While building an algorithm to scan the social web is incredibly important, we can't negate the value of experienced journalistically driven humans and their judgment to derive meaning from quality user generated content. It is technology and human curation in concert that will ultimately forward the curated social web.

Newsrooms, and journalists within them, face an information management problem.

Most newsrooms have for decades been poor at information management. Journalists often work as silos, and newsrooms focus on output rather than process (even assuming that the output is the process). News is an information procurement, information management/analysis and information distribution business - but the first two steps of the process are often overlooked.

It is assumed that journalists or teams of them can manage procurement and analysis themselves. Increasingly though this is a problem. We are confronted with a deluge of information and limited means to manage it.

On the plus side journalists are perfectly positioned to handle this problem. It is their job. They should be spending their time managing the deluge to find the information relevant to the rest of us.

And that information should be data, since digital information is easier to manage. The digitization of the process is only just beginning, but with it comes awesome ability to manage more information faster and better.

A YouTube video is data, a tweet is data, a Reddit post is data, a Branch post is data, a document obtained via FOIA is data - all of that data needs to be managed, parsed and then distributed to an audience of people who don't have time to manage information but need people to do it for them and tell them what they need to know.

We can't forget that the audience a lot of the time doesn't fully comprehend how to analyze the data delivered to them. As journalists and technologist, we have to remember to be transparent and clear in how we're communicating our information and conveying our data.

Or that the audience doesn't want to analyse the data at all sometimes, they just want to be told what's going on and what they need to know.

The source data must remain linked to the analysis though. A newspaper article is not the full story. The audience can then choose to dig deeper or move on.

Certainly. The entire process should be "naked" by default. All the way from the raw data to the finished version that a journalist signed off on. Users should have to power to drill up, down and pivot in all sorts of ways.

Good point Gavin which brings up the other point of not waiting for a fully written story. How early can the story go public? Is the public process part of managing the torrent?