What does The Huffington Post teach us about content curation ?
Last year Bill Keller in an article about aggregation wrote this about the Huff Post " The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come. How great is Huffington’s instinctive genius for aggregation? I once sat beside her on a panel in Los Angeles (on — what else? — The Future of Journalism). I had come prepared with a couple of memorized riffs on media topics, which I duly presented. Afterward we sat down for a joint interview with a local reporter. A moment later I heard one of my riffs issuing verbatim from the mouth of Ms. Huffington. I felt so . . . aggregated."
In terms of News Curation it is our view, mentioned in a previous post that the Huff Post fits in the category of a Content Commentator and it certainly has many points of difference to simple news aggregators.
However if we take the key points from the Keller quote above which of course was to some extent made with tongue in cheek, we can learn some important lessons from the Huff Post's successful approach to content curation. The lessons can be sumarized as follows
1. Understand and target a specific audience.
2. Curate and or produce content for your chosen audience.
3. Occupy a distinct position in terms of political alignment that appeals to your target audience. This has been demonstrated to be a trusim for both left and right leaning news curators/aggregators.
4. Use a myriad of people paid and unpaid to contribute to your content be they professional journalists , subject matter experts , academics, bloggers or celebrities who appeal to your target audience.
5. Carefully select , link and curate content from established and respected third party media that appeals to your audience and enhances your own whole product.
6. Finally for the founder , senior editorial staff and key executives use every public speaking opportunity or exposure to other media to market your publication.
On that note we would like to share the video below to demonstrate lesson 6
Right I'm off to get some sleep.
