Aggregating the News

Aggregating the News
Author: Mark Coddington
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2019-07-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231547196

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Aggregated news fills our social media feeds, our smartphone apps, and our e-mail inboxes. Much of the news that we consume originated elsewhere and has been reassembled, repackaged, and republished from other sources, but how is that news made? Is it a twenty-first-century digital adaptation of the traditional values and practices of journalistic and investigative reporting, or is it something different—shoddier, less scrupulous, more dangerous? Mark Coddington gives a vivid account of the work of aggregation—how such content is produced, what its values are, and how it fits into today’s changing journalistic profession. Aggregating the News presents an analysis built on observation and interviews of news aggregators in a variety of settings, exploring how aggregators weigh sources, reshape news narratives, and manage life on the fringes of journalism. Coddington finds that aggregation is defined by its derivative relationship to reporting, which colors it with a sense of inferiority. Aggregators strive to be seen as legitimate journalists, but they are constrained by commercial pressures, professional disapproval, and limited access to important forms of evidence. The first comprehensive treatment of news aggregation as a practice, Aggregating the News deepens our understanding of how news and knowledge are produced and consumed in the digital age. By centering aggregation, Coddington sheds new light on how journalistic authority and legitimacy are created—and the consequences when their foundations are eroded.

Aggregating the News

Aggregating the News
Author: Mark Coddington
Publisher:
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-07-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780231187312

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Mark Coddington gives a vivid account of the work of aggregation--how such content is produced, what its values are, and how it fits into today's changing journalistic profession. Aggregating the News explores how aggregators weigh sources, reshape news narratives, and manage life on the fringes of journalism.

The Rise of the News Aggregator

The Rise of the News Aggregator
Author: Kimberley A. Isbell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:

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During the past decade, the Internet has become an important news source for the majority of Americans. According to a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, as of January 2010, nearly 61% of Americans got at least some of their news online in a typical day. This increased reliance on the Internet as a source of news has coincided with declining profits in the traditional media and the shuttering of newsrooms in communities across the country. Some commentators look at this confluence of events and assert that, in this case, correlation equals causation - the Internet is harming the news business. One explanation for the decline of the traditional media that some, including News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch and Associated Press Chairman Dean Singleton, have seized upon is the rise of the news aggregator. According to this theory, news aggregators from Google News to The Huffington Post are free-riding, reselling and profiting from the factual information gathered by traditional media organizations at great cost. Murdoch has gone so far as to call Google's aggregation and display of newspaper headlines and ledes “theft.” As the traditional media are quick to point out, the legality of a business model built around the monetization of third-party content isn't merely an academic question - it's big business. Revenues generated from online advertising totaled $23.4 billion in 2008 alone. But for all of the heated rhetoric blaming news aggregators for the decline of journalism, many are still left asking the question: are news aggregators violating current law? This white paper attempts to answer that question by examining the hot news misappropriation and copyright infringement claims that are often asserted against aggregators, and to provide news aggregators with some "best practices" for making use of third-party content.

Toward a Tabloid Press

Toward a Tabloid Press
Author: Trevor Hollis Diehl
Publisher:
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

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News aggregation is a developing form of professional journalism practice, one uniquely adapted to contemporary communication realities. News companies have always gathered content from a variety of sources when producing their products. However, the sheer volume of information, number of participants and speed of consumption online requires news workers to adopt new routines of collecting and disseminating information. These routines, some argue, fundamentally differ from the beat structure of traditional journalism. As recent ethnographic work has found, online news workers might value a sense of audience and newsworthiness over and above norms like objectivity and getting a good story (Anderson, 2013; Agarwal & Barthel, 2013). As economic pressures continue to strain resources and shrink the number of reporters on staff, news aggregation, both as a practice and a digital filtering tool, is becoming a staple of modern newsrooms. Few researchers have explored the impact of these divergent routines on content. Through a secondary data analysis of the Pew Research Center's 2012 News Coverage Index, this thesis examines the topics and news-drivers in 12 US news websites. The analysis finds that in-house, so-called "original reporting" tends to rely on institutional actors and hard news topics. When stories are aggregated from a third-party source, soft news topics and celebrity stories are preferred. Finally, different professional practices seem to be favored depending on the type of online news organization. The findings suggest scholars, and those interested in journalism education, think of organizational pressures and professional norms as fluid online, particularly when connecting theories of news work to output in terms of content.

Changing News Use

Changing News Use
Author: Irene Costera Meijer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000281256

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Changing News Use pulls from empirical research to introduce and describe how changing news user patterns and journalism practices have been mutually disruptive, exploring what journalists and the news media can learn from these changes. Based on 15 years of audience research, the authors provide an in-depth description of what people do with news and how this has diversified over time, from reading, watching, and listening to a broader spectrum of user practices including checking, scrolling, tagging, and avoiding. By emphasizing people’s own experience of journalism, this book also investigates what two prominent audience measurements – clicking and spending time – mean from a user perspective. The book outlines ways to overcome the dilemma of providing what people apparently want (attentiongrabbing news features) and delivering what people apparently need (what journalists see as important information), suggesting alternative ways to investigate and become sensitive to the practices, preferences, and pleasures of audiences and discussing what these research findings might mean for everyday journalism practice. The book is a valuable and timely resource for academics and researchers interested in the fields of journalism studies, sociology, digital media, and communication.

Telling Secondhand Stories

Telling Secondhand Stories
Author: Mark Allen Coddington
Publisher:
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

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News aggregation has become one of the most widely practiced forms of newswork, as more news is characterized by information taken from other published sources and displayed in a single abbreviated space. This form of newsgathering has deep roots in journalism history, but creates significant tension with modern journalism's primary newsgathering practice, reporting. Aggregation's reliance on secondhand information challenges journalism's valorization of firsthand evidence-gathering through the reporter's use of observation, interviews, and documents. This dissertation examines the epistemological practices and professional values of news aggregation, exploring how aggregators gather and verify evidence and present it as factual to audiences. It looks at aggregation in relationship to the dominant values and practices of modern professional journalism, particularly those of reporting. The study employs participant observation at three news aggregation operations as well as in-depth interviews with aggregators to understand the practices of news aggregation as well as the epistemological and professional values behind them. I found that aggregation proceeds by gathering textual evidence of the forms of evidence gathered through reporting work, positioning it as a form of second-order newswork built atop the epistemological practices and values of modern journalistic reporting. Aggregators' distance from the evidence on which they base their reports lends them a profound sense of uncertainty, which they attempt to mitigate by using textual means to communicate their epistemological ambivalence to their audiences and by seeking out technologically afforded means to get closer to news evidence. Aggregators' uncertainty extends to their professional identity, where they attempt to improve their marginal professional status by articulating their own ethical values but also by emphasizing their connections to traditional reporting. Narratively speaking, however, their work does not break down traditional journalistic forms, but instead broadens the narrative horizon to conceive of individual news accounts primarily as part of larger story arcs. The study illuminates the fraught relationship between aggregation and reporting, finding that while aggregation is heavily dependent on reporting, it can be developed as a valid, professionally valued form of newswork. Ultimately, both forms of work have a crucial role to play in providing vital, engaging news to the public.

Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News

Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News
Author: Alfred Hermida
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2019-02-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351672509

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Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News traces the emergence of data journalism through a scholarly lens. It reveals the growth of data journalism as a subspecialty, cultivated and sustained by an increasing number of professional identities, tools and technologies, educational opportunities and new forms of collaboration and computational thinking. The authors base their analysis on five years of in-depth field research, largely in Canada, an example of a mature media system. The book identifies how data journalism’s development is partly due to it being at the center of multiple crises and shocks to journalism, including digitalization, acute mis- and dis-information concerns and increasingly participatory audiences. It highlights how data journalists, particularly in well-resourced newsrooms, are able to address issues of trust and credibility to advance their professional interests. These journalists are operating as institutional entrepreneurs in a field still responding to the disruption effects of digitalization more than 20 years ago. By exploring the ways in which data journalists are strategically working to modernize the way journalists talk about methods and maintain journalism authority, Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News introduces an important new dimension to the study of digital journalism for researchers, students and educators.

Understanding News

Understanding News
Author: John Hartley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136105883

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News depends for its effect on a culturally shared language, and this book concentrates on ways we can decode its messages without simply reproducing their underlying assumptions.

News Story Aggregation and Perceived Credibility

News Story Aggregation and Perceived Credibility
Author: Stan Diel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

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The practice of news aggregation, or the use on a news website of content that is in part or in full copied from a separate, originating source, has become common in the wake of layoffs and budget cuts at traditional news organizations, and has long been common practice in new, online media. The results of this study suggest that news organizations can make the product of their work more credible in the eyes of consumers of news by more clearly identifying originating sources than by increasing or decreasing the use of aggregation. Links between degree of aggregation and perceived credibility were found to lack significance or be of little strength, while links between receivers' confidence in their ability to identify originating sources and perceived message credibility were consistently significant and of high strength.

Content Aggregation by Platforms

Content Aggregation by Platforms
Author: Lesley Chiou
Publisher:
Total Pages: 40
Release: 2015
Genre: Consumer behavior
ISBN:

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The digitization of content has led to the emergence of platforms that draw information from multiple sources. Policymakers are concerned that these new platforms threaten incentives for the production of original content. As a result, policymakers are contemplating regulations that would force aggregation platforms to pay or require an explicit "opt-in" for content providers. To understand the possible consequences and underlying rationale of such laws, we explore whether aggregation of content by a single platform encourages users to "skim" content or to investigate in depth. We study a contract dispute that led a major aggregator to remove information from a major content provider. We find that after the removal, users were less likely to investigate additional, related content in depth, particularly sources that were horizontally or vertically differentiated.