This post on MediaHelpingMedia about curation acts as a helpful reminder of some of the things journalists working in this area should consider. Author David Brewer also highlights the “rules” set out by different curation platforms.
Journalists who use aggregation in their digital reporting are likely to find Steve Buttry’s guidelines for good practice useful.
Buttry, who blogs at The Buttry Diary, outlines advice on key issues such as linking out/attribution and how to “add value” to your aggregated posts, as well as matters relating to verification.
Image by art makes me smile on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
This week’s jpod looks at how different publishing platforms in the news industry are approaching curation and aggregation of news, from sources across the web including news outlets, bloggers and social media platforms.
Journalism.co.uk’s news editor Rachel McAthy speaks to:
Storify has a new look, logo and functionality. The tool, which allows you to curate stories using elements from social media like tweets, Flickr photos and YouTube videos, is today rolling out its new features and promising to “revise the entire reader experience” in the coming months.
Xavier Damman, Storify’s co-founder, explained the changes:
We’ve taken feedback from users and have rebuilt Storify on a stronger and more reliable foundation, which includes:
A new logo and new look. The search and the editor sides of the interface have been switched, and we have made it easier to write your own text into stories, and to add subheds, or headers.
An elegant new drag-and-drop functionality, which makes it easier to build stories, and to reorganise them.
A collapsed view of your Storify story while it’s being built, so you can see it all easily, and organise it better.
A revised Storypad bookmarklet that lets you gather information from all over the web for your Storify stories. You can add the material to a story at any time, and share your Storypad with other users.
The changes are explained in more detail using, of course, Storify itself below:
You can create a timeline that will automatically update via RSS whenever you publish a story with a particular tag, such as this journalism job cuts timeline. (To add an RSS feed go to “show sources” at the bottom of your timeline, click “other” and add your the URL of your feed.)
You can then embed your story and readers can view it as a timeline, flipbook, list or map. Try toggling though the job cuts timeline to see the information displayed in different ways.
Storify has partnered with Breaking News, the @breakingnews Twitter channel and news site, which is owned by MSNBC.
Storify, which allows users to create a narrative using tweets, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Audioboos, Slideshares, Facebook status updates and more as sources, will now include the option of adding Storify as a source.
You can add Breaking News as a source by going to settings within your Storify account. A breakingnews.com logo will appear alongside the images representing the above social networks and allow users to drag and drop content from Breaking News.
Storify has also added a ‘Storify’ button allowing visitors to its site to take a news story and start to build a timeline.
Many of you will have used Coveritlive already for liveblogging, but 10,000 Words has a good how to post on using it to curate tweetstreams.
For those who haven’t tried this before the post has some good practical advice on using it to pull in tweets from individual users, lists, search terms and hashtags to curate streams.
Content curation tool Bundlr goes public today, making it accessible for people to sign up through Twitter and Facebook instead of by invitation only.
The new public version also boasts some additional features, including a embedding, timeline visualisation, and a search function for users and bundles.
The Guardian today announced the launch of the Guardian Comment Network on Comment is free. The site says it has partnered with a range of websites which they will curate content from and cross-post, in a bid to break down “barriers between us and them”.
We hope to act as curators for the best of this content, while acknowledging that we as editors are not the only ones who can or should decide on the direction of Comment is free on any given day. We already draw on the inspiration and insights of our users through series such as You told us, the People’s panel and Anywhere but Westminster. We want to extend that to the many bloggers out there who are often just as good as Guardian journalists – if not better – at spotting stories and responding quickly and imaginatively to them.
This follows similar developments in content curation across other areas of the site, as outlined by Dan Sabbagh to Journalism.co.uk when he joined the Guardian last year as its new head of media and technology.
