Aggregation tests traditional notions of sourcing and accountability

 By David DesRoches

 “A thousand bloggers all talking to each other doesn’t get you a report from a war zone. Somebody’s got to take a real risk... [and] gather that news originally.”

- Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales,

in Page One documentary

Media blogger Jim Romenesko gained a Twitter following of more than 45,000 people (and growing) by being a maverick paraphraser — a sensei in the art of finding interesting news and distilling it to its essence. His success germinated while working at the Poynter Institute where he helped pioneer an aggregation style that now permeates the web. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of hits to other websites, giving them free advertising through his enticing summaries.

           

In late 2011, Romenesko’s aggregation techniques became the subject of hot debate and derision when his boss, Julie Moos, posted a blog that challenged his practices and claimed his attributions were incomplete. She provided examples where Romenesko failed to include quotation marks around certain phrases within his aggregated story.

Correcting a correction and the power/danger of unverified facts

 By David DesRoches

Publishing an unverified fact is an opportunity to challenge traditional notions of power as it relates to truth gatekeepers. It is not, however, an excuse for sloppy journalism.

The danger of publishing unverified information made headlines recently, after CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers published a story that claimed Mitt Romney’s former employer, Bain & Company, was a consultant during the auto company bailouts overseen by the Obama Administration.

The story was pulled after Bain’s PR president challenged the connection, claiming it was incorrect and demanding a retraction, to which CNBC promptly abided. But then it was learned that the report was correct, and that the correction was wrong, as Craig Silverman notes on Poynter.com. So Javers wrote another story, but not before the webomino effect ravaged the blogosphere, claiming CNBC didn’t operate by basic journalistic principles of fact verification.

Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik was one of the more outspoken critics, Silverman notes.  Even after the original story was proven correct, many remained convinced that CNBC's failure to properly verify the fact was its cardinal sin. 

Within the firestorm of criticism, there is an interesting dichotomy: What if Javers had contacted Bain & Company successfully before he wrote the first story, but the company lied to him about the connection, as they obviously did in their retaliation to his story?

Business Insider story advises Patch to "keep scraping content"

A former Patch salesman advised the company to keep scraping content, ostensibly because "cheap content is king."

Nate Carter, I am glad you have high hopes for the future of local news. But tell me, why should an editorial department listen to a salesperson about content generation? I'm sure you have an intelligent perspective, but the mingling of news with sales in any way is exactly where journalism should not be going.

But this is beside the point. Consider Mr. Carter's grand homage to Huffington Post's (over) aggregation techniques:

Keep scraping content. This should be done at HQ. Have 4 or 5 low-level staffers at Patch HQ who just content scrape from around the nation. We all hate it, but see point #2. This could be managed with simple Google News alerts and a copy and paste technique. If they perform well they could be promoted to the Huffington Post.

Does this only scare me? How could anyone talk so blatantly about plagiarism as if it were normal? (The #2 he referred to mentioned a heavier load for the local editors, so I'm guessing that scraping would help them hit their story quota. I almost think this entire post is sarcasm...)

Aggregation can be a great story supplement, and smart aggregators such as Jim Romenesko offer a valuable service for content creators. But over-aggregators such as the Huffington Post straddle an ethical line and in some cases cross that line and leave it in a dust-filled distance. 

Sometimes over-aggregation could be copyright infringement. It's not fair use if an aggregation provides enough content to prevent a person from visiting the site where the original story was published, as this post by AdAge's Simon Dumenco illustrates.

Some of Mr. Carter's suggestions to make Patch more efficient make sense. Patch should cut its editorial staff, but the suggestion to employ freelancers to cover beats is already happening, at least at some Patch sites. 

The bottom line is we should all be appalled that content scraping is being suggested. What happens when we scrape the scrape of a scrape? When does it end?