ARE CONTENT CURATORS THE NEW EDITORS?

As the internet exploded and more and more sites have constant streams of news and commentary on everything from world politics to which celebrities are dead (dead-celeb.com), the importance placed on content curation was, perhaps, inevitable. Separating the wheat from the chaff is sometimes so important to people, they're willing to pay for it

And nearly everybody with any sort of presence on the internet participates in curating content, whether they know it or not. Next time you go on Facebook or Twitter, look at how many status updates are really status updates and how many are actually links to something else on the web--be it a news story, a blog post, or a YouTube clip. Why do folks post those? Because they're interested in sharingcontent they feel would be interesting to their friends and followers. And just like that, they're content curators.

The number of curator sites and tools--both free and paid--seems to only be growing, and in January, the importance of it was driven home even more when Yahoo! reportedly paid upward of $10 million to acquire the news curation site Snip.it.

In the "old days," the job of curation was left to editors--of newspapers, of books, even of websites in the days before Web 2.0--but with information overload becoming a fact of digital life, are content curators becoming the new editors?

CONTENT CURATION: 'AS OLD AS BLOGGING ITSELF'

Before you can answer that question, though, it's important to realize that content curation--while it may be all the rage now--is hardly anything new. Jorn Barger started one of the first curation sites, Robot Wisdom, way back in 1995. Each entry on the site consists of links to other sites he finds interesting. (A sample item from the Dec. 29, 1997, entry: "Gorillas make gorgeous representational art!http://www.gorilla.org/Art/")

"The practice of collecting and filtering information and then adding value to it has been around a long time," says Lee Odden, CEO of the digital marketing agency TopRank Online Marketing. "Classic blogging often follows this 'Oreo cookie' format of sandwiching an excerpt of someone else's information with your own. Doing so on a continuous basis is curation and is as old as blogging itself."

Ron VanPuersem, director of Asia operations for Shift Digital, an international digital marketing and technology firm, agrees--and in fact, goes a step further. If there's anything surprising about the current popularity of content curation, he says, "[I]t's that people seem to think of content curation as something new."

"If [people] think about it for a minute, they'll realize that they've been involved in receiving curated information for a long, long time. Radio stations are curating music, then 'displaying' the pieces that they believe will most benefit their 'readers.' Google News does the same thing, and of course museums are the best-known curators we have," he says.

"The radio stations don't create the music; Google News doesn't write the news they pass along; and the museums don't produce the art that they have on display. All of these are curations, and we all have enjoyed them for many, many years. The need for curation--especially highly-skilled content curators--will grow along with the growth of information availability and information volume."

With all of the information out there, VanPuersem says,"[A]ll of us are increasingly dependent upon, and searching for, those sources that will provide for us the most-relevant and highest-quality 'answers' to the questions we're [asking.]"

The sources for those "answers" are plentiful, from folks using Facebook, Pinterest, or TweetDeck and curating without even really knowing that's what they're doing, to free curation tools such as Storify, Paper.li, and Scoop.it--even to tools people are willing to pay for, such as Curata, CurationSoft, and Curation Station.

Larry Schwartz, cofounder and president of Newstex, a company that offers aggregated news and fulltext feeds from thousands of media sites, isn't surprised people are willing to pay for it. "People always pay to be able to get information faster than everyone else," he says. "Knowledge is power; speed is power."

VanPuersem agrees--although he sees the paid curation tools more likely being employed by businesses than the average Joe. "Doing good curation requires some high-demand qualities, and those must be paid for," he says. "Companies and organizations that want to provide good service to their clients will need to do curation, and they'll need to pay someone to do it well."

However, he adds, "The enduser will likely remain very slow to pay for anything like that. We will use Google News, and expect that service to save us time and deliver pertinent news stories to us, based on our search parameters, and we'll expect that to come to us for free. We'll tolerate some ads thrown in here and there, but we expect it for free."

Pawan Deshpande, cofounder and CEO of the business-grade content curation platform Curata, isn't shocked that the average person isn't interested in paying forcuration; indeed, he says he'd be surprised if they did. After all, so much on the internet is free.

"To publish content, blogging software is available for free," he says. "To share content, access to social media is free. Finding content through search engines is free. Reading content online, for the most part, is free. As a result, most consumers have been conditioned to expect content and content-related tools online to be free."

For businesses though--and specifically marketers--it's a different story, and Deshpande says he's not surprised they pay for content curation tools.

"Similar to how marketers utilize powerful yet easy paid tools for functions like email marketing, marketing automation, and social media management," he says, "they also find value in content curation software."

MAKING THE CURATION CUT

So, content curation may have been around forever, but it's also more popular now than ever. With more means by which to curate, will that change the waycontent gets created, since, in theory, those creators know their work may more than likely end up in a curated list of hyperlinks?

In some ways it already has.Author and social media expert Krista Neher, CEO of Boot Camp Digital, notes that many corporate blogs have "top news" sections and sites like Mashable does roundups of top news stories. "Essentially they are editing the news to the most important/popular/ relevant to their audience," she says.

"Content creation is really about making the curation cut--being good enough to be filtered in," Neher adds.

In a video interview posted last year on Mashable, the company's chief technology officer, Robyn Peterson, poses an interesting question to Burt Herman, cofounder of the curation site Storify: "Who's gonna have more clout in the future: authors or curators?"

Herman said that, at the end of the day, he thinks authors will have the most clout. "The world does belong to creators," he told Peterson in the interview. But, he added, "Curators play an important role, especially as we're living in this age of overload, to help find what people should be reading and should care about. They are the tastemakers in some way too, so they certainly do have a lot of clout on their own."

Neher says she feels it doesn't need to be an either/or thing; there doesn't need to be some giant steel cage match between curators and creators to see who wins. "Both provide value," she says. "Creating original content will always have an important place, but finding the best content is helpful also."

"If you think about social media, very little of the content is actually original," she adds. "One new study probably generates tens if not hundreds of thousands of additional pieces of content, with each person adding their thoughts or perspective to the original piece. The reality is that true original content is few and far between."

THE BEST CURATORS ARE CREATORS--AND VICE VERSA

VanPuersem, meanwhile, says he feels good curation "can't be completely segregated away from the skill and art of creation."

"I believe that the best curators--the skilled ones that actually search, sort, find, select, categorize and provide context--are in fact creating content," he says. "Yes, we must acknowledge that the basis of their piece is being taken from someone else's research and creation, but the curator's efforts, when done well, actually create something new."

He also feels the best creators are those who acknowledge they are not the be-all and end-all on any given subject. "The most valuable writers and authors are those that supplement their creative work by including the great offerings of others," he says. "They will be good at creating fresh, new content, but they will have the humility to recognize that for every great piece they create, they can find five more related pieces that have been done just as well, or even better."

For Odden, however, there's no question: Content creation is king.

"There's no way curation of original content will become all things to all people," he says. "To start, original content to be curated needs to come from somewhere. For companies that want to take a leadership position in their industries, a commitment to creating original content is a necessity. Leaders have opinions. They have interesting things to say. Leaders do not have a problem with creating original content."

But even though content creation reigns supreme, there's still room for curation.

"Augmenting original content with curated content is perfectly effective," Odden says. He says TopRank Online Marketing does this with its own agency blog. "I've written 1.2 million words over the last nine years and that commitment has led to a very successful business where we work with numerous Fortune 500 companies and even a few Fortune 50s.Along with original content, we curate industry news each Friday. People love to see what stories we've picked as worth reading and our commentary about those stories."

DOES CURATION LET CREATORS KICK SEO TO THE CURB?

Content curation doesn't just have an impact on content creation--some feel it has an impact on the basic internet search as well. In a November 2012 column for Business 2Community.com, Brittany Botti, cofounder and social lead of the digital marketing agency Outspective, opined, "The future of internet search is not SEO ? it'scuration."

"In the future, people will look to other people instead of algorithms to find what they are looking for," Botti wrote. "I wouldn't be surprised if search engines of the future included in their search results the online properties of popular content curators who are authorities and thought leaders in the topic being searched. You will depend on these curators to gather a collection of content and information that is relevant to what you are looking for to help refine your search and save time."

Deshpande agrees with Botti. "Currently, search engines prioritize content based on signals indicative of good content, such as number of inbound links, freshness, formatting and page load times, rather than evaluating the merits of the actual content itself," Deshpande says. "As a result, many sites with mediocre or poorcontent actively work to game the system by optimizing for these signals."

"Until we see a significant jump in search engine technology," Deshpande says, human curators "are currently the only ones who can truly discern good from badcontent."

And as curators continue to multiply, creators reap the benefit of this, Deshpande feels.

"As content curators continue to gain prominence as a content distribution channel over search engines, it's causing authors to create content that is optimized for curators rather than for search engines," he says. "As a simple example, formerly many bloggers would title their content with targeted keywords and key phrases to show up in search engine results. These days many bloggers optimize their article titles, not solely for search engines, but for curators as well. Many use provocative titles that may not necessarily be optimized for search, but are instead optimized for curators to reshape their content on channels like Twitter."

Ultimately, Deshpande is pleased with this effect curators have on creators--it gets them away from the coldness of SEO and instead lets them focus on what they really want to focus on: writing.

"It's a welcome change that, rather than creating content that is friendly for algorithms but often suboptimal for their audience, authors can focus on creating the best content that other humans (curators) will appreciate," Deshpande says.

Odden isn't so quick to cast aside SEO, saying it "makes the job search engines are trying to do easier, more efficient and effective to the benefit of brands allowing their content to be copied by search engine bots."

"Curation tools are essentially search engines that allow annotations of the results. From that technical perspective, there are benefits for search discovery," he says. But, he adds, "As search engines evolve and change, so [do the] best practices [for] SEO. They go hand in hand. Curation is increasingly important, but it's not mutually exclusive to optimizing content and the signals search engines use to deliver the best answers."

Neher, meanwhile, says she feels "SEO really is curation."

"You could argue that search engines were the first curators," she says. "When you search for something, Google looks through all of the content on the web and brings you the content that is most relevant to you. It curates the results based on what they think you are most interested [in]. The difference is that Google is curating vs. a specifically identified search, whereas emerging curation apps focus on discoverability and browsability (vs. searchability). The initiating intent is different in each case."

HUMAN ELEMENT STILL NEEDED

If, as Deshpande feels, curation frees authors from the need to pump their writings full of Googlehappy keywords, does that mean editors are also disposable? For Odden, curation brings a lot to the table--curation tools, he says, "are powerful and essential for social content sourcing and creation," and he adds that "curationis also very useful for surfacing real-time trends and the appearance of topics across multiple media, channels and platforms"--but a proper substitute for a real live editor isn't necessarily one of them.

"A human curator definitely brings the skills needed for modern content editing, but obviously, there's more to editing than sourcing, annotating and promotingcontent," Odden says. "Storytelling and connecting brand narrative along with creative execution is increasingly important for the corporate editorial function. Those are skills not always present with curators."

As VanPuersem sees it, curators can only do so much. The human side of editing can never be duplicated. "If you try to completely automate the system--using tools to create aggregations--you only provide a very limited service to readers," VanPuersem says. "The human element--the skill of filtering, the skill of reshaping, highlighting what's most important, dumping the stuff that no one needs to see and gathering into the right context--this will not be replaced by tools."

Indeed, it seems it's a matter of editors being refined, not replaced.

"The 'new editors' are simply people with the same skills they've always had," VanPuersem says, "except they add this one: they're getting better at using tools to find the best, most sought-after information out there."

While curation is indeed changing some aspects of creation, it's not replacing the original news curators--editors. There will always be a need for a human touch in curating, and in an age where machines are replacing humans all the time, that's bound to be comforting.

Comments? email letters to the editor to [e-mail].

Resources

Boot Camp digital bootcampdigital.com

Curata curata.com

Mashable mashable.com

Newstex newstex.com

Pinterest pinterest.com

Robot Wisdom robotwisdom.com

Shift Digital shiftdigitalmedia.com

Storify storify.com

TopRank Online Marketing toprankmarketing.com

PHOTO (COLOR): Content curation may be all the rage right now, but it's nothing new--as seen in this December 1997 entry from one of the internet's firstcuration sites, Robot Wisdom. Jorn Barger started the site in 1995.

PHOTO (COLOR): Pinterest has become one of the most popular content curators out there. Here's a screen grab of a curated list about content curation.

PHOTO (COLOR): One of many content curator sites, Storify boasts that it "helps you sort through the noise to find the voices online that matter."

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By Mike Thompson

MIKE THOMPSON ([e-mail]) is the editor of the rivereast news bulletin and a freelance journalis

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