Thoughts on the Future of News

In recent years, there has been growing debate about the role of content aggregation in the online news industry. Setting aside the somewhat prickly issue of content ownership, which has been discussed a million times from every possible angle, I’d like to focus instead on the inherent value of providing aggregated content on a news website (the Huffington Post is a great example). In my esteem, content aggregation is a clear no-brainer and offers a very compelling win-win-win situation to all three major parties involved; the news site providing aggregated content, the original content provider and the news reader.

First, let’s start with news websites and the benefits of using aggregated content. Regardless of your news focus or the size of your company, offering aggregated news content is without a doubt the most cost- and technology-efficient way to keep your readers engaged and up-to-date. It seems strange to me that large, national newspapers would have local correspondents in every small city and equally perplexing that local papers would try to write original content on international issues where they are not likely present or active. Major newspapers should therefore outsource their local news coverage in the same way that local sources should outsource their international news. By restructuring newspapers, large and small, to stick to their natural skill sets and aggregate the rest, newspapers could save a great deal of money and reallocate those resources to the areas where they provide the most value and readership. Moreover, having aggregated news content on your website can provide your inquisitive readers with additional context around a particular story or topic. With aggregated content at your disposal, even ordinary news sites with limited resources can become dynamic information hubs, while significantly boosting their traffic, user retention and the frequency of visits from regular users.

Convincing news sources to use aggregated content is an easy sell, I agree. But how about the original content creators which fuel aggregation services with content? As many of you already know, there is a lot of heated debate about whether or not news aggregators serve a positive or negative role by disseminating excerpts from other sources across the web. In my view, the expansion of news aggregators and aggregation services has been an ideal distribution campaign for a great number of major news sources and it has, in essence, created thousands of new one-way avenues to access their original content. And the best part of it for content providers is that this wide-reaching marketing and distribution service is completely free of charge!

Let us imagine, for example, that I was to show a 30 second movie clip of a film I had produced and that I was planning to host an exclusive free screening of my movie (the full-length director’s cut) a few days later. Obviously, as a film producer, my goal is to get as many people as possible to attend that screening. Now instead of paying for radio and TV advertising or getting a small blurb printed in the local paper, imagine that I sent that 30 second trailer to all of my friends and told them to distribute it massively to all of their online contacts. By deploying others to spread the word about my movie screening, and having tapped into this free online marketing tactic, I was able to access people far outside the reaches of my network and, in the end, got 250 people to attend my free movie screening (where I also happened to be selling soft drinks and popcorn and made a little cash on the side). To me, this somewhat silly analogy truly captures the power and utility of news aggregation. If news aggregation services are willing to do all the grunt work (i.e. the marketing, advertising and distribution of short snippets of free content), how could a news provider possibly object? As a news source, if you are being properly credited, why would you want to discourage any initiative or free service that offers to significantly increase the in-bound links to your web content?!

And then, last but not least, we have our target audience… the news consumer. This one is also a bit of a no-brainer to me. Clearly, the more real-time, relevant information available to me, in one reliable location, the better! Not only has the web evolved into a more open and shared content environment, with link-sharing and link-building paving the way for the future, but I think that the average news consumer has also changed. I consider myself to be a fairly typical online news reader and I am getting increasingly more demanding about the manner in which I want my news delivered. I want to get all my favorite news stories, conveniently and rapidly, from one trusted site and don’t have the time (nor the desire) to search through various individual news sites to find and compare articles that I am interested in reading. Any news website which provides access to different news articles, sources and perspectives, all tailored to my needs as an individual, will clearly be my first (and probably only) stop for my morning news.

Of course, pure content aggregation is still in its infancy and is far from being perfect. But, in many instances, news aggregation services use sophisticated semantic technology in order to render high-quality and contextually-relevant news articles. Content aggregation certainly has its issues, like any technology, but it is making immense progress at impressive speeds. And of course news aggregation is always best when served with a dash of personal curation. Curating news content does not need to be incredibly laborious and can involve anything from manually vetting certain articles, filtering sources, selecting preferred topic areas etc. With just a small amount of human involvement, news aggregation has the power to transform a news website and modernize its content strategy.

The shared value and benefits of content aggregation seem incredibly obvious and an important piece of the social web puzzle where content and knowledge are meant to be shared, not protected. Whatever your opinion on the matter, I think it will be increasingly difficult (and foolish) to interfere with the massive momentum that content aggregators have gathered in the online news space. And with everyone benefiting, what would be the point?