Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Jay Rosen, featured by LinkedIn Pulse. To read the complete article, check out others, and sign up to receive email alerts, please click here.

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Does This Beast Have a Soul?

At a recent event produced by the NY Daily News Innovation Lab, I had a chance to interview Adam Sharp, head of news, government and elections at Twitter, and Niketa Patel, news partnerships manager.

The part I bring to your attention — and ask you to watch if you have a special interest — is in reply to this question…Going into this event we knew that Project Lightning — a Twitter improvement scheme that launches this fall — will curate best-of-Twitter streams on big topics and big events. We knew it would hire professional journalists to create that product. We knew it was meant to solve problems of discovery for users who are not experts.

Things we did not know: Twitter’s editorial idea here is… what?

Or does it even need one at this stage? Is it better off without? That is part of what I meant by asking Twitter’s News and Government team: does this new beast — curation Twitter, editorial Twitter — have a soul yet? Would a platform company already have that kind of thing ghosting around within itself? Or does it go outside and obtain it somehow?

Here’s the clip, about eleven minutes including follow-ups. (Excerpted from this video by the Daily News Innovation Lab.) Specialists: watch the whole thing. Generalists and the time-starved: read my commentary on the other side.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article as well as to the video that accompanies it.

Jay Rosen is associate professor of journalism at New York University