Daily Magazine

The social media desk at The New York Times expanded in 2013 with the addition of three editors and a broadening of our roles in the newsroom. Beyond editing Times social media accounts, our team devotes an increasing amount of labor to working with the paper’s editors and reporters to integrate reader engagement into our most important journalism. But with nearly 5 million more people following @nytimes in 2013, more and more consumers of The Times are finding their way to our journalism using our main presence on Twitter.

 

For that reason, we took stock of what worked and what didn’t on @nytimes. We examined some of 2013’s most successful tweets, measured in terms of clickthroughs and retweets, to see what connects with these readers and where our investment of editorial effort really paid off (the data comes from SocialFlow, whose system the Times uses to manage some of its major Twitter accounts). We also looked at some of our strategies and tactics to encourage a variety of types of reader engagement with our journalism using Twitter.

 

Here are some lessons we learned in 2013 from what we did on @nytimes and other institutional Twitter accounts....

Via Jeff Domansky, Deanna Dahlsad

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