Managing options

To choose which news story to curate and pass on to your readers, is not always something easy to do.

My personal suggestion is to look only for the most interesting and relevant stories for your audience while leaving out anything that is mildly interesting. I'd always go for quality over quantity and I would not discard little-read stories or dated ones, because of these two factors. Rather I'd select them on the basis of their immediate usefulness to my reader and not on the one of their freshness or recency.

Serena Matter, of the Canadian Public Relations Society, has just published a short article suggesting three key criteria to employ in selecting what news to curate each day. She writes:

"Finding content to share online can be a challenge, especially when your goal is to provide information of interest to your followers.

In many instances, it is easier to re-tweet something that appears in your newsfeed, even if it’s not that relevant to your industry, than to come up with new material.

However, this wastes a valuable opportunity to engage your online stakeholders. Rather than taking the easy way out, there are a few simple guidelines you can follow to ensure any content you share offers value. When creating or searching for material to share, keep this acronym in mind: C.I.A. (Current, Interesting, Applicable)."

But beware: "current" is a misleading variable, as "something" can be "current" depending on the specific context in which it is presented and it is not an absolute trait of a news story.

A story from two years ago can be made immediately current and relevant simply by relating and connecting it to other information which is directly impacting our present.

Good for beginners. 6/10

Full article: http://www.cprsvancouver.com/what-should-i-post-today-guide-content-curation

Current is important, but not the most. If anything is interesting and applicable and remains useful, it doesn't matther that was built up 3 years ago...