Losing on aggregate

Until a couple of years ago, if someone had mentioned 'aggregate' to me, I'd have expected them to either be talking about European football results or concrete. Now though, it's a term that's becoming more and more common in media usage.

Today Matthew Yeomans spoke to us about journalism in the future, the shape it will take, and what factors will shape it.

As he said, no-one knows...and if they claim to, they're lying.

But the growing commercial pressures on media outlets, combined with the easier access to more news sources that the web brings with it, mean that news aggregation is a quickly growing trend.

Services like Google News, Yahoo! News, and countless others enable websites to offer a comprehensive overview of news from around the world, without the need to employ a single journalist. They simply take content from other outlets, and put it all in one place.

These, and RSS feed readers like Google Reader, allow consumers to customise their 'front pages' so they can see what's happening on all of their chosen news websites/blogs on one browser.

Matthew explained to us how he had previously been editor of the ag, a blog on Time magazine's website which used RSS feeds to aggregate news on a range of issues from around the world.

Time was able to provide their readers with news which was relevant to them, in real time, and only pay one person for it. Sounds great! Right?

Maybe not if you're a journalist.

And probably not if you're a reader.

If one person is responsible for the entire content of what is effectively an online newspaper/magazine, what happens to all the journalists? Sure, there'll be someone, somewhere, working for a news agency or PR Company churning out the press releases which are being coming through the RSS, but who's going to double check whether the story's true? And who'll be finding the stories that don't simply promote the official line? Who will be digging through the dust-bins looking for dirt? Who'll be finding the stories we're not meant to hear about?

The danger is that the news aggregators and RSS feeds make it even easier for PR companies and governments to manipulate the media and set the agenda, and there are less and less 'independent' journalists to scrutinise what's being said, in which case, we all lose.