The journalistic value of aggregation creates the business value

Great post today by Julie Moos at Poynter.   Definitely worth a read.

My comments to this article are as follows:

Great analysis of a complex issue that will continue to evolve as the current dislocation in the publishing industry works itself out.  Eventually the courts will have to define how “fair use” operates in a digital world which will clear up  most of the fuzzy lines between whats being called good or bad aggregation.  At the end of the day, bad aggregation will be defined as theft – plain and simple.  Everything will be legal and fair game.  If done well, sites will be successful because consumers like the content gathered by the curator or tour guide.

Really like the analogy of a “tour guide” who can provide readers with access to far more content than any one publisher can afford to produce themselves.  The reality of online content is that no one publisher can satisfy consumers expanded expectations of complete depth and breadth of content.  This economic reality is the root cause of aggregations prolific rise.

Being in the technology industry, I think new platforms and technologies will solve many of the current issues by addressing the real problem with aggregation — money.  How do content owners and destination sites that have large audience both get fairly compensated for their respective contributions — great content and big audiences.  Link backs, UV’s, and traffic deals are one answer (that does not seam to working very well) but there will be others.  If content owners simply got paid when their content was viewed by consumers on other sites, the aggregation dispute would go away.  Solving this issue is something we (and others in the technology space) are working on and will transform the online publishing ecosystem.

Gregg Freishtat
CEO, Vertical Acuity
www.verticalacuity.com