The way we live now
There have, of course, been winners, digital pure plays unencumbered by the expenses of legacy publishers. They’ve succeeded by attracting large audiences while keeping editorial costs low, often by rereporting or commenting on the journalism produced at great cost by newspapers and other “old media” companies—“aggregating,” in the parlance of the trade. A 2010 study by the Pew Research Center found that 80% of stories linked to in blogs came from just four sources: the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Huffington Post, which recently sold itself to AOL for $315 million, is the most famous practitioner of this strategy, but there are plenty of others, from Gawker to Boing Boing to Mashable.
Jeff Bercovici takes a moment out of “Google Saves the News!” to explain what aggregation is. Something about this paragraph just gets me.
[Yes, that’s the second Bercovici post of the day. No, I cannot promise it will be the last.]
Notes
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