news
Society | DOI: 10.1145/2398356.2398365
Marina Krakovsky
Just the facts
In repackaging other companies’ news, some news aggregators
are diverting readers and ad dollars, and, critics argue,
undercutting the incentive to spend money on original reporting.
It is an economic and ethical problem without a clear legal fix.

LAst YeAR, siMon DuMenCo, a columnist for Advertising Age, found himself at the center of a minor media maelstrom. A blog post he had written for AdAge.com went viral, getting picked up in one form or another by several other sites, including Techmeme and the hugely popular Huffington Post. By now, the topic of his piece (Apple’s launch of iCloud getting upstaged on Twitter by the “Weinergate” scandal) is old news. What remains timely is the window the incident opened on a big question for the struggling news business. Do news aggregators—which include AOL’s Huffington Post, Techmeme, Google News, and the many other sites that profit from recycling news stories first reported by others— help or harm the news organizations whose material they use?

a Broken Market

PHOtOGRa PH by MICHa El Rub Enst EIn

For many news people, the answer is obvious. The Wall Street Journal’s managing editor Robert Thomson has called aggregators “tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet” and Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, has likened Huffington Post’s practices to Somali piracy. Whether portraying aggregators as parasites, pirates, or petty pickpockets, critics make the same basic argument: Aggregators free-ride on the efforts of others, taking readers and ad revenue that would otherwise go to the companies who financed the labor-intensive work of actually breaking the news. “When the Huffington Post reproduces much of the article, even if it gives credit to the Times and the reporter, they are undermining the market for the original product,” explains Joe Mathewson, a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

arianna Huffington, co-founder, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, a leading content aggregator.

 

Business journalist Robert Levine, the author of a book about the free-rider problem in the culture industry, puts it more bluntly. “We have a broken market,” he says. “If it’s so easy to make money aggregating, investment is going to go to aggregators.” It becomes less profitable than ever

Do news aggregators
help or harm
the news organizations
whose material
they use?

to fund investigative reporting, for example, or to send journalists overseas. Dumenco points out that because aggregation is far cheaper than original reporting, aggregators also drive down rates for advertising, traditionally a major source of newspapers’ revenue. And although some newspapers have set up paywalls to earn subscription dollars, aggregators make it more difficult to do so successfully, Levine says, since readers can now get much the same information for free elsewhere. This system seems inherently unsustainable and bound to bankrupt the very content sources on which aggregators rely.

But defenders of aggregation, most notably Arianna Huffington, do not seem to worry. They counter that what they are doing is “curation,” giving readers the most interesting stories from a broad range of news produc-