Aggregation and Curation
What’s it going to do for me?
Over the past week, I’ve learned about something I should constantly be thinking about in a new age of media. For my future newsletter to be successful, I need to aggregate and curate meaningful content.
The Huffington Post has promoted the idea of aggregation and its ability to give prominence to otherwise unheard voices and to bring together and serve intensely engaged audiences.
As I look back to some of the stories I’ve written for The Brown and White, I think about how I could have used aggregation to give readers more information.
For example, I covered Pete Souza, former President Barack Obama’s official White House photographer. Souza spoke about his time from Obama’s inauguration to his last steps onto Air Force One (leaving the White House on Trump’s inauguration day).
Souza’s voice isn’t necessarily “unheard,” as he has fiercely engaged followers. Even if you didn’t know Souza took the shot, you still recognize the former President and the meaning a photo can have on history.
So, what does Pete Souza giving a lecture at Lehigh University mean in terms of aggregation?
I wrote this story in a few hours after Souza’s lecture and had to send it off to my editors the same night. If I had more time to report, and was taught this lesson on aggregation beforehand, the story would be so much better.
Souza presented his photos with details of what was happening behind the scenes. In my report, I spoke about some of the moments he captured, but didn’t analyze. This is where I could have linked to other sites or borrowed others’ ideas.
This image displays Obama bending down to a young African-American boy so the boy could touch his hair. It was a symbolic moment for Obama, Souza explained, but The New York Times gives the story real justice, which I didn’t have time to do in my reporting.
Check out Jackie Calmes story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/us/politics/indelible-image-of-a-boys-pat-on-obamas-head-hangs-in-white-house.html
Here’s another moment I reported, Obama sitting on the Rosa Parks Bus in the Henry Ford Museum. To learn more, though, Eyder Peralta wrote a NPR article talking about what this photo means in history.
That article can be found here: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/04/19/150970124/photo-president-obama-sits-in-rosa-parks-bus
Spending some extra time aggregating leads to huge benefits. In fact, I learned that aggregation benefits original-content producers as much as it does the aggregators.
I did it just now by linking both the writer and outlet that wrote stories on these photos. The links are from the original publishers, and I made sure I didn’t reprint any information from the original stories.
These simple steps make my story so much better, and it didn’t take too much time. After all, I am just gathering others content and giving credit where credit is due.
There is so much to say on the topic of aggregation. I think the main lesson I took from this week is to spend a few extra minutes after reporting to keep digging. The more reliable content you give to your audience, the more they’ll want from you.
