Robin Good

For centuries the article was the finished product. It is becoming the way someone finds a resource he can use, and that only works if the sources, your process and your checks stay attached to it. We may be entering an age in which publishing also means making what you know available as pieces that people, and machines, can assemble around a need you never anticipated. Build knowledge resources, tools and apps from what you’ve already written, keeping your sources, reasoning and checks visible.

When AI can fake plausible expertise on demand, what people still pay for is the judgment you paid a real price to earn. When AI can produce plausible expertise on-demand, the one thing left that your customers will happily pay for is your very specific, personal judgment. Five articles, one direction: Knowledge has suddenly become very cheap. Simply producing more content delivers fewer and fewer benefits.

This is no longer just my opinion. Five signals explain why curation, the art of filtering, judging and contextualizing information, is becoming an essential authority-building skill. For years I have been arguing that curation is not a minor editorial activity, nor a way to save time and effort to create valuable content. In my very personal view it can be a way to build authority without having to be great writers, as it requires judgment and pattern recognition more than prose.