Are Editors Giving Way to "Curators"?

When you hear the word "curator", what do you think? Perhaps a museum. Something a bit dated, holding archives. Maybe the contents and their keepers may be somewhat musty. Important stuff, to be sure, is curated, but it's not stuff you're enthused about running to see.

So it's curious that curator term is now finding new life on the Web. Curator as in assembler of news, coordinator of blogs, rounder-up of diverse viewpoints and content types. You know, what we used to call: editor.

But editor now seems so MSM -- the mainstream media that to too many now seems like a museum, a living museum, but one living on borrowed time.

I first saw the "curator" terms on new aggregator site DayLife. Its mission: "The world we live in is a vast, colorful place, and 'Highlights' reflect some of the biggest stories happening. They are selected each day by a global team of Daylife curators." Now it appears to be spreading.

Digital media pundit John Blossom and I recently exchanged curatorial comments on his ContentBlogger site. After I complained about the curator label -- saying its preciousness gave me the shivers -- John responded with this:

I suspect that the "curator" meme is an effort to come up with a rationale for the role of mainstream news organizations as social media begins to take on a more primary role in breaking and aggregating news. Already there are many weblog-based portals that collect headlines and fair use snippets from sources around the Web. Mainstream news organizations fancy themselves as better editors of what is and isn't news than these outlets. In an abstract sense they may be right but "better is as better does" in the eyes of many audiences. Traditional news organizations will have to become far more source-agnostic to become truly superior news curators. In the meantime the webloggers are doing an increasingly professional job for highly focused audiences.

John is right-on in his observation.

Still, I think we just need editors to get better and quickly. News site editors need to understand how constricted is the world of the traditional wire services -- AP, Reuters, NYT , LAT-WP, McClatchy Tribune, Scripps Howard -- and see the wider world madly multiplying all around them. Blogs, podcasts, audio, video. Then, they need to bring us the best of it.

Maybe "editor" is too value-constricted by the old days. If we have to move on from it though, let's get get past the musty "curator". "Boss" seems to be a reborn term for being informally in-charge these days. Or if we want to stay classical, but add a sense of harmony, maybe maestro. For those wanting to informalize it: bandleader. Or the potentially popular: el hefe digital.

Whatever we do, let's not lose the sense -- only reinforced by the alacrity of the web -- that journalism is indeed that totally relevant, often-messy first draft of history. It's not something to be pampered and curated. And besides, it doesn't matter how many curators you have if we don't find new ways to pay the soon-to-be-starving artists who practice the craft.

Comments

[John Blossom]

Ken,

Thanks for continuing the dialog on this. In the broader picture I think that Robin Good's vision of "newsmasters" from three years go (his original post) is unfolding and is catching the news world flat-footed. Source-agnostic filtering of news is the major trend in news aggregation, though the tools to do so are still fairly primitive. Be it a weblog, social bookmarks, news filters like MySyndicaat, Yahoo! Pipes or more news-like sites like Huffington Post, all the world's an editor.

Obviously traditional editorial skills are still crucial for key news events, but when news is broken increasingly in more conversational channels it becomes less a matter of controlling the megaphone and more a matter of moderating a conversation that's going to proceed no matter what.

All the best,
John Blossom
President
Shore Communications Inc.
http://www.shore.com/