Social Media: Curation For the 21st Century Journalist?

This blog is in response to Is Curation the Future of Journalism?, by Shari Weiss on Sharisax.com.

I feel like the premise of this argument is flawed from the start with a title asking if curation is the future of journalism. Without reporters, columnists, and bloggers, there would be no content for an editor to aggregate. Perhaps a more precise title would be “Is Curation IN the Future of Journalism?” It seems that if information continues to proliferate at its current momentum, there will be an ever-increasing need for someone to gather all the scattered media into organized chunks for easier consumption (i.e. Drudge Report/Huffington Post).

With that said, I think it’s fun to play around with new and juxtaposing ideas to better understand where journalism is headed. For the sake of the experiment, curating information from different sources into one concise location can definitely lead to a greater understanding of any subject. The internet is also making aggregation easier for non-journalists, especially when you factor in social media. Twitter, for example, is essentially the museum curator’s dream, with Tweetdeck serving as the Louvre of social media. Facebook is like the having a curator in the family; placing the home deep inside the art gallery, only instead of art we get a vast array of multimedia in the form of the “update.”

I think it would interesting to take a non-journalist’s Twitter or Facebook account and aggregate their entire tweet/update history into one publication. It could prove that curation can apply to social media in ways we haven’t seen before. I also wonder if a writer would use this method to write biographies. For example, if another Elizabeth Taylor biography ever comes out, will it include her Twitter voice? The process of organizing those Tweets I could see at true curation, because once these personal works have been “published,” they will be open for public “viewing.”