Newsrooms are transforming to a great degree because the way we consume and create news is changing. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check my Twitter. I know I can rely on my Twitter Lists, which I’ve carefully curated to be finely focused by reliable sources, both traditional and non-traditional, from the ground and from newsrooms.
In a highly un-scientific poll, with answers coming from Twitter, which again will skew the answers biased toward the medium of Twitter, I asked folks where they go first thing in the morning to check what happened overnight:
I asked the same question on Tumblr, which again skewed the answers a bit based on the demographic and the tendency of the folks there already to use Tumblr as a news source. Out of 97 responses, the top three were Tumblr (28%), Twitter (18%), and the New York Times (7%), with NPR Radio (5%) and Al-Jazeera (5%) not far behind. Other interesting answers were new email curation tools like Percolate, which look at your social networks, source out the links that are getting the most attention, and email you a digest of them the next morning.
The trend seems to be toward audiences looking for someone to tell them what to read. Overwhelmed with the sheer deluge of news and information, people are looking to curators that span news sources to bring them what they need to know. For some it’s good enough to let friends do it, but more and more people are looking to specialized curators who focus on certain topics, like politics, entertainment, auto, tech, etc. I’m more likely to go to @acarvin than anyone else if I need to know what is happening in the Middle East right this moment, because Andy is monitoring everything from multiple sources on traditional and non-traditional media and bringing it to me in real-time.
As the New York Times moves to a subscription model, which will allow free access to links in-bound from social networks, the role of a curator not only becomes a trusted organizer of news but a pathway to getting that news without having to dole out the access fee. It might be wise for the Times to work with these curators who may eventually become the major pathway that leads people to their content.