A new frontier of opportunity is in the ways news is being developed, packaged, and transmitted.
Curated filters are becoming more interactive. From the New York Times offering personalized news recommendations, to this past week's launch of TheDaily, a subscription-based app for the iPad indexed by Andy Baio on the Web, and the upcoming release of News.me.
Personalization has been around for a while. However, there is some increasing experimentation on listening to and picking up or playing the news as it happens. Increasingly, the opportunity is in the field, where the news is developing -- commentary, expertise, imagery, first person accounts, and so on.
Forget the press release. It was always just a delivery mechanism. Not the value itself.
All those pitching with one, do you copy this? Your "copy and paste" release in emails is just about as awkward as someone breaking out in song in the middle of a conversation. Except for the song would be more entertaining.
Curating news delivery
People are getting used to seeing what other people are reading and talking about out in the open -- in public streams like Twitter and Facebook, as well as deeper features on blogs. Stories are being told in more than one dimension and shared across media.
Mainstream media is launching initiatives that more closely align with this new reality. There are a couple of opportunities in news delivery in this movement for you as well:
- starting with building a platform -- where you literally begin the process of creating a content hub on one of your online properties to attract traffic, conversation, and conversion. In essence, you shift your approach from third parties writing the news to publishing it yourself
- moving from the article to the topic -- now your information changes from just about you to your commentary and expert opinion in your ecosystem -- partners, customers, even competitors -- aggregated and presented in a digestible format
- expanding the organization's story -- then telling that story in multiple formats, over time, helps you build context around an offering, how your product is used by customers, and so on
In other words, from your unique vantage point, you could be curating the news itself and showing the relationships around it.
Business is social
The most interesting aspect of the new trends in news capitalize of this idea that seeing what others in your stream are interested in is appealing. We're social animals, even as our time is more distributed -- when we see the information varies. Business is inherently a social activity.
Any way you can find to let your customers see what other customers are reading, favoring, and sharing or saving for future reference gives you insight into what makes sense to produce content-wise. In other words, don't create in a vacuum, put yourself in the thick of things.
You can indeed curate and transmit news in novel ways. Execution matters, of course, just like with everything else in life. See Kenneth Cole... reactions, or rather those to his inappropriate statement. Always make sure you tweet while thinking.
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Here are some power tools for content aggregation and curation.
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