The limits of disaggregation

Via Jeff Jarvis I read Jason Fry's recent WSJ column on news disaggregation. A key passage:

In moving online, newspapers have become collections of individual articles, each of which often stands on its own. Once, readers encountered articles by reading the paper a page at a time. Now, such readers are being supplanted by voracious online consumers who get their news in any number of unpredictable ways.

This is unquestionably true, but it is not the whole truth. Yes, newspapers have become collections of individual articles, but they are not just that: they are also portals and subject indices where editors make respected judgements about what should be more or less important on any given day - judgements that audiences seek as much as they do the articles themselves. Agregation has value. This has always been so, with and without the web.

What the web has changed is that now there is an entire new marketplace of alternative takes on what should be important: that is what blogs, Digg, Newsvine, Google News and Jeff's own Daylife offer. Two types of content, articles (what I have earlier called 'linear content') and selections ('aggregate content') have just become uncoupled, and now it is possible to make a business with just one of the two.

Update 06/08: Scott Karp on link journalism: "There is a HUGE opportunity for news brands to redefine what they do for such 'media frenzy' stories — to focus on helping news consumers find the BEST coverage of the story."

Still, even in this scenario editors' original judgements are fundamental. A story would not get to Google News' front page if weren't featured prominently by newspapers, and a blogger would not link to it (or email it, or Digg it) if she or someone else hadn't first found it in a curated portal or some automatic derivative. Editors' judgements are less final than they used to be, but they are still important; they are no longer authoritarian but are at best authoritative voices in a wider conversation ('seeders of clouds' as Tom Grocer once said), and this calls more than ever for good editorial skills.

   

Update : See also Nicholas Carr on a similar theme, and a followup by Scott Karp (20/05/07)