Daily Magazine

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)

Via Robin Good

Robin Good: I have just received an invitation to test the new content curation platform Zeen, and here I am with some early impressions on what I have seen.

 

Zeen is a content curation tool designed to create good-looking magazines on a specific topic or theme. Setup and configuration is very easy and straightforward and it allows you to connect your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.

 

Once you are in, you can immediately set up a Zeen magazine, by selecting a title, a description and a cover image. From there on you are free to use the integrated search feature to find web articles, news, images, video clips or tweets relevant to your magazine. You just start a search after having selected what kind of content you are looking for and Zeen presents you with a set of relevant results. One-click on any of them and they are inserted instantly in your magazine.

 

You can also create as many "tags" (Zeen calls them "labels") as you like and assign each content item to a specific label.

 

The final magazine issue offers an automatic visual table of contents, in which you can organize by dragging and dropping the order of your selected contents.

 

A Zeen magazine can be made of multiple issues, instead of being like Scoop.it, a continuously growing content holder. You select the content items and you produce an issue (which can be still edited after publication).

 

N.B.: There is no way to edit or modify the content picked and added to your magazine, including the use of images.

 

You can't create new content but only pick and organize existing resources.

 

Here is an example of a Zeen magazine: http://zeen.com/read/ODgO94/toc

and here is another one on barbeques: http://zeen.com/read/KuJoAW

 

 

More info: http://zeen.com/

 

Via Robin Good

Robin Good: Hard to believe but true: you can curate and publish while on the move by using one of the many mobile apps devoted specifically to news discovery and to publishing/distribution.

 

Francisco Rosales, the author behind SocialMouths, has prepared a valuable illustrated guide to finding 10 among the best mobile apps for news discovery and distribution.

 

Resourceful. 8/10

 

Full article: http://socialmouths.com/blog/2012/06/05/curate-content-from-your-smartphone/ ;

Via Robin Good