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. 

KQED Radio is Experimenting is also Experimenting with Storify

Menlo's News Management and Production class isn't the only organization test driving Storify.

KQED Radio's Daily talk show, "Forum" is testing it, too.

Earlier this week, "Forum" host Michael Krasny led a lively discussion on going vegan and vegan cooking. The Forum team created a Storify story that collected recipes, recommendations and vegan cooking tips that listeners Facebooked, tweeted or posted.

Click here for the Forum page.

Click here to go directly to the Storify story (which includes a SoundCloud widget with audio from the show.

Music Video Used to Explain Super PACS

ProPublica is one of the best known, and widely respected, investigative reporting websites in the U.S.

So when it posts an animated video explaining Super Pacs, people take notice.

Basically, Super PACs (Political Action Committees) are a new political phenomena. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot stop unions and corporations from spending money in political campaigns as long as the spending is "independent" from the money raised and used by the candidate.

Whew!

Click here to check out how a team of freelancers, working with ProPublica, explained Super PACs. There is also a link to a site where you can find the names of some Super PAC donors and how much the gave.

It's Never Too Early to Start Thinking About the Final Project

This semester, the final project is all about you and your dream digital media project.
If you had the money and the staff to launch a digital media outlet or to create an app or to do something that no one in the communications field has ever done before, what would it be?
You need to think outside the box. You will have to create a prototype. You will have to answer some basic questions about your idea.
Here's a good example of thinking different. KCRW is the Public Radio station in Santa Monica. It just launched a YouTube channel that "will stream themed video playlists curated and hosted by the station's DJs."
That's right. Radio DJs curating (collecting and using their judgment and news sense to customize and present the material) video.
Check out the video and start dreaming of what you can do. This is the first step in becoming an entrepreneurial journalist.

Media Ethics and Facebook

On Sept. 16, 2009, Melissa Bailey sent a “friend request” through Facebook, the online social network, to Jessica Del Rocco. Bailey was the managing editor of the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit news website, and Del Rocco was the ex‐girlfriend of the man wanted by police for allegedly murdering a Yale pharmacology student, Annie Le.

 Le had disappeared on Sept. 8, and her body had been found on Sept. 13. The story had become a national media sensation, and the Independent, a grassroots publication with strong ties to New Haven, was
at the forefront of the coverage.

Del Rocco accepted the friend request, giving Bailey access to her Facebook posts known as “status updates.” Here, “behind the wall,” Del Rocco had responded to the news that her ex‐boyfriend, Raymond Clark, was the murder suspect. As Bailey read Del Rocco’s posts, she was riveted—this was great material. Independent reporters also had a six‐year‐old police report filed by Del Rocco in which she alleged that Clark had “forced her to have sex.” The police report alone was big news, but Del Rocco’s comments on Facebook helped to “fill out the picture,” says Bailey, and brought the story up to date.

Bailey could be confident that no other journalist had Del Rocco’s name, much less access to her Facebook posts. But the comments were visible only to her online “friends.” Was it ethical to use them in a news story?

Over the next few weeks, we will be talking about whether Melissa Bailey did the right thing in the way she obtained the Facebook postings by the murder suspect's ex-girlfriend. We will also talk about other ethical issues raised in this case study.

Here is a link to the CNN site the murder of Annie Le and the police investigation that ultimately led to the arrest and conviction of one of Le's co-workers.

The Power of Photo Slideshows

Here is a photo slideshow that I couldn't stop going through. These are photos for the cruise liner crash off the coast of Italy.
It looks to me as if there is a mix of professional photos and photos shot by passengers and crew.
Anyway take a look at the slideshow (Please notice how I just embedded a link to the slideshow. When you create your slideshows you should embed a link to it from your story.)
To embed a link, you can create a link using a word or a couple of words in a sentence. Or, you can just write something like "Click here" and embed the link in the word "here."