Acronym

Good post, Joe---and I'm not just saying that because I sit three feet away from you.

One thing I'd say, though, is that there's a reason why "curation" is a four-letter word in journalism circles: It emphasizes the job of gathering and summarizing the relevant information that's *already out there* at the expense of the warm bodies who are capable of *creating* new relevant information. In that sense, "curator" is closer to "research desk" than it is to "editor," let alone "reporter."

This isn't just a matter of semantics. Research-desk work is a valuable thing that will only become more important as more information gets sprayed out there. But in the same sense that a reporter starts at the library but eventually has to work the phones and walk the pavement, information-gathering efforts are just the start of what curation ought to be. The best "curators" (or whatever we want to call them) will be the ones who not only collect information but can also a) identify where the available information falls short and b) solicit people to successfully fill in the gaps. You address that point in the last graf of your post, but I wanted to draw a bright line under it, because it too often gets lost in the shuffle in these conversations.

When I think "content curator" I don't think so much reporter as finding the right content to plug into certain channels. The nuance part, to me, is picking the right content to plug into each channel, given that each has a different audience. I find the challenging part to be that now, instead of just focusing on one audience: members, we have to find content that's relevant to many different audiences. If your association has a Facebook page, for instance, suddenly you have to provide content that's relevant to all the fans of the page--whoever they may be--students, parents, members, potential members, etc.

As you said, there is already so much information out there; to be able to weed through it all on a daily basis and figure out what would be of interest to x, y, and z audiences and get it out there does involve, in my opinion, some level of artistry.

My dot-com years (founder of a web portal subsidiary of a large trade association) taught me that content aggregation was/is key. In the ideal world, we have an efficient process for collecting, translating and sharing all that we know with our core audience, with the appropriate rights and permissions allowing enough of this knowledge to be accessible to non-members/customers/users to entice them or keep them informed to further our mission. I hadn't heard of a content curator before but it sounds like the role of secondary researcher & reporter .. as long as it somehow addresses the other negative connotation I'd see in the term, which is that of 'curation' as a backward-looking discipline, concerned with accurately retelling the past, rather than telling me what is going on today and why this might have bearing on what I should do today and tomorrow.

The journalists lens is more appropriate in considering this function's role & core competencies, but I also see it as akin to conducting and relating primary vs. secondary research: I often see neither of them done well, particularly when it comes to putting all the pieces together. Many associations will tell me that they are storehouses of information yet as an outsider I find that most of this knowledge is tacit: the volume of web content doesn't cover much of what the association produces, and associations don't do enough to link out to the right pieces of content that others have prepared. If I was in livestock management, chances are I want to have a single starting point to figure out what's new in cows, and I'd appreciate it if figuring that out didn't take long before I'd have to go out and face the real thing. The association site arguably should be that starting point, fed by a healthy volume of push email/e-newsletters, print, webcast etc. but often it's not, measured by total peers who go elsewhere for this information--to another portal, to many sources, or the personal/probably ungainly personal info center I've been able to construct through RSS feeds.

I'll defer to your understanding of curtain being a part of reporting, but when I think of the term I think of it from the artistic side of the house and not the analytical. Museums and publications often have guess curators because they bring a specific point of view in the choices they make for a collection of works. It is this very subjectivity that is valued in contrast to the objectivity people generally associate with reporting (but not opinion columnists obviously). It's not just aggregating and editing in the mechanical sense I think some might associate with it. Any web algorithm can do something like that. It's the human filter here that is distinct and valuable.

What Jeffrey said ;)

Thanks for the comments everyone. I agree with everything you've all said. Here we go into semantics again, but perhaps we need a word that captures the qualities of both "curator" and "reporter."

These roles you've mentioned are all indeed roles that associations should be filling as hubs of information for their members:

• via Mark: on-the-street or on-the-phone reporting to find and assemble the info that is important
  
• via Maggie: a keen sense of the audience (or multiple, varying audiences) one is sorting and delivering info to
  
• via Kevin: skill in aggregating info quickly and being the starting point for people who want it (and this means pointing to sources outside the association, not necessarily being the source of the info)
  
• via Jeff: context, perspective, and opinion
  

I think this is reflective of the general trend in all forms of media right now that is a convergence of the aspects of curation and reporting.

• In the past, curators gathered information over long periods of time to tell our history, but now our history is being captured and documented in almost real time.
  
• Reporters, in the past, often were the sole sources of primary information and the only ones with publishing power. Now anyone with eyes and an internet connection can publish their first-hand experiences (and opinions).
  

All of this is to say that you're all right. And my main effort in equating curators and reporters is to argue that this doesn't have to be a revolutionary idea for associations. It's merely an evolution or enhancement of a purpose they already pursue.

Semantics are important and words do matter . . . particularly if they spark intelligent discussion (like that occuring above) into nuances of meaning, and prompt one to look at the rote processes and the justifications we have for same from a fresh perspective and with a critical eye.

But, at the risk of sounding curmudegeon-ly, I have a certain amount of PR-hyped jargon fatigue. And too often, that is all that this amounts to. People are tired of talking about mission, so let's talk about vision. No, let's talk about mantras. Knowledge management is so 1980, let's call it open sourcing expertise. No, let's talk about being knowledge curators.

A large body of consultants, authors, speakers, seminar providers depend on coming up with such fresh hooks to entice new audiences to their latest re-packaging of the same old stuff. Too often that is all it is, a gimick. Once you peal back the shiny wrapping and actually apply some intellectual rigor, there isn't much new there.

I think Mark makes an excellent observation, and we ultimately have to decide if there is any "there" there.

A new term though can refresh our thinking about something we've let grow stale and/or expand our notion of the value we might wring from an effort we've dismissed because the label we attach to it has become a cliche.

Or it might make us question whether we had done the original activity correct to begin with. For me, that's been one of the productive outgrowths of the energy I've seen in people's response to Guy Kawasaki's "mantra not mission" assertion at great ideas 2010. Call it whatever you want, apparently many folks are part of organization's who don't have a purpose articulated in a compelling way that engages passion and incites action on a daily basis. That's an opportunity area.

With the risk of being lumped into Mark Golden's "large body of consultants": curation has both a supply side (in the context of Joe's original post, the reporting) and a demand side (where discoverability, relevance and ease of access are significant considerations).

Reporters typically collect information for a single use (an article, a profile, a blog post, etc.) That approach leaves a lot of data on the cutting room floor. To make full use of the information that reporting generates, associations need to both train their "reporters" (who could be executive directors as readily as staff or freelance journalists) to capture and structure content in ways that support subsequent reuse and repurposing.

A few for-profit organizations (Bloomberg comes to mind) are already doing this. Information collected for one purpose is structured and reused for many purposes and audiences, depending on the market requirements. The demand spans both place and time - the archives become as important to some users as the real-time information is to others.

Figuring out how to link content to markets - meeting the requirements of the demand side - probably exceeds the skill set and interest levels of those doing reporting. That's where a second, editorial voice becomes more important. Editors have long been charged with deciding what gets published. In an era of (digital content) abundance, their new role will be to figure out how great, curated content will get discovered.

About a year ago, I wrote a couple of posts that touch upon the evolving nature of curation. The audience was a for-profit (book publishing) audience, but they may be useful here. You can find them at http://bit.ly/WWm9A and http://bit.ly/94pVhm

I don't offer these as solutions or alternatives, but a range of people outside the association space are thinking about and often struggling with these issues.