Lexicon Entry

Curated

Curated. A small selection of items chosen by an editor with a defensible criterion, presented as a complete recommendation rather than as a comprehensive index. The word has been overused; the practice has not.

On the word

To curate is to select, with intention, from a larger set. The practice is older than its current online vocabulary; the word is not new and the form was practiced (under different names) by every editor who ever picked five poems for a magazine, five books for a season’s review, or five things for a recommendation letter that the writer was willing to put their name on.

The word has been overused, in our reading of the past fifteen years of consumer-internet writing, to the point of meaninglessness. Every email newsletter, every shopping site, every algorithm-generated landing page now describes itself as “curated.” The editorial standard the word is supposed to invoke — that a human being made a defensible choice on the reader’s behalf — is, in most of those cases, not actually present.

What we mean when we use the word

When Top Picks Report describes its lists as “curated,” we mean three things specifically. First, that an individual editor has read, used, listened to, or cooked with every entry on the list. Second, that the editor has applied a defensible criterion (which we publish in the piece itself) and would defend the choice in conversation with a reader. Third, that the list is intended as a complete recommendation — meaning that the items not on the list are not on the list because the editor does not recommend them, not because the editor failed to consider them.

The third property is the one that distinguishes editorial curation from algorithmic recommendation. An algorithm cannot tell you what is not worth your time; an editor’s job, in part, is to do exactly that.

On the limits of curation

Curated content is, by design, partial and opinionated. It does not replace comprehensive reference work — when readers ask “what are all the calorie-tracking apps available on iOS?” the right answer is the App Store search, not Top Picks Report’s list. The right reader for a curated publication is one who has decided that the time-cost of evaluating the full universe is higher than the cost of trusting an editor whose criterion they have read.

This is also the structural argument for editorial transparency. A reader cannot intelligently trust a curated list without seeing the criterion the curator has applied. We publish ours.