Thursday, June 14, 2012

Evaluation role is natural for curation team

At Digital First Media, Steve Buttry and Mandy Jenkins plan to launch a news curation team. The opportunity intrigues me because, as Jenkins rightly points out, “curation is what journalists have been doing since Gutenberg.”

One of the areas that most interests me in my perception of the team’s focus is the use and evaluation of emerging tools in journalism. To me, this seems a natural part of the team’s responsibilities.

Today's information curator faces a bewildering array and new tools are emerging daily. To have an accumulation of early reviews, best-practices and in-depth training would go a long way toward enabling journalists to navigate this rapidly changing landscape.

Like the weekly #DFMChat among Digital First Media journalists, perhaps the team could provide video-conference or live-Tweeting chats with an informed presenter who focuses upon a single tool each week and objectively shares pros and cons. The presentations could be archived for later reference.

This training would ideally be augmented with written how-to guides: step-by-step instructions combined with screen-capture stills, suitable for viewing as a PDF or printing out for ongoing reference.

A conversation about the role of the Digital First Media news curation team is taking place on Twitter.com. Follow or contribute using the #DFMCuration tag.

3 comments:

  1. Hey Cynthia, I just posted some tutorials on my blog today that I wrote for our mobile media lab on wheels. You might find these useful. I did one on Geofeedia, Twitter, Storify, etc. I tried to keep to one page and as simple as possible because they are for use when working with the public. However, I think others might find them helpful. I mention here because you talked about how-to guides in your post. Perhaps these will help. Buffy http://www.yorkblog.com/buffy/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Cynthia, I just posted some tutorials on my blog today that I wrote for our mobile media lab on wheels. You might find these useful. I did one on Geofeedia, Twitter, Storify, etc. I tried to keep to one page and as simple as possible because they are for use when working with the public. However, I think others might find them helpful. I mention here because you talked about how-to guides in your post. Perhaps these will help. Buffy http://www.yorkblog.com/buffy/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, Buffy, I've added myself to the waiting list for a Geofeedia account. That's a feature I'd been wanting to experiment with.

    ReplyDelete

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