As we’ve discussed there is a huge need for curation in citizen journalism– especially as these new media for transmitting information (twitter/qik/youtube/flickr) get more crowded and chaotic. We need people who can manage/organize PEOPLE– as well as information.

GroundReport has been experimenting with this in a few ways– recruiting local reporters via twitter, putting out assignments based on geography/skill set, rewarding super users with special editor privileges– but there is a long way to go.

The purpose of the comunication needs to be defined. Otherwise how does one select and evaluate the “best reports and best reporters.”.

For example, if the purpose of the national media communication was the inform the electorate about the support each presidentail candidate was receiving at that point in time, they did an admirable job, if they were the report the positions that each candidate held and supported over a long period of time, they were not successful.

“Best” for journalism must also be evaluated in the quality reaction, not just in the quality input.

Tools like Daylife, Google News, and other comprehensive news search engines do not “curate” in the most important sense in that they have no “voice” and no rhetorical intent. They simply collect. They are libraries, not voices or guides — and that is their greatest weakness. While they supposedly serve “readers”, these voiceless collection sites are probably best used as research tools for curators, journalists and the occasional reader who wishes to “research” some issue.

In the future online world, we’ll see that attributes such as voice, quality and perspective are, in fact, the primary foundations of competition between alternative news sources. Conservatives will read one set of news, liberals another. Stock brokers will read one site, pharmaceutical executives another.
In the paper world business success required reducing costs via economies of scale and thus required “objective” reporting that would be “acceptable” to everyone in a geographic area. But, success in the online world will depend on the subjectivity that curation implies. Successful online news sources will be those that target market segments, not those that serve all segments. Consider: If Daylife and/or Google News contain *all* the news (including what’s on Huffington Post or Politico), then why do so many people actually go directly to the Huffington Post or Politico site? Clearly, it is the “curation” and unique voice provided by those sites that makes them competitive.

“All the news” is a commodity and thus will be provided “free” or close to free by whoever can scale the best. But, “Just the news you need or want” is a scarce resource — those who provide it, by having the best curators for their markets, will have pricing power and sustainable, differentiated, profitable businesses.

bob wyman

Almost a third of the participants are French journalists and others are not (academics, experts …), but all are bloggers. The principle of this project: sharing links selected by bloggers.

Readers are familiar with these bloggers because they know their blogs and have confidence in them. They can interact with them on their blogs.

The idea of this project is that the relationship between blogger and reader is more important than being a journalist or not.

The credibility of the journalist is no longer accepted without proof. The credibility of the blogger is verifiable by his blog. If the blogger is a journalist is even better.

If the blogger is credible for its posts, he is also credible to recommend links …

This is not exactly the same philosophy as that of publish2 … No?

Classification can be make-or-break…these days it’s often called tagging.

all people first against the Wall ere the Revolution come…

but seriously “curator” sounds such a bloodless title, the term puts me in the mind of white gloves and tweed jackets.

(in keeping with the class warfare theme) Studs Terkel was never a “curator”, Mencken may never have been attending cocktail fundraisers at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

As a function of assembling news, it may be an appropriate metaphor but ain’t it a bit twee?

Thanks for your ideas and for BuzzMachine.

What about news librarians for additional perspective? Web curation would be a natural fit for them.

John M.

Jeff has defined curation as “the need for editors to create order, to correct and vet,” and while that nicely distinguishes curation from reporting, it sounds a lot like plain old editing.

What McAdams emphasizes is that a curator’s job is as much about design and presentation as about selection and assembly.

The design of a news site is especially tricky under Web 2.0, since the interactive freedom offered by search often undercuts the curator’s guidance and expertise. Negotiating this trade-off, Tyndall Report, for example, emphasizes curation by limiting its videostream database to the network nightly newscasts while Daylife, by contrast, emphasizes collection by extending its content to an unfiltered universe.

In either instance, the curator’s design function can be found in the subtlety of the search that is offered. Does search filter for quality as well as subject matter? How sensitive are the tags? Using McAdams’ terms, in a web design sense, how are the results of search culled and contextualized? In a graphic design sense, how are they arranged and organized?