Fast Company: Content Curators are New Web Superheroes

The print and online magazine that reports on what "fast companies (entrepreneurs and cutting-edge ventures) are doing has taken a look at the growing importance of curators.

"Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what's interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend to have a unique and consistent point of view--providing a reliable context for the content that they discover and organize," according to a blog post by Steven Rosenbaum.

He goes on to list some best curation pratices and highlights some of the current curation tools (we used a couple that he mentions--Storify and Pinterest--in class this semester).

"One thing I'm sure of," Rosenbaum adds, "the web is going to keep growing fast. And the solution to making sense of the massive volume is a new engaged partnership between humans and machines."

Click here to read the complete post. 

Three Plagiarism Cases That Didn't Have to Happen

Remember journalism's rule No. 5 "Be skeptical of everything. If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

Here are three examples where online journalists say they accidentally plagiarized. Their excuse: They thought they copying information from a press release that was sent by a friend. 

That's really no excuse. 

1. Even if "a friend" sends you information about a potential story, it is up to you to verify that information.

2. Press releases can be wrong.  As a journalist, you should verify any and all information, including quotes, contained in the release. Yes, that means re-reporting information in the release.

3. Don't forget attribution, even when using information from a press release. At the bare minimum, attribution, that is telling the reader where you got the information, could save you the embarrassment of being accused of plagiarism.

Click here to read how the Poynter Institute described this series of plagiarism cases. The also are links to the original stories, and the apologies issued by the reporters who made the errors.