Media Hype: Content Curation
Desperately looking for a profitable business model, old school media companies are latching on to the realization that cheap and dirty sites like HuffPost, Gawker (and hopefully us someday) are onto something. Why pen original pieces when you can curate the boatloads of content that’s already on the web?
That’s not to say merely aggregate, because that suggests an automated, unfiltered solution (e.g. all stories with the keyword “Obama” and “G-20″). Curating is spending your human capital on editors that don’t necessarily write original content but curate and quality control the content that’s already out there – linking to substantive sources ala the new maxim “write what you know, link to the rest”.
Makes sense to us. Consumers are getting quite overwhelmed with all of this content coming out of there ears, and it does explain why HuffPost and other “curators” are doing well with very little staff (besides the fact that they get celebs to write an original article once in a while for free). Yet, with everyone curating, won’t that lead to the pile-in that occured with aggregating and user generation? We think so, at the end of the day, curating may work as a starter solution (its the model we’re following until we have more resources), but nothing beats scoops, long-form investigative and original pieces. It is afterall what the “curators” will be linking to, if they see fit. Read: “Can Curation Save Media?” Business Insider
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