Can ‘Curation’ Save Media? — an article written by Steve Rosenbaum in The Business Insider asks.
The arguments he makes are a better-formulated version of what I was trying to say in a previous post where I said newspapers have to be gateways, instead of gatekeepers, for the news.
Rosenbaum writes:
The old model was “one to many” (NBC -> viewers). The new model is “one to a few” (YOU -> your friends and followers). That means there is an overwhelming explosion of content being created (Twitter feeds, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook updates) and most of it is interesting to a very small number of people. But, mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted, and made “brand safe” for advertisers.
Curation is the new role of media professionals.
Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and — most importantly – giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It’s what we always expected from our media, and now they’ve got the tools to do it better.
Yes, that’s right, the future of media is better, not worse. It’s more detailed, multi-faceted and nuanced. And, just more.
But can curation save media? I don’t know. It’s definitely a job made for editors. But we can’t only be linking to what others are producing. We still have to produce quality information ourselves.
