the transition to digital journalism

By Paul Grabowicz   ·   Updated May 13, 2013   ·   Print Print

Aggregators - Selecting and Sharing Content

Rather than having professional editors at news organizations determine the important stories of the day, people are taking on this role themselves at aggregation sites where users select and share what they deem the most important news or websites.

Users submit stories or websites to be listed on the aggregation sites, and other users then vote on or help rank the importance of the stories or sites and how prominently they should be displayed.

Examples of of aggregators include:

  • Reddit - a news stories aggregator that was purchased in 2006 by magazine publisher Conde Nast.
  • Mixx - Their motto: "So why should some faceless editor get to decide what's important? But now you're in charge. You find it; we'll Mixx it."
  • Delicious - people submit bookmarks of their favorite websites to share them with others. The bookmarks are arranged topically and are ranked by the most popular submissions. You also can find the personal bookmarks of the person who posted them.
  • Digg - a news stories aggregator, at which a vote for a story is called a "digg" (Digg was sold in 2012 and is being relaunched as a different service)
  • StumbleUpon - another site for sharing favorite websites.
  • Publish2 - this site is designed for news organizations that want their journalists to share links on news stories and have those links aggregated on the publication's website.

Aggregators also have widgets people can use to embed story feeds on their blogs, websites or personal pages on social networks.

And news websites can place icons for the aggregation services at the end of stories, so readers can click on the icons to submit the stories for inclusion in the listings by the aggregators.

See for example, the CNN website. Click on a story there, scroll to the end and click on the Share button.

Aggregators also have developed applications for tablet computers or cellphones, such as Flipboard, Pulse, news360, Zite (owned by CNN) and Google Currents.

Other services like Google News rely on computer algorithms to aggregate links to news stories.

And there are human edited aggregators like Newser (motto: "read less know more") and Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post that publish articles that summarize and link to stories at other news publications.

Huffington Post, which is owned by AOL, has been criticized by some journalists because traffic to a Huffington Post article often dwarfs traffic to the originally reported story being summarized.

See also this video of Arianna Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong teaching journalism to a class at a Brooklyn middle school.

And news sites also often have blogs or other features that aggregate or curate links to stories published elsewhere.

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Filed under: Reporting