From Gatekeeper to Curator

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Good Old Trend

I’ve been meeting with a lot of journalists lately, discussing the new role of journalism and media. My presentation at Hej!2007 and Reboot9 takes up the issue, but I thought I’d lift out one statement which really says it all:

Journalists need to go from being gatekeepers to being curators.

Old Media have been holding people and their stories out for ages. When I worked at Sydsvenskan, we had a person that only worked with keeping in contact with the readers. Sounds like a good idea. But often enough, the job was to keep people away from the journalists in question. Sometimes getting leads, but then following them themselves. A classic gatekeeper.

Let’s look at the opposite. Imagine an art curator running a gallery for instance. You don’t go to the gallery because you necessarily know the artist exhibiting, but you trust the curator enough to go anyway. You respect his/her taste and choices enough to check it out.

Today, what old media has is a brand which is (hopefully) filled with trust and credibility. This compared to your average blog at least. I think they need to leverage that trust and start becoming the hub about what’s going on in the world, rather than having to report about it themselves. If the newspaper says that a certain blog has a good post on the issue, people will click to read it. They could find themselves, but only with great difficulty and without guarantees of finding anything worth while.

A new type of journalism is evolving. Picking out the best stories, pictures, videos and anything else being produced – and then editing it together into a new piece. Adding context, background and analysis. If they start having that approach, I think old media is going to thrive in this information filled society.

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Reboot9 presentation

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At Reboot9. Loving it. Don’t want to blog too much in order to focus on the presentations. Olof is doing a good job of it though, head over there instead.

I had my presentation yesterday. The Box Room was extremely hot and noisy, but it went okay I think. The topic was Old Media vs New Media: news narcissism and the end of having anything in common. If you missed it the slides are here below:

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Going -> Reboot9

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After a great day in Stockholm yesterday I’m off to Copenhagen and Reboot. I suggested a presentation but instantly got some negative feedback regarding choice of topic (the same one I had at Hej!2007). I guess if there’s any conference where it would be okay to be called out as “so last season” I guess it would this one 😉 Either way it looks like I’m holding it anyway, so please feel free to drop by and join the conversation.

The whole Good Old gang are going actually – all nine of us. Could be really good! Last year’s meet up was one of the highlights of the year.

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INJO day three – Douglas Engelbart

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Good Old Trend

douglasengelbart.jpg

Douglas Engelbart is a legend, and one that laid the foundation for his genius in the most impressive way I’ve heard in a long time. Perhaps ever, actually. At the age of 25, he took a few months to try to straighten out what he should be doing the rest of his life. What he realised was that if people don’t get better at collectively using their resources in order to get forward – the world would ultimately crash. So he put together his lifetime goal from this insight, and phrased it like this:

As much as possible, to boost mankinds collective capability for coping with complex, urgent, problems.

This then became the driving force behind his work, and life, for 55 years and counting. _Wow.

Engelbart spoke calmly and with a very humble approach. Today, many of the ideas presented are obvious and integrated in society and systems. Therefore a simple analysis would have been “heard it all before“. But this is where it started. From the beginning. I found it a bit difficult to keep that perspective in mind.

He stated that solving any truly large-scale problem requires collective capability. And in order to do this, one must develop an adequate comprehensive understanding of the following:

The problem situation
The possible solutions
The resources required
The resources available

Engelbart called the way of approaching this the Collective IQ. He also added that the augmentation model was valid over a very large scale, following this logic:

Individual human – Operative IQ
Community of Practise – Collective IQ
A Complete Company – Collective IQ
The World – Collective IQ

At times, the presentation was very abstract and hard to follow. Or at least to summarise in an easy way. Someone more skilled would definitely done it better. Check Technorati to see what others are writing.

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