...“Mainstream news organizations have endured a skeptical public for decades,” said Kjerstin Thorson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
Now, she says, social media companies may face similar, and perhaps jarring, scrutiny.
Facebook declined to say how many people have editorial roles, as did Instagram, which Facebook owns. But several other companies provided some details about their operations that suggest the scope and variety of their editorial ambitions.
Snapchat said it has around 75 people who produce content, collecting and annotating videos and photos of live events and sometimes adding on-the-scene reporting themselves. Twitter employs just under a dozen people in the United States and around two dozen worldwide to collect and describe postings about notable topics.
Vine, the video service owned by Twitter, employs five to 10 people to highlight videos and producers that might have been overlooked by the audience, or that the company simply wants more people to see.
Vine employs five to 10 people to highlight videos on its site.
“Where curation picks up,” said Ankur Thakkar, the editorial lead of Vine, “is that you need human eyes and ears to pick up on a cultural trend that a machine might not see.”
In some cases, these teams coexist with media professionals working elsewhere on the platform. Peter Hamby, a former CNN political reporter, oversees a team of six journalists within Snapchat, while media companies — including CNN — produce content for the company’s Discover feature....
The role of curation seems to be growing within social media channels as well as traditional media. This is recommended reading for marketers and content producers. 9/10