Mike Masnick at TechDirt links to an article from France (translated into English) that suggests an interesting new Internet model for newsroom journalism. It proposes splitting “journalism” into three categories: reporters, columnists, and “curators”.
The first two are pretty self-explanatory, but the last is essentially what we do at TeleRead (and, in fact, what many newsbloggers do everywhere): "’cover’ the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible."
The suggestion comes about as a response to the problems that arise when print journalists are asked to write for the web. Print articles are not ideally suited for the web form, and journalists from the traditional mold have a hard time fitting into web journalism.
Thus, “curators” serve as a sort of translator, taking the print articles turned out by the journalists and reformatting them to be more suited for the web. (How appropriate that this is suggested in an article that has itself been translated between languages!)
Masnick has some interesting commentary as well, pointing out that “curating” is a function that tends to be looked down on by “traditional” journalists—but these days, with the social networks that exist almost for the sole purpose of forwarding whatever links everyone thinks is interesting to everyone else, almost everyone “curates” the news in one way or another.
If a newsroom were set up with a focus on those three roles (I would add editors as well…), with the understanding that they work together as a team to both bring the most information and community to a particular story, I doubt we’d see newspapers struggling as much as they are today.
I would tend to agree. Perhaps newspapers need to think about print and the web less as opposed to each other, and more as working together.
