To Create or Aggregate, That’s Not the Question
Ant Boxing. TruShu via Creative Commons/Flickr.
Last week my Internets got caught in the crossfire of an online journalism spat.
Seems Sharon Waxman had enough of Michael Wolff. Specifically, Waxman, a former New York Times entertainment reporter and now editor of The Wrap is pissed that Wolff, a Vanity Fair columnist and founder of Newser.com, is “stealing” her content. She accuses Newser of “parasitism” and says the site ignores established online etiquette of clearly linking back to source material.
Wolff struck back with a douchebag stick.
In a belittling post titled, “I Can Say Anything You Can Say Shorter,” he writes that Waxman “is having indigestion because Newser shortens her stories [and] Newser readers don’t find a need to click the link under the BIG RED SOURCE BOX that would take them to her longer story.”
Who’s Stealing What
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The playground got heated after that. Salon’s Andrew Leonard wrote, “If the Web doesn’t kill journalism, Michael Wolff will” while Slate’s Jack Schafer simply asked, “Is Michael Wolff a Parasite?“
Neither seem to like Newser — or Wolff for that matter — but both generally accept that there is and always will be something like it in the online ecosystem. Simply, in any and every business bottom feeders may not necessarily break established rules and ethics but will bend them near 90 degrees.
And this is fine.
Aggregation is important. It fits well with the curatorial role of the traditional editor and those doing it well include the Atlantic with the AtlanticWire and Slate with The Slatest. Each employ different strategies but both do it fairly by transparently linking to source material. Tumblr’s built an entire platform based on curation.
To create or aggregate isn’t either/or but rather both/and. But the question is a distraction from the get-go. Except for a few cases, neither holds the key to the economic lock that the journalism finds itself in.
Traditional content may be king but its domain is an ever a shrinking empire. Instead, mobile, social and real-time applications rule the roost.
“I like to think of this as the golden triangle,” writes Fred Wilson. “You can build interesting businesses in each of these three sectors. The iPhone is the poster child of mobile. Facebook is the poster child of social. Twitter is the poster child of real-time.”
This Golden Triangle — or something quite like it — is what will lead journalism out of its doldrums. Publications that create meaningful applications that deliver core information, and more importantly, services based on that information will win reader time and loyalty.
That is the nut publications must crack.
Content is ubiquitous. Anyone who maintains an RSS Reader knows how quickly a thousand plus articles that will never be read pile up. Dust-ups over who reads what where become besides the point in this ecosystem because much as we slave over our wordsmithing, content unfortunately becomes secondary to delivery mechanisms and services that are built around it.
Instead, think about how your readers or viewers access your information anytime, anyplace and on any device; make sure the content delivered is more interesting than what comes through on an RSS feed; and figure out what value add services can be created with — or built on top of — the content based on the platform it is being viewed on.
Waxman versus Wolff may be fun distraction, but it’s nothing more than that.
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To Create or Aggregate, That’s Not the Question originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.
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