Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » aggregation

#jpod – News industry approaches to curation and aggregation

Rachel McAthy — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:28:41 +0000

Image by art makes me smile on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

This week’s jpod looks at how different publishing platforms in the news industry are approaching curation and aggregation of news, from sources across the web including news outlets, bloggers and social media platforms.

Journalism.co.uk’s news editor Rachel McAthy speaks to:

Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify
Mark Johnson, chief executive of Zite
Rory Brown, co-founder of BriefingMedia, publisher of TheMediaBriefing.com

In the spirit of curation, here is a list of some related reading and resources on this topic:

Aggregation guidelines: Link, attribute, add value – Steve Buttry pulls together some standards journalists should bear in mind when aggregating news
Five curation tools all journalists should know about – some recommended tools suggested by Journalism.co.uk
New curation tool Bundlr sets sights on ‘untangling the web’ – Journalism.co.uk article on Bundlr
Meet the curators – The Economist follows up on a tweet which caused much discussion during the SXSW conference
Social media: what’s the difference between curation and journalism? – The BBC follows up on another Twitter debate
5 opportunities for dynamic curation tools – 10,000 Words suggests five ways to put curation into practice
Are aggregation and curation journalism? Wrong question – GigaOm highlights the importance of putting the audience at the heart of the debate
This Week in Review: A push for aggregation standards, and the end of an era for print – The Nieman Journalism Lab highlights recent efforts to set aggregation standards

You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

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Curation tool Bundlr goes public

Joel Gunter — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:57:10 +0000

Content curation tool Bundlr goes public today, making it accessible for people to sign up through Twitter and Facebook instead of by invitation only.

The new public version also boasts some additional features, including a embedding, timeline visualisation, and a search function for users and bundles.

Bundlr is based in Coimbra, Portugal, and has a three-strong team consisting of Filipe Batista, Sérgio Santos, and Pedro Gaspar.

The team came to Journalism.co.uk’s most recent news:rewired event, and created a bundle with blogs, quotes, tweets, audio and images from the day. See the news:rewired bundle at this link.

You can see more about the launch and sign up on the Bundlr site.

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news:rewired on Bundlr

Joel Gunter — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:35:13 +0000

Our good friends from Bundlr in Portugal came over en masse last week for news:rewired, and they built a page dedicated to the event.

You can find tweets, quotes, pictures and video from the day there.

Bundlr is a free tool for online curation, clipping, aggregation and sharing web content.

The idea for the tool actually came about as a way to cover conferences. Founders Filipe Batista and Sérgio Santos, from Coimbra, Portugal, told Journalism.co.uk in February:

After attending a great conference, we thought about ways to show how it really was to be at the event. Share photos, videos, reports and all that was being published online, in a single shareable page. But we couldn’t figure out a simple way to do it.

But now they have. Check it out by way of news:rewired here.

You can see Journalism.co.uk’s own round of blogs from the day at this link, and visit the news:rewired site to find speaker presentations, liveblogs and more.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – five rules for using Storify

Joel Gunter — Thu, 19 May 2011 10:38:14 +0000

Writing on the Storify blog, Staci Baird has compiled five rules for using the increasingly popular social media curation tool:

1. Don’t just drag, drop and dump!

2. Write transition sentences between the media. (See “rule” number one.)

3. Give the story a beginning, middle and an end.

4. Use Storify for realtime event coverage.

5. Experiment with different kinds of stories.

Follow this link for Baird’s full advice for each rule in her post.

Tipster: Joel Gunter.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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The Economist: Aggregation, curation, and the changing journalist’s toolkit

Sarah Marshall — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 10:46:31 +0000

A blog post by the Economist from the South by Southwest (SXSW) event in Texas takes a closer look at a much retweeted tweet: “@robinsloan The way to cover big news in 2011 is not “here’s what happened.” It’s “here’s how to follow the story” http://t.co/sMqGOuh”.

You might say that you don’t need to be a journalist to cobble together a list of links. But actually, given the huge proliferation of sources these days, you do. Being able to scan a vast range of material, determine what’s reliable, relevant and sufficiently objective, decide what will actually interest your particular readers and arrange it in a way that they can use are not trivial skills.

Full post on the Economist’s SXSW blog post at this link

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Digital Trends: LinkedIn launches aggregated news service

Sarah Marshall — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:30:49 +0000

A post on Digital Trends website reports that LinkedIn has launched a news aggregation service as a way of increasing the length of time people spend on the site.

Think about it: How much time do you actually spend in LinkedIn.com? Unless you’re fine-tuning your profile or searching for potential employees, the answer is probably not a lot. Most of us are content to let our accounts sit there until we can post an addition to our resume. Of course LinkedIn knows this, which is why it’s launching LinkedIn Today.

Full post on Digital Trends at this link

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Lostremote.com: NBC to integrate tweets from top Twitterers

Rachel McAthy — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:21:51 +0000

US TV network NBC is planning to integrate tweets from the top 20 Twitter accounts within its 10 markets, according to a report by lostremote.com.

‘The 20′ will be asked to discuss trending topics in their area and the discussions will be featured in on-air segments, the report adds.

There’s no word on how NBC will pick the top 20, other than follower counts. NBC says the list will likely evolve over time as new voices emerge.

“In the age of social media, ‘voice’ is democratizing, with fresh new perspectives about important issues facing local communities,” said Greg Scholl, president of NBC Local Integrated Media. “‘The 20′ will connect these relevant new voices with NBC’s local broadcast and online audiences to facilitate discussion and debate, and help shape local media coverage.”

‘The 20′ will be launched in New York, San Diego and DC this January, lostremote.com adds.

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In defence of aggregation: Journalists stand up for maligned practice at university event

Rajvir Rai — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 12:31:27 +0000

The role of news aggregators was defended yesterday by journalists at an event for City University’s journalism students.

Speaking at ‘Pimp My Blog’, Patrick Smith, Karl Schneider, and Tim Glanfield argued that news aggregators add value, rebuking claims by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr that news aggregators are “parasites living of journalism produced by others”.

“I do think we are adding value,” said Smith, the editor of news aggregation site TheMediaBriefing. “We have got a semantic tagging system that actually makes this industry searchable and navigable and I think that has got a good value.”

Patrick Smith at Pimp My Blog:

Glanfield, a former Times journalist and co-founder of Beehive City, echoed Smith and questioned whether newspapers added any value or helped readers by simply “copying each other’s stories over and over again”.

“There are plenty of people who call themselves journalists out there who are basically just copying stuff from each other.

“Whereas what TheMediaBriefing and organisations like that are doing is aggregating news which is adding value.”

YouTube: Tim Glanfield at Pimp My Blog

Schneider, the editorial director at Reed Business Information, criticised newspapers for blaming their failures on others.

“I think there are lots of examples of newspapers trying find someone else to blame, whether it is bloggers, Google, or Craigslist, it is always someone else’s fault,” he said.

“Actually I think newspapers have sat on their backsides and failed to respond effectively to a completely changing media landscape till it is pretty much too late.”

Schneider added that in the future newspapers will have to “fundamentally reinvent themselves” online, because the aggregation found in print does not make sense online.

YouTube: Karl Schneider at Pimp My Blog

Coverage elsewhere:

Thoroughly Good Blog: We’re online publishers now

BBC College of Journalism blog: video

Rajvir Rai is a postgraduate journalism student at City University London. He can found on Twitter @R_Rai.

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Yahoo rolling out new US local network in beta

Rachel McAthy — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:47:26 +0000

Yahoo has started to roll out a new local product offering dedicated pages of news, events and deals for a number of locations in the US, lostremote.com reported this week.

Beta pages for Yahoo Local have emerged for San Francisco, Brooklyn and Michigan, which can be viewed by city or neighbourhood and feature a list of aggregated posts.

Many of the headlines, especially at the neighborhood level, originate from neighborhood blogs. You can post an event, or sign up with Associated Content to become a paid contributor. “We have launched Yahoo! local in a few neighborhoods and towns to refine the experience while gathering more content for the next set of cities,” explains the site.

Journalism.co.uk reported earlier this week that Yahoo had launched a new contributor network which enables its users to publish content onto its sites, following its acquisition of Associated Content earlier this year.

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Yahoo News launches new Weekend Edition

Rachel McAthy — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 10:37:36 +0000

Yahoo has launched its new Weekend Edition on Yahoo News, a news package featuring original video and editorial content aimed at weekend audiences, according to a press release from Friday.

Weekend Edition programming will cover a wide range of topics, including travel and leisure, culture, family, and healthy living. In addition to featuring content from across the Yahoo! network and from Yahoo’s content partners, Weekend Edition will be anchored by an original video series with several high-profile hosts.

According to a report by MediaWeek, content will also be aggregated from sites such as The Daily Beast, Time and LiveScience.com.

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NYT: David Carr on the ‘vanishing divide’ between mainstream and digital media

Rachel McAthy — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 11:45:53 +0000

The New York Times’ David Carr reflects on what he perceives as the “vanishing divide” between mainstream and digital media, following the move of media writer Howard Kurtz from the Washington Post to The Daily Beast.

Carr addresses the evolution of web journalism, which he says is not only changing the way news is collected and presented but also the way it is valued by audiences. The brand, he says, is no longer the priority.

On a journalistic level, the new playing field is more even. Many people see the news in aggregated form on the web, and when they notice a link that interests them, they click on it with nary a thought about the news organization behind it. Information stands or falls on its magnetism, with brand pedigree becoming secondary.

More and more, the dichotomy between mainstream media and digital media is a false one. Formerly clear bright lines are being erased all over the place. Open up Gawker, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal on an iPad and tell me without looking at the name which is a blog, a television brand, a radio network, a newspaper. They all have text, links, video and pictures. The new frame around content is changing how people see and interact with the picture in the middle.

See his full post here…

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Is Facebook building a phone? Aggregation leads to some very mixed messages

Laura Oliver — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:58:16 +0000

A great spot from Wired’s Epicenter Blog: is Facebook developing a phone or not?

While aggregators filter information, what role should they have in verifying content? Or are such images illustrative of the current state of journalism?

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Professor suggests 24-hour delay before aggregators can link to content

Rachel McAthy — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 09:26:42 +0000

Suggestions for changes to copyright law posted on the Business Insider by a US university professor and lawyer have come under fire after proposing that the direct reposting of news content from a weekly title online should be banned for a week following publication.

The article suggests that declines within the newspaper industry could be improved if intellectual property rights were to undergo “rethinking”.

Using aggregators like Google and others, I can access essentially in real time the lead paragraphs of almost any story from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or indeed any other major news service. Not surprisingly, traditional print media publications are dying, and not surprisingly their owners’ online dotcom alternatives are generating far too little revenue to pick up the slack; why pay for any content when the essence of everything is available immediately, and free, elsewhere.

The writers Eric Clemons and Nehal Madhani add that one solution could be to apply a waiting time on articles before they can be reposted online by external aggregators, unless it is only in commentary on the work.

A first suggestion would be to provide newspaper and other journalistic content special protection, so that no part of any story from any daily periodical could be reposted in an online aggregator, or used online for any use other than commentary on the article, for 24 hours; similarly, no part of any story from any weekly publication could be reposted in an online aggregator or for any use purpose other than commentary, for one week.

But these proposals have been strongly opposed by online news sites such as Techdirt.com, who said the issues facing newspapers is not the fault of news aggregators.

Revenue from those publications has been in decline for many years — well before Google and the internet existed. The biggest problem many of the bigger publications faced was taking on ridiculous debt loads. On top of that, most of them failed to provide value to their community, as competitors stepped in to serve those communities. That’s not about aggregators.

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‘Good for advertisers, bad for media companies’: Google has a sit-down with news publishers

Rachel McAthy — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:15:54 +0000

Debate raged at the Frontline Club last night as Google and news publishers came head-to-head for a panel discussion on the search engine and its impact on the industry.

The very title of the event “Google: Friend or foe of newspaper publishers”, part of the club’s monthly On the Media discussion series in association with the BBC College of Journalism, set the topic of early debate, as Peter Barron, former Newsnight editor and now head of PR for Google UK, sought to banish the idea of the company as an ‘enemy’. “Google is unequivocally a friend of the newspaper publishers. Our aim is to work with them,” he said.

Challenged about the ethics of “taking stories for nothing” through the Google News platform, he added that the service followed the free structure of online news.

We absolutely we do not steal content. News organisations put their content on the web for free everyday by their own free will and Google helps people find that content. We send clicks to the pages of news websites. We send a billion clicks a month to news websites globally. Once there, those clicks are a business opportunity for the businesses involved.

A business which he claims generates revenues of £5 billion worldwide. But the value of a browser who clicks through from Google is minimal, Matt Kelly, digital content director for Mirror Group Newspapers argued. In fact, he said, he’d rather not have them at all.

We need to worry a bit less about search engines and worry a bit more about our readers. We weren’t that impressed with the value of audience we got via search engines. They came across it via Google and buzzed off again, that’s Google’s audience. It’s not our audience. We can’t successfully leverage a disconnected audience.

He added that many news organisations moving online were “blinded” by the reach the internet and sites like Google enabled them to have.

I think they confused reach with audience, they confused numbers with engagement. It was a very alluring thing (…) So we pumped the market full of inventory and there was too much inventory for advertisers to supply. There’s not enough advertising in the world to fill all of the content that newspapers put out online. So what happens is the rate collapses. So suddenly this reach came back and bit the newspaper industry on the arse. So in all this great reach, the rate of revenue coming back from it is in terminal decline. What we would sell 4 or 5 years ago for £8 cpm now we’ll sell it for 80p cpm. This is not a sustainable business model. This is a product of the erosion of engagement that Google brought to news content.

Kelly later added that he would rather get one click-through from Twitter than 100 from Google, where someone has said “check this out” and recommended it. “I’m not interested in people who stumble and go, would rather not have them at all,” he said.

Earlier in his introduction, fellow panel member Patrick Barwise, emeritus professor of management and marketing at the London Business School, had agreed that Google was “a good thing for consumers (…) Good thing for advertisers. Bad thing for media companies.”

He said the revenue model for Google focused on making money from advertising and not re-investing much of it into content. Without Google, he added, the world would be a better place for news organisations.

Who’s going to pay for the content? Google isn’t going to and why should they? Google helps people find content, however if you imagine a world in which Google didn’t exist and nothing else like it, that world would be better for news organisations (…) The amount of revenue per reader generated online is much less than what can be generated by a print reader.

Peter Barron responded to say that the problems for news organisations have been caused by the internet as a whole and that too often people “transpose” the internet and Google.

The internet changed the news pattern forever. Thats what has caused huge problems for the news industry. People often transpose the internet and Google. The newspaper industry has faced a huge disruption because of the internet and woke up to it a little bit late.

Wired and Press Gazette MediaMoney columnist Peter Kirwan, who was also on the panel, added that many online news publishers simply have their priorities “skewed”. If organisations could cut out the “astronomical” costs of printing, they could begin to think about becoming digital only, he added.

The rhetoric that surrounds the idea of the news media exchanging print dollars for digital dimes, in other words (…) the available CPMs (cost per thousand) available on the internet are so much lower than in print – well yes they are – but the cost of putting out newspapers is also astronomically high (…) Strip that out and those digital diamonds don’t look so small (…) News organisations who are currently print dominated could start to think about becoming digital only and I think the rhetoric is now getting slightly tired of exchanging print dollars for digital dimes, we need to move on from that a little bit because I think the possibility of a digital only existence is starting to open up.

Looking forward, audience members asked about the future of paywalls and whether news publishers would ever consider building a shared wall. This prompted another panel member, paidContent’s Robert Andrews to ask Barron if Google could say anything on rumours the company was developing a ‘Newspass’ micro-payments system, met with a “no comment” from Barron.

Kelly added that it was up to newspapers to map their own future, but for the Mirror Group, it was about ensuring an engaged audience, rather than being obsessed with traffic from “transient visitors”, which he called this “a sickness that has pervaded the industry”.

Lots of people used our content but didn’t care about it. We’re trying to get to position B, its free and they care about it but then one day we might get to position C which is that they care about it so much they might be willing to pay for it. I wish [the Times] had gone to position B first and see if they could have engaged the audience and care a bit less about SEO.

Journalism.co.uk’s podcast from the event can be found here. See video coverage of the event below:

Free live streaming by Ustream

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – human aggregation for your beat

Judith Townend — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:40:31 +0000

Research: youedit.info is a useful aggregation service that groups links shared by its editors into topics. Promote yourself by becoming an editor of its journalism channel or follow another topic to find out what’s being discussed on your beat. Tipster: Judith Townend.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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