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.

Ethical Conundrum: How much is too much?

Saving Ethical Journalism —

Aggregation and curation have become a normal part of online news processes. It seems acceptable to take a certain amount of content from a source, as long as you attribute properly and provide outside links, so there's no confusion about where you got the story.

The question is, how much content can you take before you actually felt like you were violating the intellectual property rights of the original author? 10%... 20%... 50% or more? How much is too much and how much is okay?

This is a legal question (10% is the rule in Australia, but U.S. Copyright law does not define a word count or limit), but it is also a question of ethics, perhaps even morality. Credible aggregator Jim Romenesko got flak from Poynter's Julie Moos in November for not putting quotation marks around direct quotes, but Mr. Romenesko's attribution was clear.

But how much information is okay to take, with or without quotation marks? After the frivolous Righthaven lawsuits were exposed for what they are, it seems aggregation can be a Fair Use, but how do we define "fair"?