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Publishing content on the Internet requires at least two stages:

1. The creation of stories, which includes researching, data collection and writing.
2. Editorial care -which many now call “curation”- which includes scrutiny of stories and editing.

In the media this distinction results in different roles. On one hand you have the reporter who researches and writes stories, and on the other, the editor that who polish refines and organizes them.

While some create the stories, others “curate” them.

Call it a newsroom or a lone blogger’s room, every piece must be cured curated before being shown to the public. The same happens in art galleries.

The editorial curator organizes the reporters’ stories and monitors the agency wires, but in the current context, he also has to read blogs, be aware of dozens of tweets or  “trending topics” on Twitter and in general, be on top of any relevant social networks such as Facebook.  (That’s just for starters.)

Many modern newsrooms/editors have made significant technological advances in order to deal with the filtration of stories that come from all over.

Multiple creators

The current complexity of modern curators’ work stems from the increasing multiplication of creators. It’s not just reporters who produce stories.  And this simple fact turns on its head traditional journalistic methods where a single reporter investigates, compiles the story and delivers it.

This multiplicity of authors, combined with the fact that each story is only half a story (there will always be another voice, another source, a hidden fact), invites us to rethink that first stage of creating stories.

“The story is always open and voices overlapped and even confronted do not stop enriching it.”

And the art galleries could also help us reflect on this matter.

The Museum of Broken Relationships first permanent gallery was opened in Croatia in October 2010.

Two Croatian artists, Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic, who had been together between 1999 and 2003, decided to break up.  But instead of destroying all those objects that had some meaning for them only, they set up a museum and invited others to send in their items that had been left behind after break-ups.

Olinka and Drazen created an interactive story that brings together more than 700 objects, making the museum a place where people can still share their own individual histories and compare them with others.

The story is always open with voices overlapping and even when confronted do not stop enriching it.

Is this a model for web content production?

Some people argue that it is precisely the qualities of a medium such as Internet  -multimedia, flexible, open, curable – which enable us to create stories in this way.

Open stories

There are already emerging experiences and some newsrooms have their area of interactivity in which, with varying degrees of success, they generate discussions on specific topics and create stories by exchanging experiences.

“As every comedian knows, it is not the polite applause at the end of the performance that counts, it is the laughing in the middle.” Clyde Bentley, journalist and academic

But they are usually marginal areas. The newsroom of the future, if it wants to better reflect complexity, should put interactivity at the heart of their daily production.

Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk argues that rather than closed pieces, with introduction, body and conclusion, the stories need to be an assembly of positions, a lively and open debate, from the very beginning.

Journalism like this would give more prominence to the route (the production), over the final destination (the publication). Or as the journalist and academic Clyde Bentley put it:

“If we adopted that storyteller standard of pausing until someone in the audience says, ‘And then what happened?’, our attitude toward publication and deadline would change. As every comedian knows, it is not the polite applause at the end of the performance that counts, it is the laughing in the middle”.

Read the comments section in What “engagement” means to The Guardian’s Meg Pickard

Each piece in the Museum of Broken Relationships has its place and complements the story with no one rushing to a conclusion. In open journalism, every voice would also have its own place in a story without end, without conclusion, without full stop …

What do you think?

Other readings

• Doing curation right
• Curating: The cure for credibility in online news?
• The Role Of Curation In Journalism
• Joris Luyendijk: ‘The old model of journalism is broken’
• Exquisite Corpse 2.0: Collaborative Story Writing with FoldingStory
• The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators