Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 describes how he believes news sites can avoid being "on the wrong end of the value chain" and be both "a pass-through content publisher and a starting point aggregator." He writes: "I read NYTimes.come every day, but I only visit it once or twice a day, because unless there is breaking news, the homepage doesn’t really change much. There’s no reason to go back. [...] In contrast, I visit Techmeme multiple times per day, because there is ALWAYS new news. In fact, I visit NYTimnes.com more often via a link on Techmeme than I do going to NYTimes.com directly."
I certainly agree news sites can offer a great value to readers by providing them an aggregated browsing experience. I'm not sure I agree that news sites haven't experimented with this in various ways (ranging from feeds to allowing users to add their own custom RSS feeds a la the personalized Google homepage). But he makes some good points for sure. The challenge, especially for local papers, is deciding what to aggregate — and how to shape those choices around their desired audience. Two examples Scott users of aggregation sites are Drudge and Techmeme, and they are useful examples for this question as well, since they both aggregate — but not the same things. No aggregator provides the whole Web (perhaps not even Google as a search engine). The real rub is what to choose, and how to execute on it each day.
Tags: newspapers
