Storytelling in the age of content curation

How time-honored reporting and storytelling techniques play out best in the blogosphere is a debate that generates enough steam to light a small city. As the mainstream media (MSM) destabilizes, no one's certain what – if anything – might fill that "fourth estate" gap. Maybe, as Steve Rosenblum notes in The Huffington Post: "Big things will get smaller, or die. Little things will survive and start to grow. Consumers will become creators. Lurkers will become participants. The volume of voices will expand exponentially – and the need for clarity and trusted filters will go from being useful to being essential."

He argues that we're entering an age of curation, where the editors will skim the cream off the Milky Way of data. "This will drive an emerging class of content entrepreneurs – people who are able to turn their trusted personal brands into high-quality filtered content destinations," Rosenblum writes.

SF Gate Columnist Mark Morford weighs in with Die, Newspaper, Die? "In the howling absence of all the essential, unglamorous work newspapers now do – the fact-checking, interviewing, researching, all by experienced pros who know how to sift the human maelstrom better than anyone, and all hitched to 100+ years of hard-fought newsbrand credibility – what's the new yardstick for integrity? On what do you base your choices? Some fickle mix of personal mood, blood-alcohol level, and how many followers your given source has on Twitter? Right."

As I've pulpit-pounded before, I believe the new world order will always need professional and dedicated semipro storytellers: a tradition that stretches back to our first recorded stories, like the glib gossip of Homer and the war correspondence of Xenophon (I once made my ancient Greek professor hyperventilate by pointing out he was the first, known embedded journalist. Yet I stand by that assertion, however bratty. Who cares if the medium is a papyrus or a pixel?). Creatives – writers, photographers, broadcasters, videographers, designers etc. – will produce, even if their efforts must blend more media to gain attention. And editors will continue to objectively collate the most noteworthy of those projects, while the pundits, the critics, mouth off about 'em.

The industry's challenge is how to preserve a professional layer in this cake, so it doesn't deflate into a puddle of soggy ingredients (or, to use a more common metaphor, the unintelligible, unproductive screaming of a mob). But your challenge is to determine how literary devices, strong reporting and original content apply to the blogosphere – and your stake claim of it.

Art: A sign advertising the Homeless Grapevine, a street newspaper, at Lincoln Park, Tremont, Ohio, U.S.A. By Eddie~S via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.