Yeah! This is a key thing, I believe, for news orgs who want to leverage the “socialâ€. What this says to me is that “news†is not limited what we produce, but what we curate as well. If we say we are “serving†an audience, then what WE produce cannot be the end of what we open to that audience. LINKS, therefore, become a REQUIREMENT for the “curated collectionâ€. This is SO TRUE in particular for religious organizations, who, it seems to me, serve a GLOBAL and DIVERSE audience. That audience is probably not looking ONLY for content PRODUCED by us, but also for content to which we can LINK them. In other words, our job as religious news organizations is to CURATE, because with church and theological issues, there is NO one source which can give audiences what they need, nor can there be, nor SHOULD there be.
In 2011, news organizations will finally start to realize that they need to be in the business of serving the consumer’s information needs, not just producing content, and any tool that allows them to serve those needs is fair game.
Jonathan Stray is absolutely right. And it is with church related communications and “news†that this is as true, if not more so. As a United Methodist, I do not look for material and info that is produced only from or about UM sources, and I know nobody who confines their search or their “subscriptions†to only UM Sources. So why would ANYONE want to make a denomination or a church website or portal page their “home page� Only if that location provides a “center†for communications. It has to be SOCIAL: It provides updates and notifications of thelatest activity in my relevant communications (email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) And it has to be a wide enough curation collection to make visiting this location compelling enough for me to depend on it for keeping me informed about the things I want to be informed about.
