How Maria Popova Curates Brain Pickings

Reading back over a stack of old Fast Company magazines I came across this graphic of the criteria Maria Popova uses to select her Brain Pickings.

Every day we face the firehose of information we've directed at ourselves and every day we seek to find the answers we're looking for in that mass of data. Wherever we are in that torrent of stories, we all need a little help. One of the jobs of a journalist is to offer that help, to curate. As Journalists we do what we've done since journalism began. We filter information down and offer up what we think is the most important, for whoever chooses to read it.

What's interesting about the Popova graphic is it recognizes the importance of knowing what your beat is. No one can follow everything, and no one wants you to. You pick your beat, your subject, and so long as you remain the best source of information on that topic, your followers will keep reading.

Popova reads broadly, and then filters by what's important in her beat, and by what fits well in her feeds. She then puts out what she's found and reported in her blog or on twitter, depending on how much time and effort she's put into it. This thoughtful use of the appropriate platform for the content isn't anything new, but it's worth repeating.

Reporters are curating all the time. Curating may be a job in it's own right, but it's also part of what all journalists do, and whether they choose to share that work or not, and where they choose to share it, is a decision for them and their editors.

We're already curating either consciously or unconsciously in our twitter feeds and personal blogs. The question facing editors is whether one of these feeds crosses the threshold of being worthy of its own page in a publication. And perhaps the challenge for journalists is to create a feed that catches their editors' attention.

Flickr Groups Get A Makeover

Flickr has launched it's newly designed Group pages, bringing them up to speed with the dramatic changes they made in other parts of the site back in May. But is this enough to bring people flocking back to Flickr?

"The new Groups is easier to use, better showcases group photos and discussions" and is easier to navigate and more flexible for admins, says Flickr. And I don't doubt that anyone who's in Flickr and paying their annual fee will love these changes.

But what about people who've moved to Facebook to store their photos? It's hard to imagine them coming back for the Groups function.

So what is the best tool for creating a discussion around photos?

Function Trumps Form On Phones

He might have found a more charming way to say it, but your own experience surely tells you that Jason Falls is right in this rant: Function Will Always Trump Form With Mobile.

With any new page:

• Pages must be responsive from he start, and look good on all platforms.
• The mobile display must be simple, clear, linear, and quickly deliver what the user is looking for.

Falls says:

As we all adjust to the mobile-first audience, we’re going to have to come to terms with some new realities. One of those new realities is that function will often trump form.

And if you haven't started adjusting yet: All pages should be responsive, they should know the browser and platform your reader is using and display the page accordingly. No one wants to scroll through the tiny text of a full sized web page crushed onto their phone's small screen.

How do you build into your day, checking how your pages look on mobile devices? Perhaps start by leaving a Safari browser open in developer mode with an iphone page as your user agent. Or drop your page into Google's mobile page tester. You could spend a day a week only looking at your site on your phone.

It's not important how you do it. It's just important that you do regularly look, as a mobile user, at every page your company produces.

Then you'll know what needs your developers' attention.

Count And Cajole - There Must Be A Better Way To Get Reporters Engaged On Twitter

Ways to encourage reporters in your newsroom to engage in Twitter:

• Ask how many new leads reporters found in Twitter this week.
• Ask how many story ideas reporters found in Twitter this week.
• Ask how many conversations reporters engaged in on Twitter this week.
• Count how many times reporters tweet each week.
• Count follower growth each month.

To get them started, set some minimum requirements:

• Set a goal for minimum number of tweets a week: 7.
• Email reporters a reminder if they don't tweet about their stories.
•  Show them Tweetdeck.
• Make sure their @names are in the email footers.
• Make sure they are following the list of all reporters in the newsroom.

The question is: what's the most simple, clear and measurable win for reporters on Twitter? Something that they can look at and think "Oh yes, that worked, helped my story, made me more productive and saved me time..."

Your ideas?

An Environment for Succeeding

Chris Brogan of Human Business Works  is a tireless campaigner for doing the work. You can have great ideas, you can love what you do and you can dream big, but there's no substitute for doing the work.

He's on a campaign about doing the work right now in his podcast, and here's a post he wrote two years ago on discipline. It's been a long campaign and it always will be, because we're human.

And because we're human you've got to find ways to help yourself and your team stick with the discipline. Brogan mentions Ernest Hemingway's trick, also used by Roald Dahl, for not getting stuck. Basically, only stop today when the going is good, so you've got a great place to start tomorrow.

Next you have to build those tricks into work routines. That's the part Brogan calls "setting up the perfect environment to achieve the goals you have." His example is of a man who can't bring himself to practice his guitar each night until one day he takes the instrument out of the closet and puts it in front of the television. Problem solved.

What's the guitar-in-front-of-the-TV that newsroom managers need to build into reporters' routines to get them to dig in to social media each day?

Phatic

Phatic: Describes communication that performs a social task, doesn't deliver information.

From Merriam-Webster - Definition of PHATIC: of, relating to, or being speech used for social or emotive purposes rather than for communicating information — phat·i·cal·ly adverb. Origin of PHATIC Greek phatos, verbal of phanai to speak. First Known Use: 1922

From Dictionary.com - phat·ic [fat-ik] adjective: denoting speech used to express or create an atmosphere of shared feelings, goodwill, or sociability rather than to impart information: phatic communion.

All of "phatic" is social. But how much of social should be phatic?

4 Cambridge Mass. Citizen Journalism Sites

Four hyperlocal blogs represented on the first panel at Cambridge Community Television's conference "Filling the News Gap in Cambridge and Beyond: Citizen Journalism."

• Cambridge Day
• Cambridge Civic Journal
• The Tech
• Cambridge Happenings