If it squeals like a pig

Today’s “curators” are editors without the flair.

If you’re playing buzzword bingo, “curate” is a sure winner. I have been sitting in meetings the last few weeks slightly puzzled, listening to people talk about content curation. Could very well be that I’m totally out of the cultural loop. So I dug around a bit and didn’t take more than a single Google search to hit upon Curation Nation, the new book by Steven Rosenbaum.

I give Rosenbaum a ton of credit – by dressing up an old idea in new language and recruiting a bunch of new media pundits to glow about it, he’s created a mini-phenomenon. I’m sorry but it’s blindingly obvious – and has been since, oh the late-90s – that content consumers (you and me) need editors to sift through the inane, insane and basically time-wasting shit that flows unceasingly across the Internet.

I personally have a soft spot for the cigar-crunching ink-stained wretches of old-school journalism (and that’s just the women). Yes, we need a filter for the sea of crap that flows to our inboxes, and across our screens. Yes, it needs to be a human (even when it ceases to NEED to be a human, we may simply prefer it). And no, it should not be called a curator. Editors edit. They select, they trim, they filter. It’s what they have always done. Curators curate, which sounds at the same time more genteel and more like a white-trash process for turning road kill into jerky.

All organizations today are publishers – whether that’s their main business, or it’s confined to b2b communication with their partners, suppliers and supply chain folks. And where there are publishers, there must be editors. Curators need not apply.