Content Curation World

If you are into content curation for the long run, do not make this mistake.

Nuno Figueroa, who shared, in an interesting and informative article on Business2Community, his deep frustration with content curation tools and with the incredible amount of work one has to do to find, vet, add value and share truly valuable content online, wrote:

"I still have to do all the searching for new and good content sources and filtering the content I get. Separating the crap from the awesome. All by myself. This is hard work and very time consuming".

But wait a minute! What you describe here is the key, absolute value a curator can provide: his time.

The more we try to bypass this in favour of tools that can automate this time-consuming and difficult work the more we give up the opportunity to truly add unique value to your curated content.

Not to say that a good curator should not have a great toolset to help him out.

But remember: There will never be any tool that can do better search than you (unless you know nothing about what you are curating). No tool that can tell whether an article is a retake of another one or a true original, or that can evaluate the insight and ideas a new perspective from a new author unknown author can bring.

This in my opinion is what a content curator does.

Would a painter or a sculptor want to automate or speed up parts of his artistic creation process?

Unless the artist goal was focused exclusively on quantity and he had no enjoyment in the creation process there would be no need or desire to speed up or automate the creation process as this is what the artist, by definition, has chosen to do.

Similarly the content curator is socially useful and provides value to other people by utilising his many skills and experiences to gather, find, collect, organise, add value and present information artifacts covering a specific topic, interest, issue or event. His realisation is in doing such things not in bypassing or speeding up these steps.

This is one of the consequences of selling content curation as a content marketing "device" that can save time and make you look good.
 

If you are after *volume* and *eyeballs* you will publish funny cats.

But volume and traffic will not command much more than increasingly slimming advertising budgets. And for how long more?

What we should be all after his instead learning and refining those curatorial skills that can help us provide the only thing our readers care about: having truly trusted guides that provide high-value information services for the specific interests they have.

Yes, a content curator will also use, test and experiment with many different tools to aid its ability to search, find, collect and organise information, but definitely not in order to save time but in order to enhance and expand his abilities to provide greater value through those activities.

What do you think?

Here's a refreshing look at the future of news that highlights the importance of going deeper into creating value for readers by providing more focus, relevance, context and opinion.

These are the characters that properly define what we now refer to as "curation" when it comes to content and news.

The following passages, extracted from the book, The News: A User's Manual, are by Alain de Botton, and have been excerpted from a lengthy article on The Week entitled "The Future of News".

"News organizations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years — and that it would hence often be wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences.

They [news organizations] are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject this minute than to wait for a more secure and comprehensive understanding somewhere down the line.

...

We need news organizations to help our curiosity by signaling how their stories fit into the larger themes on which a sincere capacity for interest depends.

To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to "put" it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already know how to care about.

A section of the human brain might be pictured as a library in which information is shelved under certain fundamental categories. Most of what we hear about day to day easily signals where in the stacks it should go and gets immediately and unconsciously filed.

... the stranger or the smaller stories become, the harder the shelving process grows. What we colloquially call "feeling bored" is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.

...We might need help in transporting such orphaned pieces of information to the stacks that would most appropriately reveal their logic.

...it is news organizations to take on some of this librarian's work. It is for them to give us a sense of the larger headings under which minor incidents belong."

The call for understanding how much greater value can be provided by curating news and information in depth, rather than by following the shallow, buzzy and viral path beaten by HuffPo, Buzzfeed and the rest of the gang, is clear.

But beyond context and depth, real value can only be added if we accept the fact that going beyond the classic "objective fact reporting", by adding opinion and bias in a transparent fashion, can actually provide greater value in many ways, as Alain de Botton clearly explains:

"Unfortunately for our levels of engagement, there is a prejudice at large within many news organizations that the most prestigious aspect of journalism is the dispassionate and neutral presentation of "facts."

...

The problem with facts is that there is nowadays no shortage of sound examples. The issue is not that we need more of them, but that we don't know what to do with the ones we have...

...But what do these things actually mean? How are they related to the central questions of political life? What can they help us to understand?

...The opposite of facts is bias. In serious journalistic quarters, bias has a very bad name. It is synonymous with malevolent agendas, lies, and authoritarian attempts to deny audiences the freedom to make up their own minds.

Yet we should perhaps be more generous toward bias.

In its pure form, a bias simply indicates a method of evaluating events that is guided by a coherent underlying thesis about human functioning and flourishing.

It is a pair of lenses that slide over reality and aim to bring it more clearly into focus.

Bias strives to explain what events mean and introduces a scale of values by which to judge ideas and events. It seems excessive to try to escape from bias per se; the task is rather to find ways to alight on its more reliable and fruitful examples. 

There are countless worthy lenses to slide between ourselves and the world." 

Overall, these ideas offer a truly refreshing look at the future of news and at the relevance that context and opinion could play in transforming this medium from a vehicle of mass distraction to one of focused learning and understanding for those interested. 

Must read. Rightful. Insightful. 9/10

Full article: http://theweek.com/article/index/256737/the-future-of-news 

Reading time: 10':20"