Journalism as Digital Curation

Who says newspapers are dead? Well, maybe they are financially, but that isn't stopping some papers from attempting to adapt their reporting procedures to the digital age. In an article for the online newsletter of the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Florida, Patrick Thornton writes about a recent trend in newspaper journalism that upends the traditional reportage hierarchy. Normally, the major news blogs "report" by responding to stories that are published by the "mainstream media," and if the major newspapers have any actual presence in the blogosphere, it's usually in the form of an automated RSS feed that generates streams of headlines for Twitter or Google Reader or the like.

The Chicago Tribune, however, is upending the traditional reportage hierarchy by engaging in what is being referred to in the journalism world as a "curated approach" to their Twitter feed. The Tribune actually has two Twitter feeds: @ChicagoTribune, which is a standard RSS feed of headlines from the online edition of the newspaper, and @ColonelTribune which is something entirely different. The idea for ColonelTribune came about because headlines would often be cut-off due to Twitter's 140 character limit. The Tribune decided to create another feed which didn't simply parrot the headline but created something more succinct and Twitter-friendly. Instead of the headline, they might lift an interesting quote or statistic from the article. Then the Tribune started doing something really revolutionary with ColonelTribune - they started tweeting about blog posts that were relevant to news stories in the Chicago metropolitan area. They would still post articles from their own website, but they would also post articles from blogs, websites of local Chicago television stations, and even the website of the Chicago Sun-Times. Readers were also allowed to respond to tweets and reader tweets are included in the ColonelTribune stream. I've even seen tweets where ColonelTribune responds to reader tweets. The interest in the "curated" vs. "automated" models is indicated by the relative number of followers of the two feeds. While 19,520 people follow @ChicagoTribune, 584,779 follow @ColonelTribune.

Obviously, there are downsides to the curated model. While the automated model requires very little effort, the curated model has less of a return on investment because the Tribune has to pay someone to run the feed (that being the case - I have to say that tweeting about interesting things going on in Chicago sounds like the best job in the world!) But the implications of the curated model are much more interesting. The Tribune is essentially curating a daily history of relevant digital articles relating to the Chicago metropolitan area from a number of sources outside of their own newspaper. That seems like a project that is worth the cost. If only they could find a way to make it profitable. Any ideas?