Aggregation, Blogging, and Reporting All Have Their Place, If Properly Balanced
By Ty Duffy
Jason McIntyre published a story yesterday about CBS Sports and the destructive power of aggregation. Many, including writers for this site, blog for a living, which entails a lot of aggregation, and don’t appreciate being likened to birds fighting over carrion.
The thing is both angles have merit. Neither is mutually exclusive. Blogging has its positive and negatives, at both the micro level and macro level.
Blogging may be more entertaining. But, the ultimate benefit is making sports analysis smarter and more accountable. The ecosystem prunes baseless conventions and half-baked ideas. That can be taken too far – godspeed to the person who dips his/her toe into baseball analysis – but broadly it has been positive. Having that check leads to better writing.
If a columnist suggests he/she voted a player into the hall of fame because pitchers considered walking him with the bases loaded, a blogger will (and should) be there to check baseball reference and point out that never happened.
Blogging also has its drawbacks. Being “smart” and “talented” is a tool, not an accomplishment. “Storytelling” can be both well written and lazy. Telling one’s own story is easy. Putting in the legwork for the mundane details of someone else’s is hard. Details that are surprising, awesome, and moving most often come from the latter.
Blogging unbound leads to a lot of thinkpieces, placing someone within a cultural construct, and little truth told with empathy. Ideally, there should be a balance between blogging and reporting.
Aggregation can be a positive. It’s good for business. Getting people to click on a website, deploying reason, ethics, and a variable measure of good taste is not an inherent part of the job. It is the job. Casting a wide net with timely, cheap-to-produce content makes the most sense. Algorithms do not discriminate between aggregator and the original. Neither do consumers.
Aggregation provides benefits to the aggregated. Not everyone reads “small newspaper X.” A story from that outlet that does major traffic is one that was aggregated. Stories that do best on blogs are original ones others aggregate.
Of course, aggregation also comes with dangers. There’s the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette example Jason gave. Aggregated story gets subsumed and distorted by bigger fish. That happens on a smaller scale far more frequently. (Though, one could argue the Washington Post found the right headline from the reporting.)
Taking that model to its logical extreme can be problematic. A small outlet that has to subsidize its writing with quick clicks is one thing. A large company deciding to cut its labor cost and hire cheap bloggers to flood the market with cheaper content is another. That’s not so great if you depend on stable writing income for a decent living.
While media has always been a business, it has never been just a business. Journalism performs a public service. Disseminating information is vital for a functional democracy. Aggregation gutting journalism has wider ramifications than, say, the logging industry declining.
The nightmare scenario for journalism is local media being gutted or non-existent, with large, overbearing national aggregators homogenizing the discussion and pulling it toward the same loud noises while “smart, talented” people crack jokes about it. That’s not a far-fetched scenario. That’s what is happening.
Look at politics. Sure, Trump lost in Iowa. But, he nearly won. He didn’t have policies. He did little invested, door-to-door campaigning. He didn’t spend an outrageous amount of money on ads or a ground game. He made himself a force by manipulating the news cycle with headlines. The media cycle was rolling along to his next comments before the hard, contradictory information could catch up with his last ones.