curation

Leave curation alone

Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

A nice quick hit from CJR‘s Steven Rosenbaum today in favor of curation, which has somehow become a bad word in journalistic circles — or at least a misunderstood one.

Information overload drives content consumers to look for human-filtered, journalist-vetted, intellectually-related material. This hunger for coherence isn’t unreasonable; it’s essential.

Even in the days before information overload, contextual links to other interesting sites and articles were the norm. Now it seems that unless it’s part of a “strategic partnership” or is otherwise monetized, stories on the web are less about helping the user by providing useful context. This concept, among others, is well explored by Anil Dash is his post “The Web We Lost“:

Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site, or to show a list of links which were driving inbound traffic to your site. Because Google hadn’t yet broadly introduced AdWords and AdSense, links weren’t about generating revenue, they were just a tool for expression or editorializing. The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.

As Dash points out, “This isn’t our web today.” I maintain that if startup founders and VCs funded solutions to the problems faced by media, instead of the latest location-based social check-in app or redundant e-commerce site, we could find solutions to help rebuild the industry.

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Digital journalism quote roundup

Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

From Madrid, the Paley Center’s international council of media executives edition…

Google’s head of news products and Google+ programming, Richard Gingras, on using data for good:

“This is a renaissance of media and journalism…computational journalism can amount to the reinvention of the reporter’s notebook.”

Facebook’s journalism manager, Vadim Lavrusik, on the value of context in content:

“People want analysis from journalists. [FB] posts with journalists’ analysis receive 20 percent more referral clicks.”

“Media companies have approached it from ‘we need to chase more eyeballs, we need to create more content.’ So journalists who created a few articles in one week are now doing that in one day. But content isn’t scarce — it’s the contextualisation and making sense of that content that’s becoming scarce.”

FT.com Managing Director Rob Grimshaw on social media distribution:

“We have to engage with social media [but] not all distribution is good distribution.”

WSJ Europe deputy editor Neil McIntosh on editorial curation:

“Our readers need us to sift. Readers are often crying out for less, not more. They’re still looking for the nut graf and the sort of stories I was taught to bash out 20 years ago.”

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Nisenholtz on content and tech

Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Four important bits from this interview with former NYT digital guy Martin Nisenholtz.

“Human-mediated content is important to me because it both introduces a hierarchy of importance as well as a kind of serendipity.”

“If you’re in the business of creating news and information, you get these kind of blinders, where you think everybody is into it. But the fact is, when you go out and you talk to people who are not in the business, they’re leading their lives and doing what they do, and for them everything is just totally optional. … [99 percent of people] care about how what you do affects their lives. Unless you touch them, in a very meaningful way, you will fail. If you focus on the technology, or focus on what will be cool about it to a very small group of people, it’s just not going to work.”

“I really think it’s important for traditional news sources to embrace the technology side of our business — and really understand what the application side can do for content. Not just publishing content from one source and porting it into a bunch of templates.”

Here he’s referring to Twitter, but this is arguably the principle behind the rise of Facebook, too, and the stagnancy of Google Plus:

“If there are no other people on the network, it’s going to be pretty useless. But the more people that join the network, the richer it gets.”

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Blogging and journalism

Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Smart thoughts from GigaOM as the HuffPost wins a Pulitzer and the NYT launches another stand-alone blog:

“The question ‘are blogs journalism?’ — or similar questions such as ‘Is Twitter journalism?’ — make no sense any more, if they ever did. Are telephones journalism? Are pencils and pens journalism? No. They are just tools. A blog is also just a tool, one which can be used for journalism and for many other things as well.”

I mostly agree, but that being said, I think there is a big difference between original reporting and aggregation, between thinking and curating. The tools of blogging have made the latter items much easier to do.

One challenge for so-called old media in adapting to the new world order is that the audience still has an expectation from them of quality original reporting, and it’s difficult if not impossible to fund news analysis, foreign bureaus, unions, reporters on assignment, long-form journalism, spotless editing (etc.) and still make payroll, while your upstart competitors do not bear the burden but often do reap the rewards of these expenditures.

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Personalization by way of automation

Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Interesting peek at what happens when personalization by way of automation and algorithms takes a dark turn.

“Unlike tabloid television, algorithmic personalization does not announce that it’s pandering to base interests. When sensationalized reports about violence against children are on TV, I can change the channel — an act that is harder to do on the Internet when seemingly ‘neutral’ spaces, like Yahoo’s homepage, leave no tell-tale trace of manipulation.  You can’t change the channel when you don’t know you’re watching the program.”

Another argument in favor of the human curator (read: editor) as we stumble through sorting out what can be programmed, what should never be, and where the middle ground is.

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Swing back to editorial curation?

Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Perhaps the editor part is more wishful thinking than reality — there is certainly something to be said for humans make better automations in the future, too — but nonetheless I like the boldness of the prediction:

“But while algorithms once threatened to replace gatekeepers, online media will see a move back to the future: professional, human filters (the artists formerly known as editors) will play an integral role in the next web after all.”

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