What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism

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Columbia Journalism School | Tow Center for Digital JournalismChapter 6Aggregation: ‘Shameless’ – and EssentialA group of middle school students at Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly Academyof Arts and Letters got a special treat one March afternoon in 2011. Just fiveweeks after the announcement of the $315 million deal in which AOL acquiredHuffington Post, AOL’s chief executive, Tim Armstrong, and Arianna Huffington,HuffPost’s co-founder, came to the school to teach a class in journalism.The lesson—or what one could see of it in the short, treacly video accountthat ran on the Huffington Post—may have told more about the future of thenews business than what either Huffington or Armstrong intended. 1 A few momentsafter the video begins, an official of the program that arranged the visitspeaks to the camera: “We are delighted that Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrongare going to be teaching a lesson on journalism.” What the video showed,though, wasn’t a lesson in how to cover a city council meeting, or how to writeon deadline. Instead, the teacher in the classroom told her students, “We’re goingto give you headlines that we pulled from newspapers all over the place, and youguys are going to place them and decide what type of news they are.”This, then, was a lesson in aggregation—the technique that built Huffington’ssite up to the point that AOL wanted to buy it.In just six years, Huffington has built her site from an idea into a real competitor—atleast in the size of its audience—with the New York Times. The HuffingtonPost has mastered and fine-tuned not just aggregation, but also social media,comments from readers, and most of all, a sense of what its public wants. In theprocess, Huffington has helped media companies, new and old, understand theappeal of aggregation: its ability to give prominence to otherwise unheard voicesand to bring together and serve intensely engaged audiences, as well its minimalcosts compared to what’s incurred in the traditionally laborious task of gatheringoriginal content.Aggregation: ‘Shameless’ – and Essential 83
The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital JournalismHuffPost’s model has provoked sharp criticism from, among others, Bill Keller,executive editor of the New York Times, who, like Captain Renault in “Casablanca,”appears shocked that aggregation is going on. 2 “Too often it amountsto taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own websiteand harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators ofthe material,” Keller wrote. “In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere,it is a respected business model.” He wrote this even as the Times’ ownsite has demonstrated the power of aggregation in many ways, notably in a blogcalled The Lede, which has deftly captured the tempo and texture of such ongoingstories as the protests in Iran and the upheaval in Egypt by blending Timesreporting with wire reports and original material from outside sources. 3In fact, almost all online news sites practice some form of aggregation, by linkingto material that appears elsewhere, or acknowledging stories that were firstreported in other outlets. An analysis of 199 leading news sites by the Pew Projectfor Excellence in Journalism found that most of them published some combinationof original reporting, aggregation and commentary and that the mix differedconsiderably depending on the management strategy, the site’s history and—tobe sure—its budget.Pew categorized 47 of the sites it surveyed as aggregators/commentators and152 as primarily producers of original content. In the aggregator/commentarygroup, fourth-fifths of the sites were online-only; of the original-content group,four-fifths were connected to traditional media. 4 Traffic is highly concentrated atthe top of the list, with the top 10 sites accruing about 22 percent of total marketshare. Seven of the top 10 sites are “originators.” 5What is surprising is that consumers use these different kinds of sites quitesimilarly. Original-content sites do marginally better at keeping visitors for longerstretches and leading them to more Web pages, but it is hard to imagine thatthis slightly higher engagement is enough to help cover the costs of originalproduction and reporting.84
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What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism

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