The Wake

News aggregators are the middlemen in an Internet filled with producers and consumers. You want news about horse races? Grisly murders? Escaped orangutans? News sources create and aggregators provide. The purpose of a news aggregator is to consolidate news content in one place, much like a newspaper with its multiple unrelated sections. However, most aggregators display the content instead of producing it. Ideally, a news aggregator scours the web for the quality content and leaves the junk to rot. In practice, the process often breaks down into a jelly of mediocrity.

For a crash course in aggregation, let’s head over to one of the reigning barons of news aggregation: Google News (a.k.a. news.google.com). The place is clean, but not sparse. I can see section links to my left, a pillar of print stories down the middle, and headlines to my right. Links to video are interspersed among the text when available, but print is the brunt of the information presented. Maybe it’s my devotion to Google as a search engine that makes me feel at home here on Google News. Maybe it’s this sensation of being at home that makes me want to leave as quickly as I can.

Google News is one of many news aggregators that offers content but not the zing. The content is there, truckloads of it, but news content on the Internet isn’t worth the fiber-optic filaments that it travels through. We can get our Internet news from anywhere; a major media site, an analyst’s blog, a journalist’s twitter and other, hipper places besides. We can even get off the Internet entirely if we dare to be so contrarian. News is everywhere for the time being and cheap to boot, so while Google News may provide a decent service, the sustainable economic model simply isn’t there. As a tentacle of the greater Google Inc. octopus, Google News gets along fine. However, Google News is unsustainable without the name. Zing is what sells, and Google News has no zing. It’s the dull-looking kid who’s the son of illustrious parents but has few prospects of his own.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, some news aggregators have the necessary zing but not the panopticon scope of a service like Google News. Newsy.com takes one such novel approach. Rewrap coverage of the same story by different news organizations to produce an arguably more balanced piece of journalism in a broadcast format. For instance, the Newsy.com story “GM Opts to Keep Opel” cites six different sources: the BBC, Russia Today, Der Speigel, CBC News, The Wall Street Journal, and Deutsche Welle. The con, however, is the same as the pro in Newsy.com’s case: One three-minute story thoroughly covers each topic. It’s fast and efficient, which Newsy.com founder Jim Spencer touts as a key element for news consumers, but it’s also rigid and fundamentally limited. At its core, it regurgitates the coverage of other news organizations into a headline news format. The site itself looks good while it’s doing this regurgitating, but the site slogan “The News With More Views” simply doesn’t lend itself to a three-minute headline news format. Imagine reading three stories about University of Minnesota campus arrests in three different publications: The Wake, The Minnesota Daily, and the Star Tribune. Each story may have a different perspective and a different way of analyzing the arrests. Will these different perspectives and analyses retain their uniqueness when a website like Newsy.com aggregates them into one mass? The results will be hit and miss, but if the uniqueness disappears, then the novelty of news has disappeared as well, replaced with something akin to the dullest of Associated Press briefs. Note, however, that speed over depth is the purpose of Newsy.com, though not of all aggregators. We in American society are told that people are busy these days, so perhaps speed over depth is marketable. Only time will tell.

Let’s shift the focus to something that offers both the necessary content and the fabled zing, albeit without a shred of the English language for the discerning monolingual American to read. 2424actu.fr has a dark, sports-car sleek design uncommon in most mainstream news sites, perhaps to draw in that younger crowd who’s already getting sick of the black on gray with a little bit of white around the edges style that the reigning French news sites already offer. In addition to the design, though, 2424actu.fr has content—and not just content, but depth of content. Say I want to know more about the story of Michael Jackson’s death. I click on the video link for the story and I’m brought to an AFP (French equivalent of the Associated Press) video news brief. However, I also have the choice of hearing the story through video or radio from ten or fifteen other sources, plus scores of print sources besides. In American terms, this would be the equivalent of being able to see, hear, and read CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times all in one place.
The problem? The site only streams video for those with a French IP address. But an American version may come someday soon; and the news aggregator landscape may develop yet another wrinkle because of it. After all, entrepreneurship steals from many places.

Aggregators are one more answer to the challenge of making journalism more accessible and more profitable. Everyone in the Internet news biz takes a different approach. Some get as many sources as they can, some simplify as much as they can, and some seek to make their site a one-stop shop for every conceivable development. MSNBC tries for the latter with their “Spectra Visual News Reader.” Imagine a Nintendo Wii game where all you do is read news; that’s what this is. Choose your feeds and watch the stories come and go. As hip and trendy as the Spectra Visual News Reader seeks to be, it’s still a profoundly inelegant piece of software—a Segway in the world of news aggregators. Spectra would make a great screensaver, but to think that anyone would use this thing as their primary news source is unlikely.

The issue with news aggregators overall is this: Whether they have the zing, the content, both or neither, there’s still little demand for them. Aggregators today are a niche product. Who needs ten different sources for the same story? If I want to listen to Fox News coverage of something, by golly, I’ll go to Fox News. If I want to listen to MSNBC coverage of something, by golly, I’ll go to MSNBC. If I want both, I’ll go to both—why should I go to a middleman first?

Speaking not as a student or a consumer of news but as the average hypothetical layman, what does a news aggregator offer me? Not much that I don’t already have. Aggregators may provide varied coverage of an event or offer coverage of something that would otherwise have gone unheard had I gone to a major news site instead, but, for better or worse, these are things that laymen have afforded themselves to lose. Aggregators don’t break the big stories and they don’t nab enough small ones. Some aggregators like Newsy.com and 2424actu.fr are certainly pretty things in pretty packages, but do we need our news to be pretty? Or is news supposed to remain what it is today, whatever it is today? We, the people, whether we realize or not, will decide with our wallets and our habits.