newsroomnext

OK, blanchor is a terrible job title, but it’s the best something I could come up with to describe the duties of a blogger/anchor for your Web site. (Other ideas: Anchogger? Webitorialist? Newsguide? Network weaver? Node manager? Node master? Web anchor? Wanchor? Oh, my, now there’s a job title that sings. Wanchor.)

A blanchor anchogger webitorialist newsguide node master (that one makes me laugh the most) would:

1. Guide your customers to your site’s content by providing links, summaries, analysis and reasons why your stories are worth the expenditure of the limited currency of their attention;
2. Guide your customers to any Web content related to your content. That means linking to and summarizing content from competing news outlets, blogs, information sites, user-driven sites (YouTube, flickr, etc.) and the 10,000,000 (and counting) other sites I’ve forgotten but Google will never forget.
3. Transparently republish variations of your content through social-networking sites. By “transparently,” I mean be clear that you are a journalism organization pushing its content through distribution channels that draw or direct immense amounts of attention.

Why do this?

As we move further away from an information-control business toward an information-networking business, these abilities of a journalism organization will become increasingly important and may present money-making opportunities:

1. Filtering and integrating information;
2. Verifying the quality of information;
3. Connecting information nodes in a massive, constantly changing network.

There are more abilities to list, but these are the most relevant to node mastering.

And if you have a better job title, please leave it in the comments. I’ll write a separate post highlighting the top five.