A recent conversation with a colleague made me realise that there is a simple way of putting what I have been struggling to say elsewhere in this blog. At the risk of annoying those readers who are already familiar with this, here it is:
According to conventional wisdom, the media business has two basic roles: content creation and content distribution. Creators produce content and hand it over to distributors who negotiate rights with retailers, broadcasters or directly with audiences, and arrange for promotion and placement ('shelf space').
My claim is that this picture is wrong because it misses a third basic role: that of curators. Curators' contribution is to select content; to decide what is important, what is less so, and what is irrelevant. Curators are necessarily human, because decisions of relevance are always human decisions and imply a point of view, judgement and character. All good machine-based curators harness the product of human curators. What curators produce I have called aggregates, and I have argued that aggregates are themselves content, as much as the creations they refer to.
Curators have an essential role in media because without them 'content' could not exist. In opposition to the 'unbundling' and 'disintermediation' theses, I hold that users who 'know what they want' cannot exist without curators who first tell them about what they might want.
Far from being an unwanted obstacle, curators' products (i.e. aggregates) are actively sought by audiences. Nowhere is this clearer than in news, where the basic audience need is the answer to the question 'what is going on', an answer that is itself an aggregate.
For curators, aggregates have a value apart from that assigned to them by consumers: they are a way of influencing the agenda and capturing attention. Advertising only exists in aggregates (from this viewpoint, a brochure is not advertising). Aggregates are always a compromise between curators' and audiences' interests.
These arguments, if right, should appease some of the anxiety that is currently pervasive in the media industry. It may be that there will always be a role for something akin to TV channels and their programmers (even if audiences can get 'anything they want'), or for newspaper editors (even if 'news is commodity'). The formats, the technologies and the experiences will probably change, but the basic role will stay.
The worst mistake that media companies can do today is to fire their curators, stop producing aggregates, and just make all their content available in unbundled ways. (This is not to say that content unbundling should be combated, or that content should be protected from being rebundled by third parties: these are complex questions, and the answers depends on the context). By throwing away their aggregates, media companies may be throwing away their most valuable assets. In fact, if it came to a choice between keeping content or aggregates, in some cases it may make sense to just keep the latter.
Excellent point on the role of curators -- also known as 'programmers' in the TV business.
Mandalan Media has just launched a beta release of such an Internet TV/video aggregator. Strmz.com (said ‘streams’) is a mashup of free Internet TV/video programming from major media outlets; local news and weather in over 30 major US metropolitan areas; popular video-blogs and -podcasts; and new/top-rated content from video upload services like Google Video. Registered members on Strmz.com can subscribe to favorite channels, and create and share playlists and memorable clips. RSS video feeds are available for a variety of topics, or users can personalize their own. The beta program offers participants the ability to publish their Strmz.com video playlist to appear on their blog/website.
The site packages a diverse library -- approaching 30 thousand clips -- of quality Internet TV/video programming into an interactive program guide, designed for efficient channel-surfing, video-searching, and clip-sharing.
http://strmz.com
regards,
James
Posted by: James Brennan | January 30, 2006 at 08:25 AM