Content and Curation for Nonprofits

My Take:   I used to joke that content curators used to be called journalists.  But if nonprofits truly want to reap the benefits of content curation (increased staff expertise and reduced information overload) - not to mention the value of curation as part of your content strategy - than following the practices outlined in the article are very very very important.

Of course, the push back is "It takes so much time."    But by slowing down, reading and putting it into content will also make one more efficient because they are more informed.

Beth Kanter

http://www.bethkanter.org

Original Curation of this piece:

Robin Good: I agree and I have said it before: Curation has nothing to do with personal expression or sharing nor with collecting links, tweets or blog posts that you may find interesting.

Curation is all about "taking care" of something in the sense  of helping someone "else" be able to dive in and make sense of a specific topic, issue, event or news story. It is about collecting, but it is also about explaining, illustrating, bringing in different points of view and updating the view as it changes.

Adam Schweigert captures the essence of it elegantly: "...[curation] it almost certainly involves broader responsibility than just tracking a big story and putting together a Storify of how it unfolded.

It’s more than blogging a daily roundup of the stories our audience cares about but our publication is not going to do original reporting on.

It’s more than becoming the Twitter account that people look to because we’re not afraid to retweet our competitors if they have a story that matters to our followers before we can report it ourselves.

Naturally we should continue to do all of those things as well, but I would argue that it is important that would-be curators of news go at least one step further.

Part guide and collector, part interpreter, part researcher, part archivist, the curator of news does all of the above:

a) collects and organizes information,

b) places it in a broader context,

c) mines the archives to surface bits of historical information, advances our understanding of the story and the driving forces behind it and, perhaps most importantly,

d) takes care to ensure that a story is properly maintained and told in the best possible way for our audience to take it in.

...

Curation is not really about reducing costs and operating more efficiently (although aggregation certainly is).

Curation is about taking care to ensure that our audience has the best possible information, context and presentation for that information."

Rightful. 8/10

Full article: http://adamschweigert.com/towards-a-better-definition-of-curation-in-journalism/ 

(Image credit: heyjude.wordpress.com)