Reporting, curation and amplification

Om Malik in his recent article Amplification & the changing role of media writes:

Back in the day, news people made choice by deciding which stories to write. Today, we have to adopt a similar rigor about what we choose to share and amplify. In sharing (on Twitter or even re-blogging) we are sending the same message as doing an original news report. The easy thing is to share or reblog everything, but by being deliberate about it, we are essentially “editing” and telling the world: “this is how I see the world/this particular beat.”

[…] in the future when Dorsey, Zuckerberg and Hastings are no longer an anomaly, the media person’s role is no longer just reporting news. Reporting through sharing and curation are going to be vital roles for us to play.

I agree. If you want to become the lens through which your readers grasp and understand the world — apart from painting pictures with your own words — your job is to curate and share what the others have said.

The aim is to be the first port of call. Not last.

Automated non-curated feeds make you neither first or last (or influential).