Megan Garber of the Nieman Journalism Lab wrapped up two interesting and complementary nuggets on social media curation in the last 24 hours. Reporting on a panel on social media best practices at the Journalism Interactive conference in New York, Garber quotes New York Times co-social media editor Liz Heron to the effect that her job "probably will not exist in five years." It's not that social media will vanish, Heron says; it's that they'll emerge from their current primordial soup and suffuse all media, abrogating the need for specialist hand-holders. Elsewhere on the site Garber passes on an intriguing development from the BBC, which is switching its @BBCNews Twitter feed from mostly auto-generated content to human curation. (The Beeb is making the change in an appropriately stately and measured fashion: “What we’ve done is turn off the auto-feed on @BBCNews during the UK daytime,” BBC social media editor Chris Hamilton told Garber. “That’s the first stage.”) Hamilton calls the change "tweeting with value"; as Garber points out:
human-tweeted headlines are almost always more effective — more engaging, more inviting, more generally interesting — than headlines that are obviously auto-tweeted. Send out some humanity, get some back in return— we know that, anecdotally and implicitly. The real question, Hamilton points out, is how best to navigate that knowledge, particularly given news outlets’ typical mixture of limitless ambition and limited resources. How many people will do the job of tweeting? In shifts, or working collaboratively? Would a cyborg approach — some tweets that are auto-generated, some that are editor-written — be more efficient than an all-human affair?
These are the right questions to ask, and both Heron and Hamilton suggest a nimbleness and flexibility that serve their organziations well in a transitional time. In years to come we may find that the philosophical question posed by the Aaron Altman character in James Brooks' great Broadcast News -- Is it news if we don't cover it? -- gets displaced by a narrower one: Is it news if we don't tweet it?
