The Future of News Is Curation
Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and their counterparts are increasingly the way young adults today are getting their news and information. Yet every day users send 300 billion emails (around 90% are spam, however), 140 million tweets, share 1 billion pieces of content on Facebook (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc) and upload 50,000 hours of video to YouTube. How to make sense of all this? News curation. And tools, such as Storify can help.
"We no longer search for news, the news finds us"
No matter where one lives or travels, the amount of information that comes to us through our mobile phones or the Internet -- via text message, on Facebook, Twitter, chat, Skype IM, QQ, email, etc. -- is overwhelming; we are inundated 24/7.
As a result, young adults are increasingly reporting that they rarely go prospecting for "hard" news at mainstream or legacy news sites. They inhale, almost unconsciously, the news that is served up on the sidebar of their email account, that is on friends" Facebook walls, that comes through on Twitter.
Apple's Apps just hit 15bn downloads Average of 75 for every iPhone, iPod touch and iPad @mediaguardian http://gu.com/p/3vd6y/twBut as news comes in a flood of information, with worldwide events AND friends' everyday thoughts AND entertainment all mixed together, it can be challenging for individuals to make sense of it all.
Hence there is now a need for applications for individuals to organize, prioritize and contextualize what information they are receiving on all the platforms available.
And there is a need for journalists to help them.- Mindy McAdams, a professor at the University of Florida, lists seven core elements of journalistic curation:
1. Selecting the best representatives of content/information
2. Culling what's not needed
3. Providing context for what's included
4. Arranging the individual elements
5. Organizing the whole
6. Providing expertise
7. Keeping the site updated, as needed.
(see her blog post, below, for details). - Teaching Online Journalism » ‘Curation,’ and journalists as curatorsMindy McAdams has been teaching about online journalism since 1999. She has conducted newsroom training in several countries. This is her blog about the evolution of newswork.
- News Curation Needed for Feature as well as Crisis Stories
Whether journalists are covering on-going issues or breaking news, news curation is needed to make sense of what's out there. What are other competitive news outlets doing on a story? How can other voices be brought to one's own audience -- without a huge investment of time and resources?
Knowing how to curate the news and and which new tools to use will help. - Ushahidi, for example, is by now a tested platform for crisis-mapping, but recently it is creating a kind of real-time curation system.
See the 26-minute video interview (below) with Patrick Meier who used Ushahidi to help people and organizations figure out where to send resources in Haiti and to help create a real-time curated news platform - The Storify demo (below) is a minute-long video overview of how Storify works.
- PBS's media blog, MediaShift (below), discusses Storify and contextualizes it with the trend towards curation:
"Curation is a way for journalists and bloggers to help the public make sense of the overwhelming amount of information out there by carefully selecting the interesting bits and pieces and by providing context. In this new information environment, the thinking goes, we need fellow humans to make sense and filter for us." 
MediaShift . How Storify Helps Integrate Social Streams Into Articles | PBSby Roland Legrand, December 3, 2010 Tagged: blogs, curation, facebook, flickr, seesmic, storify, story-telling, twitter, youtube Curation seems to be the big buzz word in journalism and online content these days. It's also an area that's generating a lot of product innovations. New services such as Keepstream, Storify, Storyful and Qrait are jumping into the space, aiming to offer new tools to help people curate web and social media content. Curation is a way for journalists and bloggers to ...- Storyful is another "Storify"-like tool, one that is especially of interest to journalists.
As the site itself notes (below):
"Storyful was founded by journalists who wanted to separate the news from the noise of the real-time web. We set out to discover the smartest conversations about world events and raise up the authentic voices on the big stories.... Sometimes our sources are local journalists, amateur photographers, or filmmakers. But often the people with the best view of the action are citizens in the right place at the right time." 
storyfulGot a story to share? Click here to use our storytelling app. Build a story using tweets, videos and images. Storyful uses the power of social networks to create an authentic, cooperative and socially useful journalism. President Obama defends Libya action Mother of Eman Al-Obeidi speaks out Mohammad Bouazizi remembered More... World leaders meet over Libya's future The campaign for truth about Eman Al-Obeidi Ouattara forces make gains in Ivory Coast Mass pro-Assad demonstrations in Syria So...- Curation tools can help individuals cope with social media.
Several of the most popular curation platforms and applications are those that aggregate -- and try to make sense of -- particular social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. - The Tweeted Times (below), for example, aggregates news in one's Twitter account and ranks the tweets by popularity among those who are "followed." It can also create theme-based web "newspapers" based on streams produced by Twitter Lists or Twitter search. The "paper" that is created is "rebuilt" hourly.
Paper.li (below), by contrast, creates a web page around one's own Twitter and Facebook accounts, creating a newspaper-like site, updated daily, focused on someone who is "followed," or on a "hashtag" or a list.
paper.li – read Twitter and Facebook as a daily newspaperA newspaper built from all the articles, blog posts, videos and photos shared on Twitter or Facebook.- Qrait is another curation platform that combines automatic
real-time filtering with curation. It is embeddable on other websites. 
QraitQrait is a real-time curation platform. There's lots you can do with it. Fundamentally, you can bring bits of information from all over the Internet on to one page. Here's some examples: You're covering an event and want to collect together what people tweet while they're there. You're doing some research and want to collect together all your links, photos, and resources. You're having a family event and everyone has posted photos all over the Internet afterwards and you want to put them all...- And then there's LinkedIn Today (below), which launched in March 2011. As it says: LinkedIn Today "delivers the day"s top news, tailored to you based on what your connections and industry peers are reading and sharing."
As e-consultancy.com notes: "To surface news that's most relevant, LinkedIn is taking a three-layered approach. It can personalize news based on what an individual's connections are sharing, what's being shared by folks in the same industry, and what's popular in other industries." 
Introducing LinkedIn TodayDiscover what the world's professionals are reading and sharing right now.
