This year, from January to the end of June, I spent six months in Oxford, at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The Thomson Reuters Foundation sponsored my fellowship and I had a great time with bright and clever people from all over the world. But of course, I also had to work (sometimes ). The result of my efforts is a paper on journalism and content curation, whose title is “Newsroom Curators and Independent Storytellers: Content curation as a new form of journalism“.

The underlying idea is that, without giving up their traditional skills, journalists are becoming more and more information “managers”.  They are behaving like human filters which due to the absence of boundaries (i.e. space limitations, like television’s airtime or newspapers’ pages) typical of the digital world, verify and add context to what user-generated content they think to be relevant, and feed it onto Web pages or mobile applications.

Thanks to the rise of new social media curation platforms, the same role can be played by independent professionals (whether journalists or amateurs), who are “independent storytellers”. They might be freelancers or amateurs, or they might be working for a news organization, although with such a level of independence and visibility to transform their job into a one-man-show.

My research shows that this increased participation has both its drawbacks and opportunities. For news organisations, one of the dangers is to assume that what you find and hear on social media is the real and only “voice of the crowd”, without taking the time to analyse in more depth other possible points of view. Resources are scarce and this could be a real temptation; but not everybody is on the Internet, especially in developing countries, and even if they are, it should not be taken for granted that they are willing to testify online what’s happening in their surroundings.

As for independent storytellers, they could play a double role in the future: supplement, replace or somehow integrate the coverage done by mainstream media; or just take advantage of the new possibilities offered by curation tools just to transform them into propagandistic platforms. To strike a balance, to make use of user-generated content without “being used” by it, it’s not an easy task.”

For a full introduction, check the RISJ’s website.

You may also read the whole paper below:

Newsroom Curators Independent Storytellers – Content Curation as a New Form of Journalism? by fedegue

Related articles

• Aggregation and curation in journalism (mindymcadams.com)
• Storify sold to Livefyre in a merging of social curation tools (niemanlab.org)
• New Journalism How to Use Social Media for Storytelling #SMWReporter #SMW13 #SMWBerlin (wiredprworks.com)