How does featuring work on Current.com?
Hello Current.com’ers!
We occasionally receive questions asking us how stories get picked for featuring on the homepage, or how one story made it to the homepage over another. So in an effort to clear things up, I thought I’d run through some of the sections of Current.com and layout some details regarding our featuring processes.
First, it’s important to note that staff is a part of the Current.com community — always has, and always will be. Contributions from our community help shape the content we program and feature, and there are sections of Current.com dedicated to showing the top community stories as submitted, voted on, and commented on by our community. But in addition to these community curated sections, there are also areas that are reserved specifically for staff to use to program featured content — both community submitted and editorialized by our online producer team.
Current Stories
This section is on the homepage, and it is refreshed occasionally with topical content submitted by the Current community.
We focus primarily on community contributions, and we try to make sure that the stories featured here are timely, contextually relevant, and that they are not duplicate posts. People who submit trending stories before anyone else on Current tend to wind up featured, and this has nothing to do with preferential treatment. When you notice that your post was not featured, check to see if it is too similar to a previously submitted story by doing a search on keywords and sorting by “newest.”
Homepage Channels
Each channel on the homepage has two sections:
Featured: this is noted by the “star” image and the stories in this section are picked by the online producer for the channel. They can be either community posts or a staff submission (usually a callout for webcams, comments, or a blog post pointing people to a new feature, tool, or other notable piece of original content). Each one of our online channels on the homepage has a corresponding online producer who acts as a host and moderator for that channel. They pick the story featured in this spot, and it corresponds with the first story featured on the channel homepage. The story picked for this spot can be a relatively new submission, or a popular trend.
Community picks: this is noted by the “#1” and “#2” symbols, and the stories placed in these sections are the top two most popular stories as determined by the Current.com community on that channel. These are determined strictly based on popularity alone — a result of votes, views, comments, and shares on the submitted story.
Channel Homepages
The channel homepages have a featured section (we call it the playlist) and a popular ranking section.
Stories for the featured section are picked by the online producer, and the first story is the same story that is featured on the homepage in the channel featured section (see above).
The popular ranking section is all determined by community activity, and the top 2 stories are the ones “picked” to feature in the “community picks” section of the homepage channel module. Our online producers also write blog posts that get featured and highlighted on our site in various places.
To clear up one fundamental misunderstanding: we have some staff members whose sole job is to produce video content for airing on Current TV. These pieces range from shows like infoMania and SuperNews! to Current News recaps like the following video recap of the Neda story from Iran [WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES].
The way we represent these pieces of content on Current.com is via their staff profile, which we clearly mark with a green staff badge. This isn’t showing preference, it’s simply calling out when and where we contribute to the site.
I hope this helps clarify things. Please understand, we realize that some of this can be confusing (and in turn frustrating), so we have been discussing some design changes that could help call these distinguishing sections out better in the future. In addition, I’ll be working on a series of “meet the online producer” and “meet the online community team” posts to help get you guys better acquainted with some of the names and faces you see around the site.
If you have any feedback or suggestions, please post a comment below or feel free to submit them to our Current.com feedback threads on Get Satisfaction.
