In 2009, Wired‘s then-executive editor, Chris Anderson, released a book with a daunting prediction. In Free: The Future of A Radical Price, Anderson claimed that the open-air marketplace of the Web made information, essentially, worthless.
“There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing,” he wrote, evoking futurist Stewart Brand’s now-famous words: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive … That tension will not go away.”
The main caveat Anderson offered to this brave new world was the role of “curator.” Though information might be free, it would need people to assemble, dissect, and package the glut of what the Web makes available–a new kind of editor for the digital age.
Time has proven him right. Though Anderson was writing in the midst of a world that the Web was just beginning to disrupt–two years earlier, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal had dropped their paywalls (both have since been reinstated)–his theory of curation has only expanded in the past five years.
Sites like Facebook, still relatively nascent in 2009, arose as the current era’s algorithmic gatekeepers, determining what has global reach. In a piece published Tuesday, The Pew Research Center signaled the site’s dominance over other social media platforms in driving readers to news stories, pointing out that a figure comparable to 30 percent of the US population gets their news from Facebook. While this doesn’t mean those readers are more engaged–as Pew points out, they’re less likely to read other stories on a site–it’s still a game changer. Brands like UpWorthy exist solely to generate an audience for other people’s content. Recent CJR cover subject Elise Andrew has faced ongoing criticism for using other people’s content to build her brand. Some of these problems–like not linking to sources and using photographs without proper permissions–fall under copyright law.
But beyond the failure to credit properly–which, as Web culture has matured, has become an issue more curators are fixing–is that this act of repacking and curating allows this newish breed of digital worker bees to capitalize on creating an audience, even if they haven’t generated the content that draws it.
Those savvy enough to know what keywords, hashtags, photos, and introductory text will satisfy platforms are the ones with the most influence over what has reach. And since these audience creators aren’t going away, the tension between those who create content and those who capitalize on it to generate an audience–which translates into more clicks, more ad dollars, and more income, all thanks to the original reporters and wordsmiths–can only grow more fervent. In economic terms, it seems unfair that curators can make money off the backs of reported content; journalists have been rallying against it for years. But as social media opens the door to a much-increased audience pool, it’s worth understanding how this shift in gatekeeper changes the flow of information.
“Digital technology, for better or for worse, has changed the paradigm,” says Mike Godwin, an attorney and author who was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Of course, bloggers and digital sites like BoingBoing, Gawker, and The Huffington Post have been generating revenue on a similar model of curation–taking news, aggregating, adding commentary–for, in some cases, decades. But Facebook comes with a built-in audience of the almost everyone: According to founder Mark Zuckerberg, the average American spends 40 minutes daily on the site. It’s a dynamic environment that allows an enterprising person, hitting on the right moment in site’s constant algorithm tweaking to access a potent tool.
Beyond all that, gaming algorithms have led to a Web that, rather than being a meritocratic system, where the best information rises to a broader audience while crap falls away, cat memes still reign supreme. Unlike legacy media gatekeepers of times past, who had standard practices to determine what content merited broader reach, today’s ringmasters work without them.
Maria Popova wants make sure today’s curators treat this power appropriately. Popova, founder of the popular curation site Brainpickings, is leading a group of curators championing a ‘curators code,’ replete with a tiered system of symbols for crediting content–from “via” to “hat tip.” Still, while standardizing the method by which content creators are credited helps push more traffic back to the original source, it doesn’t change the reality that audience-generators are major players in the media game.
“Some incumbents in the copyright industry were hoping to turn back the clock,” Godwin says. “I think the tide on these issues on the direction of our continuing to allow, at least in the near term, these kinds of exercises where people post links to things that they’re interested in.”
According to Nikki Usher, an assistant professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, the founders of the Web were “operating on a gift economy,” and working within educational institutions championing free information, so they overlooked the idea that copyright wiggle room would become a problem for users’ livelihoods.
“In the perspective of the open Web,” Usher said, “it’s better for content to be read than not and better to be shared then not shared.”
While the spirit of open information remains, things are more complicated today. It’s not just about who gets a financial reward; the ability of curators to generate a specialized audience also shifts the kind and quality of information we receive. While magazines and newspapers cater their content as a whole to a particular audience, individual stories can’t alter according to the interests of an individual. Comparatively, the stories we receive on Facebook are dependent on our connections to friends–people who are likely to think like us–and an algorithm that pushes content at us reinforcing and reiterating what we’ve already clicked on, liked, or shared.
“If you publish a lot of stories about crime in a particular neighborhood, people start thinking that there’s a lot more crime in that neighborhood then in others,” explains Pablo Boczkowski, a professor at Northwestern University who studies journalism in the transition to digital.
Of course legacy media isn’t immune from pushing an agenda, intentionally or not, by what stories they choose to cover and how they promote them. But broadly speaking, we’re familiar with the rulebook of journalists. With curators, it’s all still up for debate.
Alexis Sobel Fitts is a senior writer at CJR. Follow her on Twitter at @fittsofalexis.