Leaderboard for week of 2-2-09: Curation edition

This week’s Leaderboard is all about curation.

Yes, the Internet makes information more accessible and has destroyed much of the gatekeeping role that journalists have played in the past, but it also has overloaded people with information. There is just so much information on the Internet that it can be hard to make sense of it all. That’s where journalists can come in.

On the Web, journalists can provide value by acting as curators. Journalists can sift through the mountains of information on a given topic, find the best parts, highlight keywords, link to important documents and help people make sense of it all. Beat reporters in particular have deep knowledge of topics and can harness that knowledge to be strong curators.

The link is a powerful thing. It is the basis of good curation on the Web. This week’s Leaderboard is comprised of journalists who act as curators for people.

They help their users make sense of it all.

Dave Levinthal | The Dallas Morning News

• This is another great beat blog from The Dallas Morning News. Levinthal was inspired by Tawnell Hobbs and Kent Fischer’s popular beat blog. Levinthal has used beat blogging to improve his beat reporting and to connect better with users.
• This is an interesting bit of link journalism. Instead of linking to other news stories, Levinthal mostly links to government documents about the Dallas City Hall. It’s a great way to provide curation of government documents. Journalists can sift through documents, finding and linking to important ones. Journalists can also help make sense of individual documents.
• Many documents, including government documents, are publicly available. Journalists, however, can provide value for users by curating and making sense of all those documents and information.

Kent Fischer | The Dallas Morning News

• Fischer originally blogged about a new Texas senate bill that would require school districts to make public the name of candidates during superintendent searches. He then posted about an exchange that he believes shows why the superintendent search process could use some openness.
• Fischer then highlighted keywords and phrases in the exchange that would be of interest to his users. The phrases he highlighted demonstrated a lack of openness that the Senate bill is meant to address. This is another act of curation. Fischer is able to read longer documents and explain them to users in much easier and digestible terms.
• Fischer and Hobbs have done a great job of getting people talking on their blog. These users often offer incredible insight into the district (many work for it), and they often provide links that can help Fischer and Hobbs report and help other users understand issues surrounding the school district better.

Daniel Bassill | Tutor Mentor Connection

• This post clearly demonstrates the power of linking, and it showcases how asinine it is when journalists don’t link out. If a journalist mentions an article, blog post, photo, video, etc that is on the Internet, it is paramount that he or she links or embeds said content.
• This post takes linking a bit further. It’s not just about linking to content that is mentioned within the blog post, but it’s also about fashioning a blog post around linking.
• In this blog post, Bassil links to articles, Web sites, books and other relevant information on the topic of school reform in Chicago. The value of this post is not only in the original content that Bassil produced but also the quality content that he links to and suggests that others read.
• Bassil knows the issue of school reform well, and he can act as a curator for the topic by sending people to the best content available on the topic.