Hearst isn’t the only media company willing to take on an aggregator label. And indeed, most readers are so overwhelmed by the Web that they want editors, writers and designers at brands they already love to curate it for them, explained Upendra Shardanand, the head of Daylife, a media services company that powers aggregation services and topic pages for The Washington Post, Newsweek, and USA Today, among others. “Every publication has a view of the Web within their niche,” he told the Observer. “There’s a lot of different user experiences for each different brand.”
So everybody can aggregate—as long as they are careful about what they bring to the table. If users want duck confit, they can sample tasteful links whipped up by The Atlantic. If they’d rather stuff themselves with McDonald’s, there’s always Google News.
Last December, The New York Times launched Represent, an interactive feature that allows users to keep tabs on their local politicians with a news feed of articles and raw data. Type in an address and the feature finds who represents the district at every level of government, from community board members to state representatives, then crawls Times stories, City Room posts, and even outside sources like the blog Gothamist and even The Observer, to find relevant items. Roll-call votes, attendance records, campaign finance resources and other data are also peppered around the news feed.
“The idea is to give the reader, the voter, a cross section of relevant information that would, frankly, be next to impossible for them to get any other way,” said Aron Pilhofer, editor of The Times’ interactive technologies newsroom, in an interview. “We’re aggregating not only blogs and news stories, we’re pulling in candidates’ official Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and official releases,” he added.
“Given what’s going on with the AP trying to control who links to what, and all the hubbub over aggregators like HuffPost, I think it’s kind of significant that we’re putting out an app like this that treats all sources of information (including the competition) as equal … equal even to our own reporting,” Mr. Pilhofer wrote in an earlier email.
This summer, his team launched an aggregator for the local city races. Mr Pilhofer, who used to cover city politics for Gannett newspapers in suburban New Jersey, said a snoozy local race is a tough sell to readers. But perhaps making it easy for them to find information will get them interested. “We were sort of scratching our own itch,” he explained. “When I was a political reporter, I would wish for something like this to exist, so I just built it.”
Mr. Pilhofer told the Observer that NYTimes.com users can expect to see this aggregator format used in a lot of different places—not just city politics—in the next year. Some ideas they’re playing with? Creating news aggregators based on events, like natural disasters, the Oscars or the Olympics.
“Finding those key data points that you can enhance through traditional reporting, along with the raw material—that’s where I think this [aggregation] really becomes powerful,” he said.
Just a few weeks ago, in mid September, The Atlantic launched a sister aggregator site called The Atlantic Wire, which culls together opinions from some of the most powerful media voices on the Internet.
Bob Cohn, TheAtlantic.com’s editorial director, said the site had been in the works for six to nine months. “We watched a lot of other sites do aggregation and it’s a popular Web strategy,” said Mr. Cohn, a former executive editor of Wired. “We worked through just what kind of aggregation worked for The Atlantic. By approaching opinions and commentary, that’s where we saw the opportunity to help people—and keep within the tradition of the magazine as a forum for the exchange of ideas.”
“I think it’s important that we’re not just aggregating stories, we’re putting it through The Atlantic filter,” he said. The Wire is run by a separate staff of a half-dozen or so journalists who gather headlines for a ticker and write up posts about hot topics on the Web, bringing together voices from print, radio, YouTube and blogs.
The Atlantic is showing by example how they think aggregation should be done. “We’re not trying to grab their journalism, we’re trying to shine a spotlight,” Mr. Cohn said.
Will this aggregator eventually go behind a paywall?
Mr. Cohn chuckled. “Every business discussion is ongoing at every Web site and magazine as well; we’re no different,” he said.
“Fundamentally, I think media companies are realizing that having some deep rooted technology is important to be a competitive media property online,” said Mr. Shardanand of Daylife. “They have to stay on the forefront and stay on the cutting edge, without relying so much on third parties” to do the link work for them.
