Curator

This summer, I did several posts about the shift that I believe needs to take place in traditional publishing workflows in order to adapt to the new web environment and stake out a strong position serving online communities. At the core of this shift is the concept of Sharing, distinct from the traditional linear publishing workflow. At the core of Sharing, I postulated, is the activity of Curating content. As active experts in a category, our most valuable activity can be sifting through and dynamically organizing the content created in our market space.

In eMedia Vitals. consultant Mark Danziger marks curating as one of two critical skills for the new era of media.

• Leading conversations will be the first skill, and it starts with the ability to tell a story without monopolizing the conversation – by including the knowledge and viewpoints of others who have something to contribute, and by respectfully dealing with those who are not as knowledgeable and leading them toward knowledge with a chain of facts and logic.
• Curating will be the next skill, because it implies the ability to find stories told by others and bringing them forward to a broader audience. Remember the “It’s not news because it’s not in the Times” attitude? That is changing, because there is a lot of news out there and no news organization – even in the heyday of news organizations – can afford the staff to cover all of it.

Mindy McAdams, an online journalism professor at the University of Florida, has done some work to more precisely define the nature and benefit of the curation model.

In an age where anyone can be a publisher, it is now up to the editor to curate the best of the massive amounts of content now available in a way that is easily digestible. The role of the journalist is much like a museum curator whittling down, say, 19th century Neo-Classicism, into a single, walkable hallway.

“Aggregation is just bringing stuff together, just collecting stuff and laying it out there. We used to do that more in the old days,” says McAdams.

Scientists are in the midst of an ongoing debate about the relative value of openness and collaboration in their profession. The activity of science publishing has been a de facto authority-creation machine, with editorial boards doing peer reviews on science papers that were being considered for publication in journals. The act of publishing in the journals — which were supported by high-priced subscriptions — was critical to the career trajectory, and ultimate economic value, of a scientist.

As communities expand on the web, and collaborative and networking tools are enhanced, many scientists are calling for an open source model of research, where papers would be shared and collaborated on in wiki-type environments.

One proponent of the open approach to science research is Abhishek Tiwari, who writes the science blog FishEye Perspective.

Tiwari is also a gifted designer of information graphics. His graphic above is one of the clearest examples I have seen of demonstrating the process of group curation.

In essence, the filtering occurs as the community of trust narrows. The opportunity for editors is to put themselves in the midst of the content sharing that is going on in their market, and to leverage the power of trusted connections in order to diminish the sheer work of defining which information elements should be included in the curated collection.

The biggest challenge that I have seen, as we’ve introduced the concepts of Sharing and Curating to our content teams, is changing the orientation of information and editorial authority. A traditional editor sees his or her role as creating original and authoritative work.

While there is still a clear position for that work, it needs to be augmented by the identification of other high quality work in the market. In fact, the balance should be between truly original work and curated work. In that model, the consumer of information will look at the brand as a critical hub in their knowledge experience.

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