aggregation
Down the aggregation rabbit hole
This began as a link post pointing to Joel Achenbach’s Washington Post blog entry Journalism is aggregation. But, like more and more link posts lately, it got away from me and merged into its own article.
Achenbach decides journalism is aggregation, and that’s okay. Or maybe he decides it’s not really aggregation, or that it’s at an acceptable point along the continuum between valueless aggregation and value-adding aggregation. I’m not actually sure he settled on a conclusion, and that’s okay, too.
Achenbach had reminded me of my recent post on the topic, which prompted the author of the post I was commenting about to leave me a nice comment of his own. (So meta!)
And then I found this post by Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab expressing some disappointment with Achenbach’s aforementioned lack of a conclusion, or more precisely paints his conclusion as a bit of backtracking. I’m not sure I agree with Benton’s take, but both men raise interesting points.
Some journalism is aggregation, but most good and all great journalism is more than mere aggregation. It’s a synthesis of the anecdotes, data, facts and perspectives of as many reliable sources as you can fit into your word limit. Right? That’s an accurate description of much of the best journalism I’ve read in the past year or two.
To me, pure aggregation on the web involves sharing a link and perhaps pairing it with an inflammatory or vapid comment. Sometimes, that’s actually fine with me. Twitter is a good example of that. But no one would call it journalism, even when journalists do it. That’s important to keep in mind, I think: not everything a journalist does online or off is, or is intended as, journalism.
Achenbach wrote about the interview process, which most journalists use to offer different perspectives on a piece of news from experts of different disciplines or schools of thought. Interviews, collecting the commentary of multiple sources, are an aggregation of those opinions. But that’s just one activity in the composite of activities which together compose an act of “journalism.” The result is an article in which, as Achenbach also says near the end of his post, the reporter has drawn on personal knowledge, research and experience beyond the interviews and facts aggregated.
Aggregation, then, is the collection and presentation of opinions or facts, adding little or no context. Journalism, I think, is an equation like this:
Journalism = aggregation + context
I want to know what you would add to, or remove from, that equation. I realize that aggregation on the web generally, and as an issue in digital journalism and publishing specifically, predates my humble blog posts on the topic, but I want to explore it with other interested folks.
Aggregation is plagiarism
I couldn’t help but aggregate (though not plagiarize) this link Jim Dalrymple aggregated to a post by a Mr. Joe Wilcox about how aggregation is, well, plagiarism.
It’s true, now that you’ve read this you don’t need to read the original to know what it’s about. However, my guess is you’ll miss out on the personal reasons and nuanced perspective Mr. Wilcox offers if you don’t go and read his post.
I certainly agree with his position, not an uncommon one, that word-for-word copies or close paraphrases are plagiarism plain and simple. But I would term that behavior, well, plagiarism. Aggregation, done right, will collect interesting material to which the collector wants to point his own readers, adding context or perspective or opinion lacking in the original.
John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is a great example of that: it’s comprised almost entirely of links to the work of others, often including quotes from the linked-to article. But it’s as far from plagiarism as you can get. People read Gruber’s site specifically for his opinion on the news of the day. Most of his readers probably find the newsy bits elsewhere, be it on Twitter or another news site. But Gruber’s take adds value, and that’s why they’re there.
I like to think that’s what I’m doing here, but I suppose only readers like you can decide that.