Journalists as Curators - CM #12
Insights, trends, tools and real-world examples of how to create profitable online projects by organizing existing information.
Welcome to issue #12 of Curation Monetized.
I am Robin Good, a passionate researcher of content curation since 2004, writing you from Holbox island in Mexico.
I assist indie entrepreneurs who are expert about a topic in creating valuable resources to increase one’s authority, visibility and reputation, while providing a new profitable revenue channel.
Key Curation Insights
1) The Formula for the High-Road
There was a time when sellers had access to information that was not available to everyone else.
“Now that everyone has access to information, what provides a competitive edge is the ability to separate the signal from the noise, to curate, make sense and synthesize the essence from large bodies of information.“
Source: Daniel Pink - Duration 2’:50”
2) ICO: Identify, Contextualize, Organize
"...#curation is not just about selecting and displaying information.
It deals with identifying the most relevant information for a specific group or target audience and contextualizing and organizing it before presenting it to them."
The key point here is that, it is not just the serendipitous picking and sharing of relevant materials that qualifies for quality content curation.
Quality content curation is specifically characterized by:
The focus on a specific target audience
and need/interest is key,
as much as the provision of context
and the ability to organize/arrange that information makes it easier to appreciate it.
Source: Diego Lainez Jamieson - “The Art Of Content Curation: 7 Steps To Efficiently Find The Right Information”
3) Curation Levels
Level 1: Content Filtering is folks finding and sharing “helpful” articles, research, etc., on social media or via email.
Level 2: Content Curation takes Content Filtering one step further on the helpfulness meter. When you curate content, you don’t just find and share. You find and share along with some kind of contextual information you add. It’s this context that helps your reader understand why he should pay attention to the content you’re sharing and what it should mean for his business. It’s what converts the content you share from noise to signal.
Level 3: Synthesis goes beyond filtering and contextualizing by summarizing the key facts, insights and issues and by extracting and highlighting the most important parts of something.
Source: Tom Martin - “Why Sales People Should Be Curating Content”
Curation Trends
Directory Sites
Strategy on how to monetize directory sites. Tim Stoddart shares his personal experience and gives lots of examples.
Watch from 29’:57” to 34’:28” (duration 4’:31”)
Source: Niche Pursuits - “How Tim Stoddart Nets $250k Per Year With His Side-Hustle Directory Sites”
Journalists as Indie Entrepreneurs
I have long been thinking that trained-journalists are probably among the best qualified individuals to create information-based scalable independent businesses online.
The only obstacle they face is just a lack of vision. The market is already badly in need of trusted niche experts in every thinkable sector.
“People want to know how the world works. They want to know why the things that are happening are happening.
So journalism is inevitably shifting.
… it is less about producing new information than it is about gathering information already on the record, evaluating it, and explaining and contextualizing it for an audience, perhaps with some analysis and argumentation for good measure.”
“If you become known as a person who knows a lot about something and who can explain it well, you will find a niche.
There are all sorts of trade journals and specialist publications these days where you could get your start. But you don’t have to wait for a job. Learn, and share what you know.
Become useful, even if only to a small community.”
Source: David Roberts - “My Advice for Aspiring Explainer Journalists”
Co-Publishing
“Imagine a scenario in which a journalist tells their employer they plan to launch their own newsletter, and the employer counters by offering to house the newsletter under its own banner in exchange for a revenue share.
Under this framework, the media outlet would play the same role as a book publisher or record label, both of which pay their creators an advance + royalties.”
Source: Simon Owens - “How the Journalism Talent Wars Are Shifting”
Curation as a Service (or CaaS)
“…as the amount of content on the web increases, there will inevitably be a need for more human curators.
People who are domain experts (or have an obsession with a topic) that can sift through the garbage and collect the gems.”
Source: from The Case for Curation as a Service by Jeremy Brown
- Check also: Trends.vc - “Curation as a Service No-Code Directories, Personal Brands, Digital Products”
Curation Tools & Resources
(only for Premium subscribers)
In this issue (17 tools):
Read, highlight, annotate and curate. For sharing and collaborative research.
Collect and organize links and browser tabs. Create and share public collections.
Save any link and organize it with tags and folders for bio/profile pages, news pages & feeds, collections, directories.
Memorize anything you find online and have it auto-categorized and OCR scanned.
Create a custom search engine for your website. 100% free.
Discover the best timeline builders to create context and a story around a specific subject.
Curation Monetized: Real World Examples
(only for Premium subscribers)
Catalog of Top Landing Pages and Design Components
Showcase of Top World Advertising Campaigns
Catalog of Best Online University Courses on Specific Subjects