The curator

If you've grown up in the UK with the BBC, how public broadcasting works in America can seem very strange.

National Public Radio (NPR) is in many ways the equivalent of Radio 4, but it operates largely on donations and isn't enormously popular except among certain constituencies.

However, there's some fascinating stuff to be found on there, including the famous This American Life, and a technology-related idea that's come around more recently.

NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin has become well known over the last few months because of something he's been doing online: he's become a 'curator' of the various revolutions and protests that have been going on around the Middle-East, staying up all hours and posting on Twitter what he hears and what's he's sent by others.

You can read his Twitter posts here.

In an interview with international development blogger Ethan Zuckerman he says:

Tunisia is so rarely covered by any mainstream media, and yet for several weeks I saw Twitter and Facebook lighting up with one protest after another. And once things started getting violent, around the time of the Kasserine massacre, I really started to try and get my NPR colleagues following along. And that's about the time I decided to create a Storify collection on it, since I hadn't seen anyone else do one. That was somewhere around Monday of the final week of protests.

The Atlantic asked him if what he's doing is a new type of journalism:

I think curation has always been a part of journalism; we just didn't call it that. Think of the word "media." It's about being in the middle, between the story and the public. The job of a reporter is to capture the most important elements to tell a story, and then go ahead and tell it. Watch any breaking news story on TV and you'll see curation going on. They'll quote sources, pull up clips from wherever, pass along info from pundits, etc. So curation itself isn't new; it's just the way that some of us are doing it online that's fairly new. The tools have evolved, but the goal of capturing a story and turning people's attention to it isn't.

Those links are from an interesting Metafilter thread on Mr Carvin, in which he himself pops up half-way through to provide more explanation.

A more recent Guardian profile on him based on an interview at the SXSWi festival says he balks at the definition 'curation':

I've never been a war correspondent and I don't know how to do it." If he hasn't quite worked out what to call what he does, though, he winces at the description of his journalism as curation. "I know what I'm doing is a form of reporting. I just don't know what kind of reporting it is."