“Content curation is a the art of finding, verifying, collecting, organising, adding value and presenting existing content, resources, media or information on a specific topic, theme or issue for a specific audience or need,” – Robin Good
If the future of journalism is our hot topic, it cannot go un-discussed that the main element of journalism is news curation.
It’s a fast, frenzied and news-saturated world out there and it’s up to the journalists whether professionals or amateur to piece together a story from all the sources, text, pictures and videos.
This of course is something caused by technology (mobile phones, smart phones, the internet, social media, apps etc.) and the solution is also technology.
The technology available means that an event can be covered from every little corner of the world (with an internet connection) and therefore finding the relevant information can be tricky.
This finding and gathering of the news is what is called curation.
As discussed in our most recent blog post, an issue faced by most journalists who are curating content from the web is verifying the source. It is all too simple to find a story posted by someone on Twitter, run with it and tell the world, only to find out 5 hours later that it is in fact false. And on the web 5 hours is a very long time – a story can get to the other side of the world and back in mere seconds.
That is why some extra help can be needed in the form of curating services (not every tool offers verified sources).
Some of the best tools out there include:
- Scoop.it
- Storify
- Storyful
- Snip.it
- Bundlr
- Kurat
However, nobody needs to use all the tools, it’s about finding out which works best for you and choosing a couple as your favourites.
Content curation has even been known to ‘save journalism’, for example lots of ‘newsworthy’ stories come from places that reporters can’t get to, meaning curation of User-Generated-Content becomes THE most important part of journalism. Thanks to increased participation on social media and an increase in amateur journalists, there is more content than ever.
Despite the argument that content curation makes for a lazy journalist, the content curator is therefore, a person not to be taken lightly. The job is quite possibly THE most important. As Robin Good said, the journalist has to ‘add value’ and when curation is done well with added value it can assist in creating some excellent news articles.
During this ongoing project I have been using Storify to curate content for recent news articles such as Donald Trump’s distasteful comments and astronaut Tim Peake’s venture to the International Space Station.
I have learnt a great deal about the verification of sources (not something that Storify does by itself) and also about the ‘can of worms’ that curation must open to professional journalists. For example, in my most recent article I spoke about The Prince’s Trust 40th Anniversary programme that aired on ITV with Ant & Dec. This was not a story that needed verifying, however when trying to curate a story on one topic you are presented with stories on multiple topics, such as ‘Ant & Dec to share a Knighthood’ which of course turned out to not be true. You are also shown people tweeting on the topic of Prince William swearing, if Prince Charles should be King and if Ant & Dec should win the next National Television Award. With so many angles to choose, it’s up to you to be able to write a focused story using your news curation without going off topic. It is harder said than done and if you read my Storify’s you can see why!
Overall using Storify has been helpful to the project in understanding what makes up news and journalism. There is not just one thing, it’s a hoard of elements including curation, writing, tweeting, reporting etc. Storify is the curation part that makes finding news something great. It’s no longer a laborious task, but actually very intriguing and leads you down many different paths. Most of all it’s a very modern way of ‘doing’ journalism and one that will definitely grow in popularity as more people discover it’s uses. I certainly found my first experience using it as an enjoyable one.
I hope you decide news curation can be a useful tool for you as it has been for me. Make sure you test some out and hopefully you can improve your stories!
Journalizm Speak 