Aggregation: A Brave New World?
August 24, 2011
As I’m typing this article on my computer, I must confess, I love pen and paper, the smell of a new book, the sound a newspaper makes when its pages are turned. Unfortunately, these physical things are slowly becoming extinct thanks to the internet. Though I stubbornly resist the allure of Kindle, I can see the writing on the wall, or the tablet.
The article How the Internet Has All But Destroyed the Market for Films, Music and Newspapers from the UK’s The Guardian, believes the impending death of physical newspapers, among other media outlets, is due to the lack of law governing and enforced on the internet. According to it, as long as information can be easily pirated and transmitted to others for free, those footing the bill for creating the movies, music and news will continue to see sharp declines in profits.
Image source: http://www.sreweb.com/weekend_emails/sept_10_2010/
To understand how the internet is killing the newspaper star, one must first understand why newspapers have worked so well for so long. It’s all about aggregation and curation. Aggregation is simply the gathering of ‘stuff’; in a newspaper’s case, that stuff is news stories, sports scores, horoscopes, classified ads, etc… Curation is the culling out of unnecessary ‘stuff’.
Newspapers have created brands for themselves because of their unique aggregating and curating. For hundreds of years if someone liked a column in a specific newspaper, they were forced to buy the entire paper to read the one column of interest. The newspaper hoped that the reader would also find the other articles interesting, but it didn’t really matter because the price of the newspaper was the same whether a reader liked one article or all of them.
Now, thanks to the internet, that is no longer the case. If a reader likes one column, they need only to search online for the author and follow them on Facebook or Twitter, paying exactly nothing to the newspaper. Ditto for all the other components of the newspaper. This conundrum circles back to the Guardian article’s premise – as long as media fodder is available for free, no amount of aggregation and curation will deter its increase in popularity.
Christopher Mims, of Technology Review, disagrees partially with this conclusion. The article, Why All Local News Aggregators Seem Destined to Fail, complains that due to impersonal aggregation of news stories (algorithm based), websites featuring ‘local news’ suck, to be blunt. As the article explains,
Attempts to create “local news” sites that span the entire country are prima facie problematic. What makes local news interesting and relevant is the very thing about it that resists homogenization — its individual, local character. Yes, Starbucks is ubiquitous, but that’s because Starbucks managed to impose its character on the entire country. A news aggregator, on the other hand, has to reflect the character of every place it purports to cover.
The answer according to Mims is not to throw up our hands in defeat, like the Guardian suggests, but rather to go back to good old fashioned people-based journalism. Only through real people investigating real stories, interacting with other real people, will local news truly be newsworthy. Mims believes this can be done on the internet, certainly, but the legwork must be completed by a human.
As curation is becoming more and more necessary in an internet-based economy, aggregation must also be considered, and not written off as an irrelevant art form. The publisher of Beyond Search (Stephen E Arnold) has set up a separate Web site to showcase his team’s aggregation services. If you want to know how his approach to content can help you be found, navigate to Augmentext and check out the examples.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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