Aggregators Are Just Not That Good

I thought a lot about news aggregators when we were discussing possible models for the CT Mirror. It strikes me as odd that so many people use sites like Digg and Memeorandum in the first place. Honestly, Digg is just like the news version of Twitter, pushing only the most popular stories to the forefront and neglecting, consequently, anything more contextually relevant. Memeorandum does a great job of grabbing everything but a crappy job of sorting it based on relevancy or some kind of quality analysis. I still use nytimes.com and Cnn.com. Arguably one might say that I am limiting myself and not getting the whole picture of the news that is out there but whose to say that the Huffington Post is either. As for Mr. Dankosky question: No I wont pay for any of it. I wont pay for the Nytimes or the Huffington Post. There are just to many sources of news out there and none of them are so outstanding and exclusive to warrant me buying a real subscription.

Aggregators are great for traditional newspapers, expanding their readership and becoming their "free paper boys." But as a consumer, personally I would rather go straight to the source. On most days, I am not interested in being linked to the New York Post or the Courant. As for the argument by Murdoch that they don't invest in journalism, I think is just annoying. Don't get mad at The Huffington for doing your dirty work or for saving you money. Aggregating is not the same as plagiarism and while I think they certainly have a role to play, I hope that this is not the future of media. There is already enough of a top-down model to journalism. Aggregators just become another filter that consumers have to get through. Some find it convenient. I just think it's superfluous.

WNPR was talking about new stories as intellectual property. I fear this idea. On the one hand, we all need and want quality journalism, good reporting and well-written stories. But for the most part, the news itself is the gold. Just tell me what happened and dont claim it as some kind of entitlement because you discovered it first. It belongs to the public. Yes, a journalist should be given credit but I have a problem with Murdoch's attitude. He doesnt own the actual news part of a story.