The other day I was at an entrepreneurial journalism class at the CUNY J-School and somebody said, “Curation is the new journalism.” I was skeptical at first, but after a long discussion of pros and cons, now I agree with most of this premise. One example will be my upcoming project the Xtra Local Group, a group of hyper ethnic hubs to connect and organize international communities in New York. The main motor for generating content will be curation of news by community members.

When Vadim Lavrusik talks about curation in this Nieman Journalism Lab article, it confirms in some way to me the direction that journalism is heading. I agree when he writes that the mentality of content curation has to evolve, and he is right about something: Journalist are now more distributors of verified information to a larger audience rather than producers of that information.

The vertical model of doing journalism is almost dead, it has been dying since the arrival of social media in the last few years. Now, we, journalist, have to work in a new ecosystem, a more richer and valuable journalism horizontal model where we can contribute the reporting and verification skills that we posses to make content more valuable.

It’s not that hard to accept the new reality, just it’s a matter of humbleness to help the media industry grow in the right direction. And understanding how distribution of news works in an ever-growing online ecosystem is pivotal for the future of the news industry.

As the articles ends, if content is king, distribution is queen.

 ”In 2012, there will be even more emphasis not only on curating that content, but also on amplifying it through increasingly effective distribution mechanisms,” Vadim Lavrusik…