If A Book Apart hadn’t been interested in this project, it wouldn’t be happening. This isn’t “a content strategy book” slotted into their lineup; it’s a specific project conceived to take advantage of their ambition, editorial chops, and unswerving commitment to their readers.

Which is to say: I’m writing this book because I think we’re at an inflection point.

Yes, content strategy is a real thing that real clients and employers really need. But beyond that, we’re in the infancy of a ubiquitous internet—one fully integrated into our lives and environments. The publishing world has been bitten by a radioactive wombat, and we don’t know if journalism’s going to die or mutate into something speedy and awesome. Our brains are changing in ways we don’t understand. Content work matters—yes, now more than ever—and as this thing spins faster, we’re going to need every advantage we can find.

Some propositions:

• Our practice revolves around a set of shared assumptions, grounding principles, and professional ethics. These are every bit as important as the tools and methods we use.
• We don’t have time to reinvent everything, and we don’t have to. Our discipline is rooted in old-school, long-lasting professional fields that offer practices and approaches we need and can immediately use. This also means that people from these allied fields make great candidates for content strategy positions.
• Just as porn built the internet, commerce has been the impetus behind the development of content strategy; we have to get commercial content right. We must also remember that our educational, cultural, and governmental institutions are increasingly dependent on the online world. These are not afterthoughts or fluff jobs for idealists, and they demand that we know how to be user advocates.
• The economics of content is our problem, after all. Unless we understand resources and costs, we can’t build sustainable publishing processes, teams, and systems.

My aim is to produce a short, clear reference that deals with the roots, principles, core skills, and central processes of content strategy in ways that content people will find helpful, and that designers, information architects, and project managers will be able to use as they work with and around content.

This is where you come in. I’m finishing up the draft of the manuscript now. If there’s something you want to know about content work, but aren’t getting from your current resources, let me know. This is a short book, so I won’t be dealing with anything comprehensively, but I don’t want to miss whole areas of interest, especially for people who don’t do actually content work. So leave me a comment or find me on Twitter or send a note to erin@ this domain name, and I’ll do my best to give you something you can use.

In case you missed any parts, here they are:

• Intro: Content & Curation: An Epic Poem
• Part 1: Curating the Deck Chairs on the Titanic
• Part 2: Between the Click and the Curator
• Part 3: The Curate and the Curator
• Part 4: Slouching Toward the Curatorial
• Also relevant: Credo: Addendum.

Curation as Storytelling-via-Filter

This revivified form of link-blogging is getting loads of attention as an easy way of (somehow) making money and expressing a personal vision. Here’s the 10-second version of my posts on this sort of curation:

• Content curation is not a quick fix or a cheap way to solve your content problems, because if you do it well, it takes time, and if you do it badly, you’re already losing.
• If content curation fits into your overall content plan, then by all means, do it—but commit to doing it well. It’s only by trying to do it better than anyone else that you’ll create something that continues to interest your readers after the first rush of interest has subsided.
• “Feed the beast” is not a strategy. If your content plan revolves around creating huge heaps of content, then unless you have genuinely accepted the long-term responsibilities and expenses of a publisher, you probably need a new plan.
• If someone tries to get you to pay for curation tools or services, remember that this is just one part of what bloggers have been doing since the late 1990s, and budget accordingly.

And one more for content people, specifically: we shouldn’t be jerks to people who do real curation in museums and galleries. Their work isn’t sacred, but neither is it trivial, and using their jargon without understanding where it comes from is a dilettante’s move.

Digital Curation (aka TL;DR)

If there’s one thing that researching and writing this series has pounded into my head, it’s that this web thing we do is not an isolated, special activity. A valuable and immediately useful inheritance is ours if we look beyond our ring-fenced specializations.

To people who aren’t already neck-deep in things like enterprise content strategy and document management, digital curation may seem intimidatingly technical or unwieldy. But until we routinely leave our clients and projects with a solid understanding of long-term publishing and content management costs, needs, and processes, we’re glossing over a really important part of content strategy.

Our natural allies in digital curation, information science, and museum work offer us the chance to learn about field-tested tools and approaches. We should take it.

How to Win at Internet

If you can use the second kind of “curation” to plan for and get more out of the work you do with the first kind—by “curating” your own content as well as that created by someone else, by reusing your work in smart ways, and by creating digital storage and tagging structures that support new publishing activities—you’ll almost certainly have created something sustainable and genuinely useful.

What’s Next

I realized after about the second post that I wasn’t going to be able to talk about anything like the full set of resources I’ve been using, lest the length of my posts turn all of you to stone and get me kicked off the internet. Rather than making a giant list of links, I’m just going to post short discussions of curation-related resources and how I’m using them as an informal series over the next few months.

Big thanks to all of you who commented, wrote thought-provoking posts and emails, and retweeted the crap out of this, and to Peter, who skillfully edited my posts on the fly, even when they were much too long. Unicorn-colored space princesses, every one of you.

The previous two posts in this series discussed the notion of content curation as it relates to “real-time curation” and the filtering/mosaic method of online content production. I’ll be adding on a related post with examples of what I consider to be especially useful and successful examples of that genre, but first, I want to look at another kind of content curation—one that I think is vital to the work of content strategists.

Note: If etymology isn’t your thing, just skip down to the next section, because I’m going to geek out for a minute.

Everyone Loves the OED

From Latin cura (“care”), through a tangle of mostly Old French, we inherit the English nouns “curator,” “curate,” and “cure,” as well as “accurate” and—less felicitously—“sinecure.” The OED‘s first definition for “cure”  is simply “Care, charge; spiritual charge”; from this, it’s an easy step to the care of souls performed by the curate. Long before the medieval English curate, however, Rome conferred the title “curatores” on a wide range of caretaking bureaucrats:

Under the Roman Empire, the title of curator (“caretaker”) was given to officials in charge of various departments of public works: sanitation, transportation, policing. The curatores annonae were in charge of the public supplies of oil and corn. The curatores regionum were responsible for maintaining order in the fourteen regions of Rome. And the curatores aquarum took care of the aqueducts.¹

To this list we may add the curatores alvei et riparum, who had the care of the navigation of the Tiber; the curatores kalendarii, who kept the account books on the investment of public funds; the curatores ludorum, who oversaw public games; and the curatores viarum, who counted among their ranks Julius Caesar, and kept the Roman roads.²

In the middle ages, as English began to evolve into its modern form, the curator reappears as the spiritual caretaker of the Christian church in England. Because I am a nerd, here’s one of the two attestations from Piers Plowman that the OED uses to date the term’s entry into English:

For persones and parish prestes that shulde the peple shryue, Ben curatoures called to knowe and to hele, Alle that ben her parisshiens. (Our parish priests, whose duty it is to hear the people’s confessions, are called ‘curates’ because their business is to know their parishioners, and to cure them.)³

As David Levi Strauss puts it, “one could say that the split within curating—between the management and control of public works (law) and the cure of souls (faith)—was there from the beginning. Curators have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest.” It’s worth adding that while parish priests were caring for their parishioners’ souls, the inhabitants of medieval monasteries and convents were doing an impressive job of creating, collecting, and keeping safe the written records of civilization.

It’s not until the 1660s that we begin to see the word’s modern sense—which the OED has down as “The officer in charge of a museum, gallery of art, library, or the like; a keeper, custodian”—and again, we have a wonderful first attestation, from the diary of the very entertaining 17th century diarist John Evelyn:

We tried our diving-bell, or engine, in the water-dock at Deptford, in which our curator continued half an hour under water. . . .

Words cannot describe how much I enjoy the idea of that curator’s job.

Curators Take Care

So how does this relate to the work of a content strategist? If we shove aside all the hoopla about “real-time curation” for a moment, the relationship is quite clear. Here’s Kristina Halvorson, from the Brain Traffic blog post about curation:

As content strategists, it is in fact our job to sort through the wasteland of content—both online and within the organizations we serve—to find the really valuable assets, to organize them in meaningful ways, and to ensure they’re properly cared for over time.

Another commentator focuses on the last part of that statement, noting that real curators care for, rather than about, their collections.⁴

This distinction gets to the heart of content strategy’s strongest connection to the work of professional curators, which is that most of our work, particularly with large organizations, involves planning for the ongoing assessment, management, storage, indexing, distribution, and display of content.

In an A List Apart article from last year, content strategist Erin Scime points out some of the connections between editorial and curatorial work:

As if hanging art, the editor-as-digital-curator thoughtfully examines how to strengthen primary content (editorial features) by positioning it with related content elements to support a thesis. But it’s not just that simple. Unlike physical gallery space, the web is a far less constrained space which offers access to multiple dimensions of content at once. . . . That said, juxtaposing timely and timeless content is something that few sites do well—but with this digital curation frontier, there are essentially open skies for exploring this potential in page design and how related content is served up to users.⁵

Erin also includes examples of sites that take a curatorial approach to their content; the NYTimes.com Topics site section, the Times’ multimedia productions, and the New Museum’s online space, Rhizome, which preserves and displays digital works are especially relevant. I would argue that in addition to relying on the usual information management techniques handed down by librarians, any organization with more than a few hundred pieces of content can also benefit from a curatorial approach to information collection, contextualization, and display.

Which isn’t to say that a retail display = curation. In the comments that follow Erin’s ALA article, Margot Bloomstein reminds us that marketing people already have a word for the design of product displays—”merchandising”—and that when we’re discussing the “curation” of product-related content, it makes more sense to switch vocabularies (a distinction that may prevent us from going too far down the path of curated ladies’ underpants):

[I]t strikes me that when articles, news, and information are the main wares of a site, the content strategist can adopt the practices of a merchandiser as well. Retail merchandising brings together products to make new meaning through context. Put all the red items together in a window display, and voila! It’s time to shop for Valentine’s Day! Mix together pens, folders, and lunch sacks, and look! It’s time to go back to school! As content strategists, we may more easily communicate ROI for “merchandising” content, especially for retail clients . . .⁶

Confession Time

Museums and libraries are the physical manifestations of cultural impulses I treasure above nearly all else, but that’s not why I’ve been writing this series. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking so much about curation is because I’m working with Happy Cog Studios and Ralph Appelbaum Associates on the redesign of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website. As my colleague Whitney Hess has written, this is, for many of us, the project of a lifetime.

Working with the Museum’s across-the-board brilliant staff⁷ has been an irreplaceable chance to understand how differently a single organization’s teams and divisions may approach its collections, all while maintaining a very consistent sense of responsibility toward the institution’s mission, audience, and purpose. As a result, I’ve been wrestling with the relationship of the content strategist to the collections of content within her care. In the next post in this series, I’ll touch on some of the principles and tools of traditional and digital curation that I’ve found most relevant to my work as a content strategist.

Dessert

Notes

In the previous post in this series, I suggested that we in web-land tend to use the phrase “content curation” to refer to two distinct activities, and then talked a bit about how we got to the current state of collective hypervigilance about the filtering/mosaic form of content curation.

Today, I want to begin talking about professional curators, what their work might have to do with ours, and how we can get better at our jobs.

I Know It When I See It

As noted extensively elsewhere, there has been a bit of a kerfluffle about the use of the term “curation” to refer to “real-time” filtering/link selection. Before we turn to the world of professional curation, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that we, the web-making industry, have been pretty careless with the term in ways that have—understandably, I think—got up some curatorial noses.

For example:

Content curation has emerged as a new and powerful way for marketers to seamlessly sift through the flood of content available to prospects. Like the owner of a high-end art gallery, you have to sift through the information from across the web and “curate” it to ensure that it is relevant to the customer.¹

In addition to abusing the human capacity for figurative language—seamlessly sifting a flood?—this comment implies that curation is a customer service process intended to ensure relevance. Many professional curators are doubtless interested in audiences, but I think most curators would bridle at the notion that their work centers on the act of culling irrelevant material.

Another post provides a revealing glimpse of what curation means to someone immersed in the jargon of online marketing. Language nerds may wish to avert their eyes.

Content marketing is the hype as it uses content as a currency to get attention of your audience or potential customers instead of paying for advertising. The main drawback of content marketing is the requirement of creating content. For most people creating new original content is just too demanding.

Content curation is aggregation in context. Thus instead of creating content you only have to find, evaluate, sort, filter through the glut of already existing content, then copy and aggregate this content and publish it by your channel in a different format. . . . If you have some creativity adding on your own point of view is still possible in order to have some personal input.²

If that doesn’t make you twitch, consider yourself uninvited to my slumber party.

Finally, there’s Scoble’s now-famous info-molecule post, in which he explains that just about anything you do, up to and possibly including sneezing into a tissue, is curation:³

Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? That’s curation. Or I can order my links in a particular order. That’s curation. . . . Or I can forward those links to you via email. That’s curation.

A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.

Reading these posts, I can see why museum and gallery curators might reach for their revolvers.⁴ The New Curator post I keep linking to includes a reference to a small, informal survey about the primary function of a curator, and the article’s author reports that “not a single person said ‘selecting.’” I sympathize with the desire to distance one’s profession from seamless flood-sifting, but the survey responses did include the following, which hover awfully close to the practice of selection:

Making choices.
Steven Lubar, Director, Brown University’s Public Humanities program

To help people sort through an excess of information/choices and to shed light on objects that might be missed; to sort wheat from chaff.
Kirsten Teasdale, Museum Educator, The Conference House Assoc.

Making choices, making predictions, making connections.
Suzanne Fischer, Curator of Technology, The Henry Ford

If these responses are indeed representative of the field, museum workers clearly do consider prioritization and—yes—selection to be an important part of a curator’s work. Not the only thing, but an important piece of the whole.

Most of us can probably agree that making an ordered list doesn’t constitute curation in any meaningful sense, and I agree with Leslie at the Clutter Museum when she writes that you cannot simply “click to curate.” But somewhere between a grocery list and an exhibition, curatorial skills do come into play. So what’s the difference? Where is the transition between aggregation and something curatorial?

Another handful of survey responses from New Curator provides the missing link:

To act as ‘story keepers’ and to encourage people to interpret the world we live in from different perspectives.
Catherine Manning, Curator at the Migration Museum, History Trust of South Australia

Explore and create connections that artists, academics and the public do not (yet) see.
Francesco Spagnolo, Director of Research and Collections, The Magnes

To draw connections, bring meaning out of the seemingly meaningless.
Emily Hummel, Public History MA student, American University

Connections, meaning, story-keeping. Yep.

Stories All the Way Down

Maria Popova manages Brain Pickings, which is one of my favorite examples of content curation. She makes a good case for using the language of curation to describe the importance of the ability to recognize interestingness:

Curation is all about pattern-recognition, seeing how various and diverse pieces of content fit together under the same taste umbrella or along the same narrative path, so the guiding principle has to be the sole storyteller with a strong point of view.

And the art of curation isn’t about the individual pieces of content, but about how these pieces fit together, what story they tell by being placed next to each other, and what statement the context they create makes about culture and the world at large.⁵

I think that’s an excellent formulation of the curatorial aspects of online filtering-as-storytelling. This sort of content work—that which relies on pattern recognition, storytelling, and the nebulous but centrally important quality of the good eye—is not an analogue of the much larger skillset of the professional curator, but it does aspire to the curatorial. And despite the denigration of “taste” as an element of curation, it does seem relevant: not in the sense of “good taste,” but as shorthand for a particular kind of predictive synthesis.

An Aesthetic Science

Some people can look at a roomful of nearly identical objects and pick the one dress, the one pair of sandals that will sparkle in the eye of a fourteen-year-old girl from Long Island. Similarly, some people can “just tell” which objects will be enhanced through juxtaposition with other objects. Their brains are doing a kind of pattern recognition that synthesizes zeitgeist and history and context and aesthetics and produces something that seems oracular. (Some people do it with math, and that one can really spook the crowd.)

But these processes aren’t literally ineffable, they’re just complicated stories told in deceptively simple ways. Aesthetic “taste” is shorthand for the ability to go straight to the answer without consciously doing all the work required to get there. To some people, some things belong together, and when you put them next to each other, they tell a story.

At its best, this kind of curation arranges units of content into an emotionally or intellectually compelling exhibition that is more than the sum of its parts. In reference to the failings of the controversial 52nd Venice Biennale, one critic discusses the alchemical potential of exhibition curation:

The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one and one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both and create a third thing. This third thing and the two original things then trigger cascades of thought and reaction; you know things you didn’t know you needed to know until you know them; then you can’t imagine ever not knowing them again. Then these things transform all the other things and thoughts you’ve had. This chain-reaction is thrilling and uncanny.⁶

Alchemy is such a great figure for this process: it walks and quacks like a science, but at the core, it’s all correspondences and symbolic resonance and story.

That’s a piece of what one sort of curatorial work aspires to achieve. And if you ask me, it’s what we should hang over our desks as well, whether we call ourselves curators or bloggers or editors or tropical penguins. Whether the frisson is emotional or intellectual, if we’re not making the hair stand up on their arms in a flash of recognition, we have work to do.⁷

In the social media world, posting an ordered list of tweets may feel like curating, but it’s a sad shadow of what curation can be. No matter how many top-ten content-curation skills lists are published, the human ability to spot patterns, synthesize contexts, and tell compelling stories will always be less like combining one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen and much more like turning the symbolic base metals of the physical world into something that glows in the the mind.

Doing It Wrong

Given all this, it’s awfully fortunate that we have access to the world of traditional curation, and to people who have been thinking and writing about these skills and ideas for so long. Unfortunately, we’ve so far chosen mainly to ignore that world, except when we pop up to slander it. From an article on content curation written by someone who works in PR:

There is a certain level of “intellectual snobbery” in existence from the point of view of traditional museum curators (the “purists”). Many museum curators have PhDs in their area of expertise, and believe that it is only with the highest level of education, and many years of research and experience, that one can be a true curator.

Museum curators argue that, when applied to digital content, the term curation is a bit of a stretch, and that content curators are simply filters of information. Marketing influentials disagree and believe that, using a high level of industry expertise, content curators can provide the same value as a museum curator to their own industries.⁸

This is what my maternal grandfather would have called horseshit. It’s an unacceptable oversimplification of a complex field that includes professionals with a wide range of perspectives, and unfortunately, it’s hardly the only example of this tactic.⁹

If you don’t know what a “museum curator” does, as so many “marketing influentials” (which is so not a noun) clearly do not, how can you responsibly suggest that you will “provide the same value” in a commercial setting? The answer, of course, is that you can’t—that you’re relying on your readers’ short attention spans to keep them from noticing that you’re constructing a straw man, labeling it “CURATER,” and then alternately kicking it and suggesting that you’ve arrived to do its job.

So let’s just stop.

The Moral Obligation to Be S-M-R-T (er)

If we pick three links on a topic and put them in a particular order, then no matter what we call it, what we’re doing is linking. This is what the web was built to do, and it can require a certain amount of focus and care. But if we genuinely believe that what we’re doing is curatorial, we should be ambitious for our work and intellectually curious for ourselves, and try to learn from the people who’ve held that title for so long.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to rely on an dated cartoon image of a curator—or to keep guessing about what we imagine curators do and think—because there are plenty of professional curators having interesting conversations on the web.

You could do much worse than to begin with the online writing of Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia. Schlatter has written several lucid and balanced articles about the response of museum and art curators to popular uses of “curation” by web people, marketers, and other groups of people not traditionally trained in curatorial work.

Her article “A New Spin: Are DJs, Rappers and Bloggers ‘Curators’?” includes thoughtful and widely diverging perspectives from a range of professional curators, and is essential reading for anyone who wants to consider content curation within the context of traditional museum and gallery curation.¹⁰ Here, Schlatter quotes Troy M. Livingston of the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C.:

I think the threat to curators is that if we allow anyone to participate, will that lessen the value of what curators contribute? There’s a sense of resistance and fear perhaps in the curatorial profession because of this. [ . . .] The real difference between this idea of Curating 2.0 and traditional curating is scholarship. That kind of expertise to study objects and put together an exhibition for cultural and education purposes is very different than the kind of curating going on in Web 2.0.

In another recent article, Schlatter considers the ways in which “real” curation (my term, not hers) is changing:

the spectrum of what can be defined as “curatorial activity” is simultaneously being expanded in two diametrically opposed directions. At one end, the word “curate” is being used to describe myriad activities not pertaining to museums or art, while at the opposite end is the increasing specialization of the practice as exemplified by introspective theorizing and institutional criticism as well as proliferating academic programs.

This climate of introspection within the curatorial world has provided a wealth of ways to think about the nature of real-time content curation. Here are just a few jumping-off points—you can expect quite a few more to appear in the remaining posts in this series.

Curators on Curation

The New York Times has a light but encouraging article on the current generation of young curators that serves as a nice introduction to the popular end of the curatorial conversation, despite including the hilarious phrase “taught classes in scholarly subjects like letter writing.” Easily twice as interesting, though, is the article’s superb multimedia companion piece, which includes brief audio interviews and images from exhibitions.

One curator interviewed, Clara Drummond, returns explicitly to the storytelling functions of curation:

I think you have to have an interest in storytelling . . . I mean, it’s sort of an old-school idea about what it means to be a curator, but I think that still stands—it really is about telling an interesting story.

On the abstract/theoretical end of the spectrum, Maria Lind, director of the graduate program and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, ponders the scope of “the curatorial”:

At its best, the curatorial is a viral presence that strives to create friction and push new ideas, whether from curators or artists, educators or editors. . . . The curatorial involves not just representing but presenting and testing. It is serious about addressing the query, What do we want to add to the world and why?¹¹

In a fascinating joint interview between controversial curator Jens Hoffmann and artist Julieta Aranda, Hoffmann situates his work in terms of “temporary alliances” between artist and curator that produce “grand narratives that are bigger than the sum of their parts: exhibitions with an epic dimension, if you will, which reconnect to my formative years as a theater director.”

The relevance of these notions to practical concerns like the relationship between online content creators and the people who want to “curate” their work is obvious.¹²

In a 2007 article, Hoffmann is more explicit in his consideration of curatorial work:

Ask 20 people what they think a well-curated exhibition is and you will get 20 different answers. Curating remains a very young profession. It has not yet managed to develop a clearly defined identity, any form of theory or even standards by which to measure quality. This is further complicated by the fact that curating has diversified over the last decade. There are now multiple coexistent discourses on curating that are often not related to one another at all. Many have grown to be very sophisticated and specialized: from the art history–led discussions around collection displays and museum exhibitions to the debate around art in public space, and from the arguments around biennials to disputes regarding the idea of the so-called “creative curator.”

Now that curating has become popular—just look at the number of curating courses offered around the world—in the general eye it is often simply understood as the practice of flipping through art magazines, walking through art fairs or biennials and selecting artworks that will illustrate a clever theme or idea that the curator has thought of. That curating is more complex—something that in fact has a lot to do with experience and the ability to be multi-talented—has not yet reached everyone.

The curator should bring a sense of staging to the exhibition, with the intention of creating a unique experience for the audience and for the works of art. Above all, the curator should have a vision.

I couldn’t agree more.

More Paths

References & Notes

One of the snarls in the content curation discussion is a problem of definition: leaving aside the ethical, aesthetic, and logical questions about the relation of museum or gallery curation to the online world, what do we—web people—mean when we say “content curation”?

Completists may wish to scan the Content Strategy Google Groups thread¹ or the Brain Traffic blog’s curation post comments² to get a feel for the definitional debate, but I’m going skip to the end: it’s pretty clear we’re using one term for two very different activities:

1. Content curation as filtering, selection, remixing, or mosaic. When someone says “real-time curation,” this is what they mean. When someone tries to sell you “curation software,” this is the activity they propose to support.
2. Content curation as the collection, preservation, and ongoing stewardship of content. There are about four people talking about this kind of curation, but those four people are very smart.

Trying to discuss these two activities at once is like making cherries jubilee while hang gliding: fun, but eventually the wrong thing’s going to catch on fire and we’re all going to die. So I’m going to take them sequentially.

Today’s post and its sequel concentrate on the first sort of content curation; the subsequent pair of posts will deal with the second sort. After that, there will be either a wrap-up post with mini-interviews or a long page of velvet paintings.

Filtering Is What We Do

Like the Japanese object-collection game Katamari Damacy,³ the internet is full of things. We need information mediators—spam filters, search engines, journalists, bloggers, friends, family members, government agencies, corporations, non-profits—to tell us what matters.

Happily, information mediation is already a central human function. Our brains filter out vast quantities of sensory info and pass along the relevant bits so that we can function without being distracted by the texture of our tee shirts or the scent of the ink in our pens. We’ve long had human and technological information mediators in place to help us replicate this mental process on a larger scale, but as Clay Shirky has pointed out, these filters have begun to fail.⁴ And thus we see a host of automated, semi-automated, and human attempts to turn Way Too Much Information into Just Enough Information.

This is all pretty straightforward until financial incentives rear up and send us careening into Bat Country.

Social Media Ruins Everything

“Content marketing” is a subset of online marketing and refers to the practice of publishing content online to attract the attention of potential buyers. At its best, content marketing helps organizations develop more useful content and fix broken publishing processes; at its worst, it boils down to such magical thinking as “social media will save you from the recession.” In either case, the field is made up of a voluble online community with the incentive to continuously reformulate its tenets to keep up with a rapidly evolving internet.

Here are a couple of definitions of the filter/mosaic sort of content curation from social media and content marketing people:

A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word “continually.”⁵

Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources . . . on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience.⁶

I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and categorizing and interpreting information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience.⁷

This sort of “curation” is an integral part of what bloggers, journalists, editors, and people with Tumblr accounts have been doing for lo these many years. Its recent cultural prominence is related to the rapid expansion of online publishing, but its sudden popularity on social media websites in particular can be traced to the moment at which organizations began to realize that “creating interesting content” is difficult, expensive, and highly competitive. As marketers sank beneath the weight of unrealistic content production schedules, some began to suggest that instead of creating content, businesses might simply quote from and link to content produced by others.

And thus were born companies, experts, and products dedicated to automating a kind of content curation that—if done poorly—simply replicates the irresponsible waste of human effort represented by the portals of the late 1990s. Except, you know, in “real time.”

Now Panic and Freak Out

Many consultants have suggested that if businesses want to succeed online, they should become content curators. So should they?

The simple answer is no. No one should reflexively pour time and money into “real-time curation,” because reflexes are a lousy way of making business decisions. Furthermore, when it’s used as a supposedly inexpensive substitute for a real content strategy, this kind of content curation is the definition of pounding sand down a rat-hole. You get tired and dirty while accomplishing nothing, and the rat has long since faffed off to watch Hulu. (There is a larger assumption at the root of this misapprehension of online content dynamics, which is that all companies should try to pump out as much “interesting content” as possible as a matter of course. But that’s a subject for another post.)

On the other hand, done well, this kind of curation can be useful to readers and can therefore be an effective marketing tool. Of course, doing it well requires a lot of time and money along with (yes) actual human skill. And the good news is that if you have a real communication strategy and the resources to support an online publishing process, you’re probably already curating content.

Doing It Well

The social media/content marketing fuss about content curation may have led a few marketing teams down the garden path, but it’s been a great favor to the larger community of people who make, publish, and tend online content. We have an opportunity to discuss this subset of online editorial work with a large, passionate group of people from many disciplines—and to learn from actual curators, whether they’re thoughtfully writing about the nature of curation itself⁸ or suggesting that we all have our thumbs removed.⁹

This matters because we genuinely do need to get better at this work. Our readers need it. Our clients need to know how to do it, and to understand the difference between doing it well and doing it poorly.

And that’s what tomorrow’s post will be about. In the meantime, your homework is below.

(Now online: Part II. See also: “Credo: Addendum”

Bonus Smarts

Notes

NEWSPAPERS: “The youngs say they’re curating things, even though they do not work in museums.”

SOCIAL MEDIA/CONTENT MARKETING PEOPLE: “Content curation is the new old newness. You must pure-play some content curation to leverage your thought leadership. It has good info-molecule and is lemon lemon easy thing. AHHHHH.”

NEWSPAPERS: “THIS will save newspapers. This and iPads.”

ACTUAL CURATORS: “YOU ARE FOUL OOZE OF DECADENT COMMERCE.”

CONTENT STRATEGY PEOPLE: “So, you know, this ‘content curation’ thing with the content is sort of what we already do. Here in content strategy where we are content strategists. But it’s not just really about making lists, because you need strategy. For your content. Hi.”

EDITORS: “Wait, isn’t that just—? No, no, forget it. We’re going to the bar.”

ACTUAL CURATORS: “OOZE.”

10,000 BLOGGERS: “Controversy! Curation! Monorail! Jazz hands.”

Names were called. Realizations were had. Many exclamation points went to their deaths.

Watch This Sloth

Now, the debate over terminology and who gets to be a curator doesn’t really grab me—Scoble can call himself World-President Viceroy of Fancy Space Publishing and I will still be okay—but I do think there are some interesting and useful ideas in all this froth.

Since I blog in geological time, I went off to the woods and wrote a five-part series on content curation, which I’ll post every business day or so for a week starting on Monday morning. In those posts, I’ll talk about two very different kinds of online content curation—curation as filtering/mosaic/storytelling and curation as collection/preservation/management—along with ideas, skills, and perspectives from the art and museum curation worlds that may help us do better work.

Edited to add: links!

• Part 1: Curating the Deck Chairs on the Titanic
• Part 2: Between the Click and the Curator
• Part 3: The Curate and the Curator
• Part 4: Slouching Toward the Curatorial
• Part 5: Curation Conclusions
• Also relevant: Credo: Addendum.

Apéritifs

But we’re not really publishers over here in the web content world, so we don’t need to think about this stuff, right?

Eh. If you work in web content, sometime soon, someone’s going to ask you about “premium” content and ads and paywalls and you’re going to have to do better than assuming an optimistic expression and then distracting the client with a cupcake.

Not that I’ve ever done that.

When we talk about content strategy, we are, increasingly, talking about a field that goes well beyond editorial calendars, style guides, and some copy. This is wonderful, but if we’re going to stand up and say “Hey YOU with the org chart, we need your attention, because you’re going to be hiring some new people,” we need to be able to talk about the money thing. Not just how we get paid, but how this whole “Day Two Problem” world gets funded.

So. Details.

Ads: Sucking More and Sucking Less

There are plenty of people who can break down banner sizes and text-ad optimization techniques, and I’m not one of them, so I just want to mention two things about ads and content strategy.

1. Good online ads are relevant and context-sensitive. This is bad news for publishers like The New York Times, which aren’t very good at making cozy, contextually appropriate homes for ads. It’s great for publishers like Nick Denton who build topical blogs with specific audiences that are attractive to advertisers. Likewise, it’s good for sites that are part of the Deck Network, which serves a single, relevant ad per page.
2. Attention is finite, and ads are attention sinks. For most people, there’s a point past which the benefit of “free” content is outweighed by the obnoxiousness of the surrounding ads, which is when they either leave your site or install an ad blocker.

These two things are related. If you’re running a niche site that attracts an enthusiastic, narrowly focused readership that advertisers want to talk to, you probably won’t need to run bullshit ads that smell like  death.

Piling on more and larger ads is an equally bad solution. The higher your ad-to-content ratio gets, the less authority you maintain, and the more of your audience you lose—and then you’re less attractive to advertisers, who can in turn demand that you make their ads even bigger. Classic death spiral.

It’s easy to see why this happens, but the end is not going to be pretty. We need to help our clients think about this stuff.

Subscriptions: Friend and Foe

Subscriptions didn’t keep most print publications profitable even when print was doing well—classified and display ads did. Legal databases, academic databases, super-specialized content . . . that’s something a lot of people or institutions will pay for. News? Bloggy or magazine-style content? Not so much.

That’s the conventional wisdom, which seems to be validated by disasters like Newsday‘s acquisition of 35 whole subscribers in its first three months of operating behind a paywall. Jack Shafer provides a nice summary of paid content woes in Slate:, listing the NYT‘s TimesSelect, the LA Times‘s CalendarLive, and Slate itself as publications that tried and failed to make subscriptions work.

The reality is a bit more complicated, though. The Economist notes that despite the disastrous results some publications see with paywalls, others are thriving:

The two most prominent are the Financial Times, which lets web users view just a few articles each month before it asks them for money, and News Corp’s Wall Street Journal, which charges for much business and finance news. The FT says revenues from digital subscribers rose by more than 30% last year. This year the paper expects to generate more from sales of content—including the paper’s print edition—than from advertising. With the help of its online paid subscribers, the Wall Street Journal was the only big American newspaper to report a gain in circulation last year.

So why do some sites die behind paywalls, while others thrive? Shafer thinks he knows:

Not all successful paid sites are alike, but they all share at least one of these attributes: 1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable. 2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use. 3) They are stupendously authoritative.

He goes on to list examples like ConsumerReports.org, MLB.TV, CooksIllustrated.com and “genealogical, fantasy sports, gambling, and pornography sites”—a collection that doesn’t entirely support his three-point test for content that people will pay for. The Economist, meanwhile, usefully notes that “There are a great many paid-for newsletters, from the Stockman Grass Farmer to the Gaming Industry Weekly Report.”

So what’s the upshot? People will pay for content that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere, either because:

1. the information itself is unique, as with Consumer Reports, Cooks Illustrated, and the Gaming Industry Weekly Report, or
2. the information is surrounded by obviously and uniquely valuable analysis and context, as with the financial newspapers.

The first is an easy sell; the second is a bitch and a half.

If your content meets either of the above criteria, you’ll also be attractive to advertisers. Funny, that.

Marketing

Most content that professional content strategists work with is subsidized by its function as a marketing or sales tool (which, for me, includes corporate communications, customer service, and PR). There are plenty of exceptions, like interface copy, purely informative content, and intranets, but this category covers most content produced by institutions who don’t consider themselves publishers.

It also subsidizes the blogs and personal of freelancers and other independent artists and craftspeople, the publication of most nonfiction books, magazines like A List Apart, and bucketloads of the awful content designed to confuse and clog search engines.

We already help clients ask the right questions about this: Can I afford to spend X amount of time and money on marketing? If yes, great. If no… Am I sure that’s really true? Am I spending more money doing less effective things? (And if I am sure, what can I afford to do?)

Paid Delivery Channels: The New Hotness

The iPad isn’t going to “save publishing,” but the sale of delivery channels via iPhone and iPad applications may be the proof of concept the industry needs to develop a paid delivery model.

At our SXSW panel earlier this month, I mentioned that the iPhone/iPad app frenzy may be useful primarily as a way of training users to expect to pay for convenience. Yesterday, Slate‘s Jacob Weisberg—who certainly knows a lot more about the business of publishing than I do—gave an interview about Slate‘s iPhone app and the notion of training users to fork over money:

My philosophy about this is we want to keep the content free but people to pay for the convenience of delivery in mobile forms…. I think it makes a lot of sense but I also think it’s very important that we train users at an early stage to expect to pay for mobile.

This is important.

Of course, paid channels are  easy to get wrong. The same principles of good publishing and design elsewhere on the web—give users what they want, don’t make them think, make your design both functional and beautiful, plan for long-term maintenance—hold true in the development of successful mobile applications.

We should be helping our clients ignore the hype, focus on those parts of the model that make sense for them, and make smart choices about integrating paid delivery channels into their immediate and long-term plans.

Next week on Incisive: The next big challenge—making it simple.

This is something we need to talk about.

Why Content Isn’t Cheap

Round about the time Amazon freaked out and ostracized Macmillan, a lot of people—many of them Kindle owners—started asking why they should have to pay more than a couple of bucks for their ebooks. After all, there are no printing, storage, or distribution costs for ebooks, so aren’t publishers just being greedy?

A bunch of authors and small publishers—many of them suffering sales losses from Amazon’s tantrum—stepped up and explained why books cost money.

These posts are worth your time, so pop those suckers open in a tab, but here’s the upshot: it takes a village to make a book. Authors, agents, editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, book designers, production leads, compositors, cover designers, project managers, sales teams, marketing departments, and so on. I won’t even get started on the resources required to publish a daily newspaper.

Online publishing also requires resources: planning, big doses of both creativity and disciplined analysis, writing, editing, design, project management, production, ad sales, and so on. It doesn’t usually require a separate person for each of those tasks, but it still tends to be a lot of work—more than most readers and clients tend to imagine.

Paying for It

Many organizations are beginning to realize that they need to include content planning, production, and maintenance in their budgets as well as in their project schedules. (Well…production, at least. And sometimes planning. We’re still working on it.)

But this is really a core part of the argument that people like Kristina and Jeffrey have been making: you have to plan for content, and you have to figure out to pay for it—not just immediately, but over the long term.

Most of us have worked for clients who loved the idea of “fresh” content, but had no idea what it would cost; many of us are also connected with publishing and media outfits that need to find a way to keep the lights on. We need to help our clients figure out how to pay for the content they need, and how to match their content plans with the realities of their budgets.

The right content strategy is the one that meets organizational communication needs, supports good relationships, and fits into the organization’s business model. Some clients may be able to change their business model or organizational structure to suit their communication needs, but many won’t. Some will need to find ways to publish more content; others will realize they should be doing much less. Either way, cost matters, and as content people, we should be able to talk about it.

Luckily for those of us who didn’t go to business school, there are really only a few ways to subsidize online content. Standing around waiting for an electronic media messiah hasn’t worked out very well for most print periodicals, so let’s consider the world we actually live in.

How to Make Money on the Internets

Most of the content on the web as we know it is subsidized by:

• Ads. Both reader-friendly ads, like the Deck network and less objectionable text ads, and hostile ads, like the tasteless diet aid/crappy video game/teeth whitening visual spam that even major newspapers have begun to run. Ad-supported content isn’t really free, even to the reader. If it were, web users wouldn’t be installing ad blockers. More on that in the next segment.
• Subscription/Paid Access. Paywalls, usually ringing only part of a site’s content, force readers to pay for content in actual currency or to gain access through institutions who buy group licenses. The Wall Street Journal uses the individual subscription model, while the Oxford English Dictionary and databases like JSTOR and Lexis-Nexis rely on the group-license model. Some sites will try micropayments, though I’m not especially sanguine about that, myself.
• Marketing. A lot of “free” content is subsidized by its function as a marketing tool for the content producers or the people who pay them. Many, many blogs work this way. A List Apart now runs small ads, but long before it did, it worked as a marketing channel, establishing the expertise and credibility of its publishers and writers. Most non-fiction books are also subsidized by their value as marketing tools: they don’t pay well enough to be worth the effort for royalties alone. Most commercial content strategy work deals with this kind of content.
• Paid Delivery Channels (The New Hotness). The paid iPhone app is a way of getting people to cough up money for content that they normally wouldn’t dream of paying for so they can receive it in a convenient way. Kinda like how we used to pay for newspaper delivery instead of going to the library to read the paper for free. (Spoiler: there is nothing new under the publishing sun.) We’re going to see a lot more of this in the nearish future as publishers realize that the race to free has resulted in a pileup of bleeding, sad people with no income.

That leaves a single category—content created out of love—that isn’t subsidized by anything but the individual’s desire to create, communicate, and be part of a community. For a couple of years, this is how most blogs and personal sites worked. It’s still the force behind most of the content on Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other companies that have figured out how to make money by acting as content hosts and facilitators.

It’s also my favorite part of the internet, but unless your client is a content facilitator or aggregator, it’s not going to help pay the bills.

Part two: Let’s think about each of these methods of subsidizing content and how they relate to our work as content and editorial strategists.

Further Reading

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen organizations buy a CMS, take their same content structure, and simply distribute authoring ownership to every far flung corner of the organization. And let’s not entirely blame the organizations. It’s how CMS is sold.

Yup, that’s a problem.

And another:

You have dozens of users in CMS tool 101 training sessions with no idea why they are there, no familiarity with the publishing model and no incentive to learn how to keep their piece of content up to date which rarely needs to be updated anyway. This never ends well.

Indeed. (Though the “rarely needs to be updated anyway” part describes less and less content as more organizations begin to take content publishing seriously.)

But then we hit the proposed solution to these problems:

Stop letting people use your CMS unless they are an integrated part of your web and editorial team and need to be in it on a regular basis. Even then, they may not need to be in the tool.

Seriously, don’t let them in. Even if they beg.

I admire its cheekiness and empathize with the central content publishing problem it’s intended to fix, but this is a misguided recommendation.

If you’re considering banning everyone but your editorial/IT staff from using your CMS, you almost certainly have one of two problems. Neither is that too many people can log in to your CMS.

Problem A: Broken Workflow

If people in your organization are publishing bad content or aren’t publishing enough content or are publishing too much content, it’s probably because your editorial processes are broken.

A good editorial workflow

• gives everyone a clear update schedule or editorial calendar,
• helps content creators write efficiently by giving them useful guidelines and templates,
• makes everyone aware of what happens at each step of the publication process and how long each step should take, and
• ensures that nothing goes live without appropriate editorial review and approval.

If your editorial workflow doesn’t do those things, it’s failing you.

Start from scratch and get outside help, if necessary, but develop an editorial workflow that does the job. Teach everyone who works on content what it is, why it matters, and how to use it. Make sure the lines of authority are clear and that your editorial and brand guidelines are practical and widely read. And ensure that someone is paid or otherwise compensated for the work of editorial review and content revision, because done properly, it’s a lot of work.

Expecting a CMS to replace a sturdy editorial workflow is like buying a backhoe and calling it a construction foreman. Don’t blame the backhoe when the crew builds an expressionist birdhouse instead of condominiums.

Problem B: Bad CMS Implementation

The CMS Myth article acknowledges that publishing trouble often springs from badly organized content management systems:

They typically expose all the functionality you need to build pages and sites, but they are not organized around supporting task-based content entry.

This is indeed a problem, but again, the answer isn’t to wall off your CMS. If you have a great editorial workflow established and people are using it and you’re still hitting obstacles, you may need to work on your CMS as well. (This is a common problem when a CMS is expected to replace editorial processes, rather than supporting them.)

A good CMS is a valuable tool that can help you save time and produce better content by

• helping content creators understand what to submit and how it will look,
• getting raw content to your editorial team with less hassle, and
• providing a framework (including version control) that supports editorial review, multiple rounds of revision, and your approval process.

If your CMS doesn’t do those things, either refine it or replace it with one that does.

Don’t Stop Believing

So: Review your editorial strategy and processes. Create a workflow that works for your organization. Make sure your CMS supports that workflow.

And remember, we started using content management systems because the old way sucked. No one wants to go back to the bad old days of 4,000 Word docs, manual “version control,” and nightmarish email-based approval processes. Get your editorial processes right and your CMS working correctly, and you won’t have to.