keep operating the same way as now. Small teams that generate a steady stream of original content of a certain type and of a specific area of interest. But instead of distributing this content to a portal they publish this stream directly and monetize it directly because of the traffic generated by The Curators and The Columnists.
It seems to me that the problem with news is the monolithic structure where you bundle Columnists, Reporters and Curators together with a TV-station or a large printing press.
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This is not possible. First annual CFW-(RTB) party "Trollin' Time"
Lake Powell! Houseboat! Tents!
Sound like fun? Well, here's the rules:
NO DRUGZ NO LAPTOPS OR INTERWEBS! NO TROLLING! NO MIKE MASNICK: HE'S NOT INVITED, BUT HIS DOG WILL BE. Just a big ass camp fire, a "Water Sled", red meat, and Google Burgers and Google Cola (which Anti-Mike tells me is "Scotch on the rocks")
Votes thus far:
"Next Week" 10
June: 14
July: 28
August: 8
Sepember: 3
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Re: This is possible. First annual CFW-(RTB) party "Trollin' Time"
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Re: Re: This is possible. First annual CFW-(RTB) party "Trollin' Time"
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Re: This is not possible. First annual CFW-(RTB) party "TrollinTime"
Is it an inside joke of some sort?
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Re: Re: This is possible. First annual CFW-(RTB) party "TrollinTime"
Now, if there is some recent indifference to assembling in a recreational activity, what federal licenses do we need to acquire?
As Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar can probably tell, Lake Powell is at a 20% capacity of where it was in 1999 when then President GW Bush mandated that the Bureau of Reclamation drain Lake Powell.
This was lost energy from the decision to drain Lake Powell by a GW Bush decision. Today the only direction is to increase secondary sources of power such as Nuclear or otherwise.
I'm going to troll there, even if you decide not to. I'm also going to have a few groups play some amazing music in one of the most amazing (acoustically speaking) amphitheaters there. But you have to get there by boat.
Good luck with whatever they've tasked you with. Have a great weekend.
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curation, does that mean eliminate the misinformation
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Re: curation, does that mean eliminate the misinformation
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then this problem goes away for good
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Ask Drudge
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Re: Ask Drudge
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http://blog.jeffreymcmanus.com/1205/decomposing-the-news-organization/
What's being referred to here as the "curator" has traditionally been the role of an editor. (It is a fallacy that most people who work in a newsroom and have the word "editor" in their job title spend most of their time editing copy.)
I'm not a fan of the term "curator" since it makes the news seem as though it belongs in a museum.
Lots of news organizations (in particular, the larger, magazine-ish ones) make a distinction between the role of news reporter and news writer.
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Editor or Curator?
TrackerNews' beat covers health issues ("one health"), humanitarian work and technology relevant to both both. It is a little unusual in that stories are not organized by category, but grouped for contextual relevance (breaking news, research papers, blog posts, websites, book reviews, e-books - print, audio, video). Eventually, everything ends up in a searchable database. There is actually quite a bit more going on both on the site and behind the scenes. Here is a little slide show that will give you better of the scope of content: http://tinyurl.com/5zycet
This is very much a small, quirky, experiment-in-progress, but it has been a fascinating challenge to tell stories in a kind of haiku of links. There is something liberating about tapping one-off, obscure and/or older stories that can bring a deeper understanding of breaking news.
http://www.TrackerNews.net
http://trackerblog.TrackerNews.net
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You say curator, I say copy editor
Curators, in this context, classify, verify and refine stories - no different to the copy editing process. Sub-editors make stories readable and give them a hierarchy by their position on a page. They even "link" different stories, both by page position and refers.
The mental processes involved in this are readily applicable to the web and carry the added bonus that your website keeps some of the tone, quality control and institutional memory of your printed publication.
Subs have always practised "link journalism" and have always made the news "more accessible". They represented what used to be known as the readers, but we now call the community.
The reason so few newspapers retrain their subs as 'curators' is they are expensive. Only when newspaper managements wake up to the value of "curation" by their editing staffs will that situation change.
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kasyno
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Curation is the research arm of Journalism
Powerful tools for news curation are excellent research grounds for journalist. Curation should make the whole porcess of story writing easier . Here is an example of how it can work - http://www.optimalaccess.com/blog/curation-and-journalism
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