We’re spending a lot of time lately talking about curation. No one is better than Andy Carvin, who’s told us all about the Arab Spring from his home. This piece is aimed at higher ed, but it is a valuable read for journalists, journalism students and social media dabblers.
Amid the political upheaval in the Middle East over the past several weeks, a dependable source of information has been Andy Carvin (@acarvin), NPR’s senior social media strategist. But he’s not reporting out of Tripoli or Cairo. Rather, he’s tweeting from his Maryland home, often while his kids watch TV in the background and cats vie for attention at his feet.
Carvin, whom one Metafilter thread dubbed “Curator of the Revolution,” has been tweeting updates from sources who are on the ground in the various countries—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere—that have seen uprisings as of late. In doing so, he’s become something of a poster child for content curation.
The Atlantic hailed Carvin as an example of how curation is the new journalism. Carvin told the magazine, “Curation itself isn’t new; it’s just the way that some of us are doing it online that’s fairly new. The tools have evolved, but the goal of capturing a story and turning people’s attention to it isn’t.”
During the deadly April tornadoes in Alabama someone erroneously called me the Andy Carvin of the storm. That was too much flattery, but the effort and purpose were the same. Here’s an archive of I wrote during the twisters.
How does one calculate and measure all of the things we do online? This is an evolving science. It wasn’t long ago that we were quantifying what had happened on the site the day before or a few hours ago. Now the phrase you’ll need to know is big data …
The next wave of tools claim to use a crystal ball of website data and patterns to see the future. And they promise to help news publishers squeeze more money out of the content they already produce.
One of these is Visual Revenue, a product launched this year that gives an editor “a new best friend sitting across the table,” according to founder and CEO Dennis Mortensen.
“We created this model where I can take any piece of content created over the last day or two days … and model how well that’s going to perform in any given position … about 15 minutes into the future.” Mortensen said. “And since we know how well the future is going to play out, we can come up with a set of very specific recommendations about what to put where, for how long.”
[…]
Another new product is called JumpTime Traffic Valuator, founded by people with backgrounds at major media companies such as Yahoo and MTV. It focuses on the revenue potential of each page on a site, showing a publisher how much money each article and each piece of page real estate is generating.
And so on.
There’s going to be a great use of such predictive metrics. What will human hands be motivated by when influenced by this software? An algorithm that tells them how and what to publish? An algorithm that tells editors what will make money? These become thorny issues to contemplate in a new digital ethic.
Mobile ads may not be the hit marketers expected:
Only one in five mobile ad campaigns used targeting by location in the second quarter of this year, according to a report from the Millenial Media ad network.
Almost as many ad campaigns (19 percent) used demographic targeting (by age and gender of the user, for example). A smaller share (6 percent) used behavioral targeting. A majority (55 percent) were not targeted and simply sought to raise broad awareness of the advertiser — commonly thought of as “branding” campaigns.
On the consumer side, only 14 percent of mobile device users favor receiving promotions based on their current location, according to a survey of 2,000 American adults using cellphones by mobile marketing firm Upstream.
This doesn’t surprise me much. First, there are actually times when you don’t want text messages or push notifications. And there are moments when we are not actually staring into our phone. What’s more, according to my entirely unscientific study, none of my college students like the implications of mobile advertising. They find it a little icky. (Technical term.)
Pedagogy: Using a blog as an independent study. Great idea, and the execution of it should be rigorous.
And that leads us into the last few items, all of which work together, after a time.
When the news comes to you, as a journalist:
Does it matter where a story comes from, as long as it makes the news? Apparently it doesn’t matter at all, to many of the latest crop of journalism students who believe their smart phones hold the keys to truth.
[…]
Today’s journalism students are like no other, in that they were born with a smartphone in one hand and ear pods in the other. The world comes to them, not the other way around. I did not expect that this would have a profound effect on their approach to newsgathering — after all, writing the news is simply the act of telling a story objectively and very well — but it has.
[…]
At first I was horrified. Then I realized they never have known a time when information was not immediate and in their face, screaming for attention. When there is so much of it, a person begins to believe it’s real, no matter where it comes from. But that doesn’t make it accurate.
[…]
This is where I deliver the bad news: It doesn’t matter how fancy the video is, how glossy the pictures are, how compelling the mystery voices in the background may be. Be very, very careful. Step back and think about it. Your temptation is nothing new, I confess, it’s been mine, too.
I refer you back to the Carvin feature at the top of the post. How, though, does one be very, very careful? Being skeptical is a natural skill for some, but others have to learn.
Kansas State professor Michael Welsh, on critical thinking and going beyond, from knowledgeable to knowledge-able:
If you like that topic by Welsh run right out and search for more of his material. It is fascinating, direct and applicable material.
Quick hits: Understanding the psychology of Twitter, by way of infographic. How do you write about the death of an important man few have heard of? A rock ‘n’ roll obituary. Finding the emotional photograph. Local television is expanding once again. Though not to pre-cut levels.
