“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.
