TAKEAWAY: It’s all about knowing what to serve on the plate of our hungry readers/users. Curators to the rescue.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/28/5352440/inside-app-aims-to-be-the-perfect-mobile-newspaper
Behold those curators.
The word is catchy, implies selectivity, customization, personalization and class.
And so, not only do we have storytellers (instead of journalists?), we now hire curators—-defined as those who select items for a museum, or who are guardians of such selections.
It was about time we welcome these curators into our mix, not that we did not have them before, just that we did not call them by such a name.
Good editors have always been curators and guardians.
I remember in my early years as a very young journalist at The Miami News, which was Miami’s afternoon newspaper, and how my mentor, Howard Kleinberg, would perform the duties of the perfect curator.
“For the lunchtime edition, we must select some good photos of what transpired in Miami during the morning,” he would say. “But for the late edition, when people are going home, we need to emphasize recaps of the day’s news and some good columns to entertain and to inform.”
That was curation all right.
Or, as Kleinberg would do, in his own visionary style, when there was a big game at Miami’s Orange Bowl stadium.
“Let’s do a full page graphic showing people best places to park if they are going to the game.”
This was Kleinberg at his best, doing service journalism curation.
Kleinberg, with whom I still stay in touch, was the ultimate curator, but he probably never even thought of the word as he toiled away day after day, making The News an afternoon newspaper before its time. Those of us lucky enough to be mentored by Kleinberg remember those lessons well.
Curation for the ages
Now curation is the key. We will have curators in chief, visual curators, in depth curators and lifestyle curators in our midst.
In the digital world, curation is the key.
Take for example, such new arrivals on the digital scene as Yahoo News Digest, Circa, and now Inside, which its creator, Jason Calacanis believes “has a mission of building the world’s best news product.”
That’s a tall order by any curating standards!
Calacanis describes Inside as a unit of content designed for the smartphone.
Enter the curators.
“We have curators, which are college-educated, English-speaking Americans go out, read the best journalism in the world, and we summarize it and categorize it,” Calacanis says.
We will keep an eye on this new entry into digital news disseminators.
We will also make sure to emphasize the importance of training to be curators when talking to our students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
This opens the job market for those who, as Kleinberg would say to anyone within view, “have a nose for news”. In today’s curating world, I would add “and a good instinct for that special story that may be needed at a specific time of the day.”
In today’s environment of curators, a nose for news is not enough, one must also have a sense for what people want at certain times of the day. The curated material we may crave upon rising may be very different from that which we wish to access while munching on a salad during lunch, or when going home in the evening.
The curators must be good judges of stories, and also specialists in the lifestyle choices and daily routines of those for whom their curated material is intended.
