Category Archives: aggregation

Salon.com: If the Web doesn’t kill journalism, Michael Wolff will

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Andrew Leonard: "Newser is hardly the first Web site to try to gin up a lot of traffic via sleazy aggregation. But the arrogance with which [Michael] Wolff tries to pretend that what his operation is doing is some kind of evolutionary step forward in the news business -- "Read Less. Know More." -- deserves a special award for effrontery."

ReadWriteWeb: Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source

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"Moka Pantages, the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation ... discuss[ed] how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. ... by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. ... 'There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation,' Pantages said. So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site."

Wired.co.uk: Mobile news apps vs tweet-led link economy

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Peter Kirwan: "Promiscuity is limited by the opportunity for discovery. Searching for alternatives to stories that pop up inside your app will cost you time. And for most mobile users, that's a commodity in short supply. On this basis, it's a racing certainty that some news publishers perceive apps as a way of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again, on the mobile web at least. ... Suddenly, our work-flavoured, ADD-like, promiscuity-fuelled browsing for atomised content on laptops seems like just one scenario among others."

Editor & Publisher: More Readers Skimming Google Headlines Than Going Directly to Newspaper Web Sites?

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"The 'News Users 2009' study conducted by Outsell Research affiliate analyst Ken Doctor found that 19% of people accessed Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL News for news in 2009, up from 10% in 2006. For newspapers, 19% of those polled went there first, a drop from 23% in 2006. ... Fully 44% of those polled said they scan headlines on Google 'without accessing the newspaper sites,' the report said."

Temple Talk: Rest in peace, E&P: Killed by an aggregator

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John Temple: "It's easy to underestimate the power of aggregation. But the truth, in my view, is that Romenesko replaced Editor & Publisher long ago as the place where journalists turned to find out what was going on in their world. It's not limited by one medium or industry. It's timely. And it's deep. The magazine couldn't compete."

The Shatzkin Files: Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change

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"Aggregation ... simply means pulling together things which are not necessarily connected. Curation is a term that has always referred to the careful selection and pruning of aggregates, such as for a museum or an art exhibition. But the concept in the digital content world means the selection and presentation of these disparate items to help a browser or consumer navigate and select from them. Aggregation without curation is, normally, not very helpful. Curation creates the brand."

Slate Magazine: Introducing News Dots

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"News Dots scans all the articles from major publications—about 500 a day—and submits them to Calais ... Each time two tags appear in the same story, this tool tallies one connection between them. ... s this tool scans hundreds of stories, this network grows rapidly, and "communities" begin to form among the tags. ... The news network that results is visualized using Slate's custom News Dots tool, which is built using an open-source Actionscript library called Flare."

SimsBlog: Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves

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From a great list by Judy Sims: "Most newspaper employees are not qualified to do the strategic thinking required to manage disruption let alone create it in the form of new products that may challenge the core because they still see themselves as print newspaper employees. Just stating that you are a 'news' company instead of a 'newspaper' company doesn’t make it true."

Hartford Courant: Courant Reviews Aggregation Policy

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"Last week, The Courant received a letter from The Journal Inquirer managing editor that prompted it to review our aggregation strategy. We found that there were legitimate points of concern. Most importantly, we discovered a mistake in our editing process when we take articles from our website to our print newspaper. We found that we inappropriately dropped the attribution or proper credit and in some cases credited ourselves with a byline to a Courant reporter. Once made aware of this mistake, The Courant took immediate steps to correct the process.