Posts tagged curation

Today’s Digiday Buzzword Tracker looks at the evolution of the word “curation”. For example, in the 14th century “curate” referred to spiritual guidance.

With the rise of self publishing platforms, so too came a lot of thought about curation’s pros and cons. For example, as Digiday Points out, Jeff Jarvis’ 2009 post about the journalist as curator. Most important, since we live in and contribute to a curated digital world, we highly recommend reviewing Curator’s Code by Brain Pickings founder Maria Popova and designer Kelli Anderson.

The two created the site last winter and walk through issues of respect, attribution, the nuances between “via” and “hat tip” and even offer a browser bookmarklet that generates links and symbols to indicate to site visitors how and where you found your newly published piece of awesome.

As they write, “The internet is a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery. Acknowledging where information came from helps keep the rabbit hole open and makes the Web Wonderland better for all of us.”

Couldn’t agree more. — Michael

TEDx Poynter Livestream

The Poynter Institute is running a TEDx event today with a livestream available online. We missed the morning events but this afternoon’s run as follows:

Session 2: Curation

• 1:05 p.m. “In Praise of the Humble, Misunderstood Hashtag” — Sree Sreenivasan
• 1:30 p.m. “The Challenging Transition from Journalism to Entrepreneurship” — Burt Herman
• 1:55 p.m. “Real-time Curation in Storytelling” — Michelle Royal

Session 3: Engagement

• 2:30 p.m. “@TampaBayTraffic: Connecting a Community Around a Shared Complaint” — Meredyth Censullo
• 2:55 p.m. “Do I Really Need to Learn How to Program?” — Lisa Williams
• 3:20 p.m. “Addicted to the Like: Ratings and Readership are the Old Metrics” — Elissa Nauful

The livestream is here. If following on Twitter, use the #tedxpoynter hash tag.

The Ethics of Linking II: In Which We Weigh In on the Curator’s Code.

In a previous post, the Ethics of Linking, I discussed news organizations’ linking obligations. For example, when reporting a story, should organizations have to say who first broke the news? A hat tip is always polite, but don’t overwhelm your reader with links they don’t need to click-through.

The debate continues its way to the blogosphere and at SXSW Interactive festival, nestled itself upon the roundtables of curators and aggregators. David Carr reports on two new efforts to standardize digital content aggregation. The first, spearheaded by Simon Dumenco, along with reps from key digital publications, is a Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation. The second is Maria Popova and Kelli Anderson’s latest project: The Curator’s Code, which offers two unicode characters for attribution (ᔥ means “via”, ↬ means “hat tip”) that are easily pluggable in a post through a bookmarklet.

Yesterday, Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, argued that codifying “via” links is confusing and misguided. He writes:

That’s how I feel about links in general: the source author creates something worth linking to, and the rest of us can link as we see fit, regardless of how we found it. The proper place for ethics and codes is in ensuring that a reasonable number of people go to the source instead of just reading your rehash. (via Marco.org)

Marco thinks in-line links are sort of useless, because no one really clicks on them anyway. Agreed.

My personal take: Through my time at FJP and around tumblr, I’ve learned to credit a source with an in-line link if it’s not totally necessary to click on it and I’m definitely summarizing the key/relevant point in my post. After quotes or extended paraphrasing, I’ll stick in a via link. For thumbs-up to an organization or reporter that really deserves credit for starting up a conversation, I’ll stick in a hat tip. It would be great if symbols were standardized for these purposes, but at the moment, they do seem confusing and as much as I love bookmarklets, my collection is getting a little too big.

In the spirit of helping internet journalism toward a clear and healthy future, at the FJP, we’re all for transparent links, complete with the letters “via” or “h/t”.

Michael weighs in:

It’s not just a matter of giving transparent credit where credit is due. Transparent linking, and clearly spelling out to our readers where we’re getting our ideas from, is part of a larger effort to expose our audience to valuable primary sources that they may not know about and will hopefully begin to include in their future media diet.

To that I’ll add one thought. Credit and clarity aren’t simply the ingredients of good internet etiquette; rather, they are a means of adding value to our internet expeditions, and for journalism to continue to be a public service in the digital era, it might help to think of a blogger’s linking style as yet another tool that can reveal (or hide) much, and thus be harnessed for good communication.  - Jihii

Image: Screenshots from the FJP Tumblr

If you choose your own news, you’ll be less well read by Peter Preston

Digital news offers customers the choice of what they want to read. But print offers something extra: stories that people didn’t know they wanted to read until they had read them

I wanted to post this article because we talked a lot about this in Studio 20. My own thought on this is that if we made complicated issues easier to understand then people will want to read it.  As journalists, we need find ways to make direct links between the mortgage crisis and what it means for YOU the reader.  People want to read top news — digitally and through print.  More importantly, they want to read news that’s easy to understand. 

When I spoke to Tony Haile from Chartbeat-a live analytics service, he addressed the fear that Editors who take analytics seriously will end up doing a lot more stories on celebs and gossip and he’s found that the audience is smarter than that.  Sometimes a change in title or position of the post can change the click-through rates.  (This video will be up soon on the new FJP)

The solution is for us to not fear personalized curation of news but for us journalists to take advantage of the medium so that we can do our jobs better. 

- Chao Li @cli6cli6

What’s your take on personalizing the news? 

Via Poynter: 

NPR senior strategist and Twitter maven Andy Carvin tweeted an astounding 1,201 times this weekend, including 879 on Sunday, according to Twittercounter.com. The flurry came as he covered the escalating Libyan revolution. At the close of Sunday, Carvin noted he “wouldn’t be surprised if this is the most I’ve tweeted in a single day since Mubarak resigned. Around 900 tweets so far. Oy.” It is at least the most in the past six months, according to Twitter Counter.

Glad someone’s doing it but that’s insane.

Curated Social Media Comes Of Age During Oslo Attacks

Professionally edited new media feeds kept concerned citizens informed, without having to sift through an unfiltered global reaction.

for the whole article, please see FastCompany.com