"Curation" feels a lot like reporting

Before the Internet, information flowed by word of mouth, through phone calls and memos, in books and by telegraph, in closing arguments and on TV. The job of a reporter was to sift through the information being generated by people with the power to affect other people's lives and to distill it into stories that explained what people were doing and why it mattered. Obviously, there are other types of reporting - travel, sports, etc., that are less concerned with the halls of power, but the idea of distilling information remains the same: a tour of Tuscany in 5,000 words or a recap of last night's double-header baseball game.

Even as reporters distilled the information they got from their notes, editors - especially crabby ones - worked to distill it further, whether through better story organization or by cutting extraneous information that didn't serve the narrative (or fit the page). Editors also curated the pages of their publications or contents of broadcasts by deciding which news mattered, which fit that day, what was the story to play first and which one needed to be held for more reporting.

Which is why I don't agree with the statement in a recent Newspaper Death Watch post about the revolution that is curation. Here's what Paul Gillin writes:

All of a sudden, “curation” is one of the hottest words in the Web 2.0 world. That’s because it’s an idea that addresses a problem humans have never confronted before: too much information. In the process, it’s creating some compelling new ways to derive value from content.

 Never confronted? The basic function of the brain is to curate information to make sense of what's going on around us. It's an idea that we've confronted from the start, although the Internet does demand that we develop new methods for curating information to ensure the important stuff isn't lost in a sea of inanity. Indeed, good curation by good curators (good reporting?) might find stories we'd never be exposed to had the Internet not offered us the glimpse.

Gillin's post goes on to talk about a search tool he's invested in that is supposed to make online curating easier.

Four in the morning

1. Ezra Klein consider the success of NPR and the Economist. WaPo

2. Tribune Co. takes a step closer to finishing bankruptcy proceedings. Chi Trib

3. Will the iPad deliver another blow to journalistic standards? Newspaper Death Watch

4. Over at Bitter Lemons, there's a lot of chattering/rationalizing/explaining/parsing going on about getting a story completely wrong. fishbowlLA and Bitter Lemons

Four Friday

1. World's oldest Sunday paper considers closing. Newspaper Death Watch

2. Mark Halperin at Time magazine doesn't like town hall mobsters (but he still likes Drudge). TIME

3. Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor, has some thoughts on health care reform: Beware the "death panel." Facebook

4. Errol Morris looks at the lies about lying. Part 1 and Part 2

Four at night

1. Peter Y. Sussman at Huffington Post calls for a little perspective when it comes to the citizen-journalism project:

By all means, let's keep the citizens in citizen journalism. Let any interested reader find the raw data from hundreds of localities if they wish. But the measure of our success should be the perspective and understanding we provided for our readers, not how much data was accumulated by how many people or how much of it reverberated elsewhere in the national news echo chamber.

Huffington Post

2. Ken Doctor at Content Bridges considers the algorithms of the new Google News:

As print shrinks, Google will replace its daily functionality, its daily utility -- and it's been on that road for awhile -- with Google News, v2. It sounds like Google News, v1 meets Google IG meets AdWords for news, a new algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves. Importantly ... Google is recognizing how fundamentally lazy we all are. In effect, we're taken to be the corpulent creatures in Wall E. Google seems to be saying: you don't have to do anything, we'll be your new paperboy.

Content Bridges

3. Jason Pontin at Technology Review proposes ways to save print journalism - starting with an assessment of print journalism's true value:

The comparative advantage of mainstream media is not the ownership of presses, but the collaboration of professionals. The creation of good journalism is a tremendously laborious process, requiring an infrastructure more expensive than any press. The illustration and design of stories has an infrastructure, too. Developing an audience that will attract particular advertisers requires another infrastructure. Selling advertising requires yet another. These structures, which allow publications to reach large, coherent audiences, can exist only within complex organizations, mostly businesses.

Technology Review via Newspaper Death Watch

4. Rob Fishman at Huffington Post reports on the words war between David Carr of the New York Times and Michael Wolff of Newser, and analyzes where they're getting their ammunition:

It's hip for bloggers to bite the hand that feeds them, and Wolff's got some oral fixation. It's not good enough for him to kick the Boston Globe or Seattle Post-Intelligencer while they're down; he needs to cite their own articles while he's doing it. We all have a personal stake in The New York Times, but for Wolff it's more than that, it's his bread and butter. Without the news, he's just an -er.

Huffington Post