Re-humanising News: Delineating the Trends and Research Scope for Curatorial Journalism

Abstract

The pivot to online news in the last two decades has had far-reaching changes in the way information is created, disseminated and consumed. One aspect of this transformation to digital has been the salience of curatorial journalism – a human-centric practice involving selection of newsworthy content, its organisation and presentation in consumable styles and formats. News curation has been pitched as an antidote to an ecosystem of information overload. While research into the practice online exists in certain contexts, it has been sparse in countries such as India. This paper reviews and synthesises contemporary literature pertaining journalistic practice and roles, news curation and its formats, digital intermediaries and structures of the digital journalism ecosystem. It thematically suggests three approaches that could be adopted by researchers to fill the gaps in the discourse around news curation : the role and identity-centric approach; format and style-centric approach; and, business and economy-centric approach. While the role and identity-centric approach emphasises on how many journalists today work as ‘information “managers”’, the format and style-centric approach delves into how curatorial products may adopt a conversationalised style to engage audiences. The question of the value proposition of curatorial products in a precarious environment is dealt with by the third approach. By placing the discussion of these approaches in the context of four curatorial offerings in the English language Indian news ecosystem, the paper highlights the vast potential of research that exists for a diverse country like India. But at the same time, these approaches would be applicable to other contexts as well, where extant research on curation has been found lacking.