News curation is an increasingly important and widespread practice, and curation of some form or another plays a large part in the news stories that the majority of people read. But what is it, how is it practiced, and how can you get involved? (hint: you may already be doing it!)
News curation really isn’t that different from any other kind of curation. A curator at a museum is responsible for helping the museum to collect together then most important artifacts and then deciding which pieces the museum should exhibit at any time and how they should be shown to the public. A news curator will do the same thing for current affairs stories.
This is really the extension of what was once the job of an editor, but rather than looking simply at the stories presented by a small collection of journalists, curation means that you are looking at a very wide range of stories from across the internet and other sources, including social media posts on websites such as twitter or Facebook, blog posts on small and obscure blogs, and other websites.
This can often be done by the editorial team of a news publication. There is so much information out there in today’s world that it is often more effective to research information from obscure sources rather than going out to investigate and report the story yourself.
But it is also something that most people are involved in themselves in some way. When you share a story with friends through social media, or even when you tell someone about something you hear over a meal or a drink, you are effectively taking our place as part of the network of curators through which that person receives their information about what is happening in the world.
If you would like to then there are various tools out there that can help you to take this to the next level. Sites like Paper.li will help you to create your own daily newspaper style page, with all of the headlines taken from sources you provide. These can be RSS feeds for websites, or they can simply be the tweets sent out by your friends. Genio makes it even easier – automatically tracking the sites you visit and creating a frequently updated digest of the latest posts from your favourite websites.
So whether you realise it or not, the news you read has probably been through some form of curation, and there is a good chance that you yourself are part of that process for others.
