Following up on my post yesterday about information overload, I wanted to expand a little bit on a term I used: information sherpa. I first used a similar term “video sherpa” in a post for a Carnival of Journalism about the future of online video. I wrote:

Perhaps a new form of journalistic curator will arise – the video sherpa, a journalist who guides others through the mazes of videos on various platforms like YouTube andVimeo to find the nuggets of related content that are worthwhile, a la Andy Carvin‘sNPR tweets about the Middle East.

I should specify that I’m using the term “sherpa” in a specific sense. Wikipedia captures that essence here:

Sherpas were immeasurably valuable to early explorers of the Himalayan region, serving as guides at the extreme altitudes of the peaks and passes in the region. Today, the term is used casually to refer to almost any guide or porter hired for mountaineering expeditions in the Himalayas. Sherpas are renowned in the international climbing and mountaineering community for their hardiness, expertise, and experience at high altitudes.

Another way of looking at our age instead of as “information overload” is to look at it as a mountain of information. News consumers who want to be informed, to stay on top of events that are important to them, need to find a way to scale that mountain. And they don’t always have the tools or experience to do so. That’s where a modern journalist can carve out an important role. The journalist as sherpa guides the info-mountaineer through the dizzying peaks and passes of the mountain of information, finding and presenting just the right information to help reach and stay on top of the mountain.

But I want to be clear about some things that are happening that are not what I mean by an information sherpa. The sherpa is not the mountaineer. The sherpa is not the mountain. The sherpa is not the treacherous weather that attacks the mountain suddenly. I’ll explain what I mean:

The sherpa is not the mountain: As I mentioned yesterday, there are too many sites on the internet that aren’t really providing high quality information. They’re posting intriguing photos and blurbs, or they’re posting barely disguised press releases, or hastily re-written information provided by quality news sources to juice page clicks. Those people are part of the mountain of information. They keep piling up the heights before the information consumer.

The sherpa is not the mountaineer: This is not the first time the sherpa has climbed the mountain. The sherpa knows a path through the mountain of B.S. masquerading as information, and is guiding the person who’s trying to make it up the mountain. More than ever, a journalist can’t be a generalist. Generalists get taken in by misinformation, slant, faux controversies and technical jargon meant to obscure rather than illuminate. A journalist needs to do everything possible to become fluent in whatever topic she is covering, learning who’s got an agenda, and when that agenda is shading the information she’s receiving. A sherpa doesn’t take the easiest path, but the best path.

The sherpa is not the weather: One of the most dangerous aspects of the ascent of Mt. Everest is the extreme and quickly changing weather, which can include high winds and sudden storms. In climbing a mountain of information, an info-mountaineer can experience frequent wild swings of information that can knock one off the path – useless information, sudden Twitter storms and Facebook outrages, breathless reporting about silly products and gossip about famous people. A true sherpa isn’t the weather. A journalist worth his salt doesn’t traffic in such chasing the weather. A sherpa stays the course, is aware of the weather, and knows to avoid its traps.

Many others have focused on the analogy of journalist as curator. But I think I prefer this analogy more. I would love to know what others think. I also think this new paradigm should influence how we train college journalists for the future.

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Last week, my intro to multimedia classes discussed RSS feeds, and why they were a good thing. I love RSS feeds for keeping up to date on matters at the intersection of technology, journalism and college media. A lot of people have started using Twitter as an alternative to RSS readers, but I don’t find that a good thing, necessarily. The real problem for me is the amount of information that come through the RSS reader in a day. I was amazed at how much content some of the blogs I follow was pumping out in a day, so I decided to try an experiment. I “bankrupted” my Google Reader yesterday (Monday, Jan. 30, 2012) at 4 p.m. Central Standard Time. There were no unread items.

It’s now 2:30 CST on Tuesday, and I just went in to see how many items were in the unread RSS inbox. As you can see, there are 276 unread items. And I don’t follow any traditional media outlets (NYT, Washington Post, etc.).

The main contributors to this RSS glut?

• TechCrunch (42 items)
• BoingBoing (40 items)
• GigaOm (32 items)
• PSFK (30 items)
• Lifehacker (26 items)

Five sites, 170 new items in less than 24 hours!

Now, granted there’s probably a lot of good information in some of those blog posts, but who can keep up? I’m sure most people don’t read all these firehoses of niche information, preferring to focus on one or two. But if you’re trying to stay up-to-date on the latest happenings in a certain area, it’s not always an option.
It’s no wonder one of the more recent tech terms to become a buzzword is information overload.

I’m sure someone has a workable situation for this conundrum. I think one of the things we’ve created with the fast pace of the Internet is the need for constant content, some of which is little more than a picture and a blurb from another blog or a press release. And that’s not helping us get quality information, much less act upon the information we’re getting.

This isn’t specifically a college-media-related issue. But as journalists of the future, one of our college students’ key functions will still be to serve as trusted curators or information sherpas for people who don’t have time to follow all this content. And that means they will have to find strategies and tools to go where the information is and discover what’s important without having to spend hours in front of a screen sifting through stories.

Related articles

• Information overload? – Use of RSS web readers as content filters (marketing.yell.com)
• Value Of Curation Comes Identifying Patterns And Synthesizing Information Overload Into Practical Business Advice (waterwayrealty.wordpress.com)
• RSS Update: Not Dead, But On The Watch List (battellemedia.com)
• RSS feeds make comeback with tablets and apps (kevin.lexblog.com)

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Can a Good Journalist Be a Good Capitalist (Carnival of Journalism): Good discussion this month on whether journalists can put aside their proletarian sensibilities and use the tools of the entrepreneur to ascend to the bourgeoisie.

Student Press Version of ‘Lazy Higher Ed Journalism’ (College Media Matters): “There are simply some stories that on a scroll through the archives of any student media outlet pop up again and again and again, sometimes with a fresh spin (although many times, not so much), but always with the same core issue or topic intact.” Man, have we all been there or what?

What’s your problem with the internet? A crib sheet for news exec speeches (Online Journalism Blog): This is actually a couple of years old, but it’s been updated, and, really, the content is evergreen.

10 Inspiring Social Networks for Writers (Mashable): Social networks aren’t just for posting photos of your family and cats. If you’re a writer, these might be sites to explore.

New York Times releases code to help journalists collaborate on WordPress, other platforms (Poynter): The plug-in has a “track changes” feature that looks promising. Here’s hoping it receives further development.

The Death of the Editor and the Rise of the Circulation Manager (Brain Pickings): Brain Pickings is a site that’s found it’s way into my regular RSS rounds because of posts like this. And she finds an essay that points out that everything old is new again. She writes, ”so long as we have a monetization model of information that prioritizes the wrong stakeholders — advertisers over readers — we will always cater to the business interests of the former, not the intellectual interests of the latter.” Yep.

Google already knows you’re a 24-year old woman who loves wombats (Ars Technica) I never looked at my Google Profile until I read this article. It was pretty close. You can see your own Google profile here.

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Via College Media Matters, news that the paper formerly known as the Daily Universe at BYU is cutting back to a weekly print publication. You can read more about the decision at the Daily Herald.

I’ve long held that more publications will head down this path, as the Red & Black at Georgia did earlier this year. And I’m glad they dropped the “Daily” from their name, because “Daily” is a worthless appendage in an age of 24-hour publishing ability.

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As much as possible, we try to stay clear of politics on this blog, but there’s a pair of bills before the US Congress that, if passed, would have a huge negative impact on the Internet we all know and love. The bills are the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

A number of Web-based companies are blacking out portions of their sites today in protest against the measures, including Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, Reddit, BoingBoing, Craigslist and others.

The Internet isn’t broke, and there’s no need for a new US law to attempt to fix it, with all the unintended consequences that entails.

The best thing US citizens can do is contact their elected representative to oppose the acts. You can find information to do so here.

Here’s more information:

Wikipedia

Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF)

Reddit

WordPress

Google

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