Saturday, March 12, 2011

Feeling aggregated

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, takes an erudite swing of the bat at HuffPo:
“Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. [...] But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.

I can’t decide whether serious journalism is the kind of thing that lures an audience to a site like The Huffington Post, or if that’s like hiring a top chef to fancy up the menu at Hooters.
Ouch.

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