Mandy Jenkins and I are making plans to hire and launch a curation team for Digital First Media.
If you wonder what a curation team is, don’t bother to apply. If you wonder what a curation team could be, and have some ideas, we want to hear from you.
Mandy, who will supervise the curation team, has a draft of a job description that will be included with the official job postings for a curation team leader and two curation editors. But we want people in these positions who will be finding the right directions for their jobs, not following our direction.
So here’s an invitation to journalists interested in curating for Digital First (or those interested in contributing to a broader conversation about curation): Tell us how you think a national journalism curation team should work:
- How should we provide curation around big national stories, where primary coverage will be handled either by our staffs or by our content partners?
- How should we curate the social conversation around the day’s big “talker” stories?
- How should we help local newsrooms in their curation efforts (without becoming a curation “silo,” taking on responsibilities that should stay in the local newsrooms)?
- What curation tools should we use?
- What kind of content should we curate?
- How should we evaluate, verify and attribute content we curate?
We invite you to join the conversation, whether you’re interested in a job with us, whether you’re considering curation needs for your own news operation or whether you just want to contribute to the discussion. You can join in the comments on my blog or on Mandy’s related blog post. Or you can use this form to submit confidential responses. Or tweet using #DFMcuration. Update: If you’d like to reply on your own blog, we’d appreciate that, too. Please share the link in the comments here or through the #DFMcuration hashtag or by email.
A few details that may be helpful: The curation team will be part of Project Thunderdome, which will handle national content for the 75 daily newspapers and their websites of Digital First Media (scattered across 18 states across the country), as well as some niche content that may be used by the sites of our weekly papers.
Update: Someone asked on Facebook where the team would be located geographically and in the organization structure: My reply: “The team will curate content for all DFM newsrooms around the country. We expect that someone will be based in our New York newsroom and others will be based in other time zones, either in other DFM newsrooms or in their homes. We’re flexible about geographic location. In the org structure, the curation team is part of the engagement team that I lead.”
We look forward to reading your thoughts on curation.
Some links that might help in your consideration:
Aggregation guidelines: Link, attribute, add value
Engagement, curation, content, branding: buzzwords, yes, but also accurate
Tips on curating the community conversation
This video will help you understand Digital First and why you might want to work with us:
Here are five quick and likely totally unoriginal ideas from me on curation:
1) Don’t wait until news happens to load up: Publications should identify key curation targets and be ready to curate from them at a moment’s notice. (sources that have been proven to provide reliable information in the past, such as local bloggers, VIP Twitter accounts, other regional pubs and reporters, etc.). Make unfamiliar sources have to “earn” their way in on issues.
2) Make following the curated content easy, but not annoying. For example: Storify. Great tool, but it can be annoying when improperly embedded into story content. Simply put: If a practice of displaying curated content even slightly annoys someone experienced in using the tools, it’s probably going to be somewhere between 10 and 372 times worse for readers unfamiliar with it.
3) How can a curation team help local newsrooms with curation? The simplest explanation: TRAIN, TRAIN, TRAIN. Nothing worse than a corporate operation providing minimal guidance with unfamiliar tools, since reporters can be such creatures of habit. That’s a setup doomed for failure. Be prepared to send trainers to the newsrooms, make sure they’re available for follow-up questions. Now that I’m in a position where I’m the guidance for social media for a fairly large educational institution, I know even more than I did before how critical it is for people to have that resource on hand.
4) Handle national stories with an eye on localization. How are people in your communities responding to national events? Try to find connections. It’s always the issue for localization of national stories: How does this event impact the lives of people here in our community.
5) Well, I really don’t have a #5 at the moment, but five is a much better number to have for a list than four.
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Context, context, context, context, repercussions, deeper information, and did I mention context?
One of the reasons I dropped the daily print edition was that I could no longer count on the WaPo to provide me with a view of events that went back more than 72 hours. Politics were the worst but plenty of other stories had the same problem.
A story on crime on the Metro made a lot out of a 30% rise in reported incidents but left me without any idea of the real meaning of that. Did we go from 10 events to 13 on a system that moved tens of thousands of people a day? Was the raise across every type of crime or were these possibly just an increase in reports because of new collection methods?
It may be asking a lot of a curation team to deal with stories lacking the WHY but I think that’s the biggest thing I miss when getting news via personal recommendation. The people sharing stories likely have their own agenda for doing so; I look to quality news organization to help me fit the story into the world and my life.
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[…] hesitate a little to dive into attempting an answer to the question from Steve Buttry and Mandy Jenkins, “How should a news curation team work?” As the comments on many of Steve’s […]
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One thing to consider: Predictive curation.* I noticed when I was retweeting a lot from trusted sources the night Joe Paterno was fired — curating, if you will — I was being added to a lot of Penn State-themed lists and followed by folks who wouldn’t normally follow me. Like they were betting: I predict this guy will be the first one to let me know when something big happens on the story. Identifying sources that will in the future be useful seems just as valuable a form of curation as assembling what’s already happened.
* I thought maybe I just coined “predictive curation,” but sadly I just Googled it and no such luck. Looks like it’s a real thing and was one of Amy Webb’s tech trends. Dang.
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I just graduated from college so I have a lot to learn but I thought it’d be fun to enter into this conversation…
1-) For big national stories, I think it’s important to curate the story from different sources to give your readers a different (yet wholesome) perspective. The worst thing anyone could do is just rely on one source for their information. I understand that competition among news organizations might be a big issue on this front but maybe this is one area where news organizations can play nice. Matthew Keys of Reuters does a wonderful job at this and he is kind of my go-to person on my Twitter feed. I learn a lot from his tweets and how he presents them.
2-) I think a good way to curate the social aspect is to present the story first (or links to a couple different versions of the story) and then follow it up with some of the best tweets and posts about that subject. A combination of regular joes and experts. This gives your reader a 360-degree angle on what is going on. Storify or Tumblr is probably the best for these type of “big talker” conversations. You could even possibly start with your own reporters giving their thoughts and intermingle them throughout the story. It’s also good to spark a conversation with your readers, ask them to at-reply you, comment, leave a video response and then go through those and summarize what your readers have to say.
3-) I think the best way to help newsrooms in their curation efforts without taking over is by offering a Livestream seminar or a video tutorial. You could also offer workshops and online Twitter chats or Google hangouts with interested newsrooms. Maybe even start with the basics of social media and how to use it and then work your way up on how to curate material.
4-) I think you should curate news that has been verified by a reputable source and avoid hearsay or anything that hasn’t been confirmed. Like I said earlier, curating multiple sources of a news story is helpful especially from different geographical areas and then curate the conversation as well. Share what people have to say, retweet it, share the status updates or Storify it.
5-) I evaluate and verify content by going to different news sources and I attribute the content by saying “Via MSNBC, MSNBC, FOX.” This is kind of the approach Breaking News does with their tweets when they curate. Sometimes waiting a few minutes for the story to be verified rather than immediately curating it helps. For example, when word first spread that Joe Paterno died and he wasn’t, had everybody avoided retweeting it and commenting on it for a few minutes, they would’ve realized that it was a factual error. Being first isn’t always good journalism, sometimes you have to step back and make sure before you share.
6-) You can capitalize on local stories that might have a national appeal by sharing the local story with your network of newspapers. A local source has a sort of ethos that you can’t always get through a news wire, I think people would trust it straight from the local journalist. Promote any content, videos, breaking news Twitpics, etc all across the board.
7-) I mainly curate using my Twitter but I’ve started dabbling with Storify and started (although haven’t kept up with as much) Tumblr. WordPress might also be great but Storify’s options allow you to easily export it to other sites, which I appreciate.
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[…] you don’t already know, Steve Buttry and Mandy Jenkins blogged on Wednesday about the creation of a curation team for Digital First […]
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[…] you don’t already know, Steve Buttry and Mandy Jenkins blogged on Wednesday about the creation of a curation team for Digital First […]
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Hi, Steve.
Interesting proposition you guys have here. My take: http://beyondtetris.com/2012/06/14/what-should-a-curation-team-do-a-response/.
Looking forward to much more conversation on this.
Cheers.
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Is curation success audience-dependent more than curator dependent?
Could Walter Cronkite appear out of nowhere today, go online, and helm his single-masted sailboat across a digital sea foaming with Drudge, HuffPo, CNN, Fox, Yahoo, Google, and ABCCBSNBC, arriving at some not-so-distant island port and stepping ashore declare with authority to the Facebook-size collection of acolytes afloat in an armada of dinghies that he had just gathered in the passage, ‘And that’s the way it is, Thursday, June 14, 2012?
OK. Could Walter Cronkite join CNN and sink Fox and Yahoo and Google as well as Huffpo and Drudge?
Perhaps the most useful curation would be democratically powered by digital analysis of what content is being imbibed by various subgroups of world society. Is an enhanced Google News curation enough?
That is, is more minds more better than more better minds?
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Here are a couple of links to blog posts contributing to news curation team discussion:
http://cynthiaparkhill.blogspot.com/2012/06/evaluation-role-is-natural-for-curation.html
http://cynthiaparkhill.blogspot.com/2012/06/useful-questions-for-information.html
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My thoughts! Let’s think a bit about how to better distinguish curation from aggregation. http://adamschweigert.com/towards-a-better-definition-of-curation-in-journalism/
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[…] develop. If you haven’t heard about the curation team yet, before continuing here, check out The Buttry Diary: How should a news curation team work? and Zombie Journalism: Exploring the Role of Curation and Curators in the […]
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[…] l’intervention de curateurs, Twitter vient-il concurrencer les médias ? – GigaOm ; Le groupe de presse Digital First assemble une équipe de curateurs – Steve […]
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The goal of curation is to provide access to news that readers would otherwise have to go look for themselves. A well-curated story tells the whole tale and leaves room to weave in how the story impacts people on the local level. Take, for example, the recent EU summit. This worldwide story of how the eurozone’s economic leaders would address the ongoing financial crisis became an even bigger story when Germany’s Angela Merkel softened her position and actual progress was made.
It is reasonable to think that the major pieces of this story would be be curated — perhaps the Reuters piece for an overview with analysis from a Tribune columnist and an alternate look from the New York Times. Then, the process of bringing it back to local begins with MSN Money’s story on how the stock market rallied on the news, drilling down to an original piece localized for each market about how the current financial troubles are impacting each paper’s coverage area. Back that with a mix of useful, curated and local content about how the fiscal conditions worldwide impact readers directly and you can create meaningful local discussions.
Not everyone sees how the crisis in Europe impacts, say, New Britain, CT, but a lot of people see how a down stock market impacts their 401K. Take a global issue and make it a local discussion across a variety of media platforms. Add in chats with local financial experts, Twitter hashtags on the local economy and live events like networking nights, financial talks and, where applicable, tying in local ethnic communities to how the crisis is impacting their homelands.
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[…] few weeks ago, Mandy Jenkins and Steve Buttry wrote posts asking the journalism community at large what they’d want to see a curation team […]
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Here’s my vision – someday, curators will enable others to “commit acts of journalism” http://www.danifankhauser.com/2012/07/11/we-need-a-news-curation-team-today-because-heres-what-will-happen-in-five-years/
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[…] I am delighted with our selections for this team and look forward to working with them as they explore and demonstrate what a news curation team should be. […]
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[…] How should a news curation team work? I am delighted with our selections for this team and look forward to working with them as they explore and demonstrate what a news curation team should be . […]
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[…] the interview in writing. When I was hiring community engagement staff for TBD and when we were hiring curators for Digital First Media, I asked candidates to tell me in their applications how they would do the job. If you’re […]
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