The key to curation is care; an almost single-minded dedication to surfacing what your audience needs to hear and what will enhance their lives.

You can push them out of their comfort zone if you find something they need to hear, but you have to know your audience well enough and be doggedly committed to enriching their experience.

I see a lot of people who do roundups b/c it’s the thing to do, but they don’t understand that curation has very little about what you like (though that is part of it).

It has everything to do with what will enrich your reader’s experience inside your publication.

Like everything else, it’s all about them. There are hundreds of articles I read a week that I enjoy, but I won’t put in a roundup.

The perfect articles are the overlap between what you love and what you think your audience will love. That said, I’ve added articles that I don’t love, but speak to something my audience needs to hear. It happens less often, but it does happen as long as it’s a well-written article.

I can tell the difference between objectively good and subjectively my jam, which is an important skill in any curation.

Ideally, they are a mix of articles they’ve seen a bunch online and haven’t had a chance to read and ones they have never seen but want to amplify.

Curation is an art. It’s one of the best ways to show to somebody you have good taste and bring them deeper into your ecosystem, but if you don’t have that level of faithfulness to your audience, it can easily backfire.

If somebody thinks you have their best interests at heart in all things, then they will be more comfortable going all-in on you, until you break that trust, of course.

However, if you are haphazard with your curation it can easily go the other way, and turn people off.