The fate of aggregation? TBD

If there’s anything most industry practitioners can agree upon, it’s that plagiarism is bad. Call it commandment No. 1: Thou shall not steal other’s content. The tenant is as old as most legacy players still operating within the industry today.

The digital space—with its fuzzy boarders and calls for content sharing—has blurred that perception, however. What’s yours is mine and mine is yours. This idea of the free exchange of information is why the Internet has sped so gloriously out of control, and why old- and new-school journalists alike are having a hard time jumping aboard and finding their footing amid the constantly shifting landscape.

It’s also why we’ve seen a wealth of fascinating new media enterprises emerge in virtually every market segment and locale. Take TBD, for example, a much-hyped Washington, D.C. news site that aimed to cover the 5-million person metropolis with only a skeletal staff and the power of the Web.

10 years ago, this would have been a pipe dream. To cover a region that big, newsrooms required a bustling hive of intrepid reporters, each with his or her own beat and area of coverage.

But under the supervision of Jim Brady, himself a former employee of the Washington Post, TBD’s pipe dream was more than practical. How, you ask? It goes back to that whole power of the Web thing.

Brady planned to use staff reporting for big stories, along with aggregation, data and geolocation for neighborhood-level news. The business model wasn’t particularly new; other sites have thrived off of this unique reporting/content aggregation model. (See The Huffington Post.) TBD just was one of the first to stress hyper-local content within a more ambitious metropolitan shell.

So how went the venture? Just ask Brady. He was recently let go by publisher Robert Allbritton for focusing more on aggregation than original content.

“To me, the creation of outstanding original content has always been what will determine the long-term success of TBD,” Allbiritton wrote in a memo.

Brady responded, downplaying the focus, arguing "What journalist isn't interested in having more original content? Being anti-content is like being anti-puppy,” according to a Poynter blog.

This is only one instance of aggregation-related argument, but I think it represents the next major hurdle for the journalism industry. The debate isn’t a matter of old media versus new or print versus digital—it’s my content versus your content.

Content aggregation has watered down the pool of information dramatically and devastatingly. The struggling newspaper industry is doing most of the work, while bloggers, skeletal news sites and even the most transparent of aggregators are reaping the benefits.

What’s most interesting is how intertwined the dynamics of business and ethics are in this case. If parasitic aggregators keep borrowing (stealing?) content from hard-working media outlets, those outlets can’t survive, and the aggregators won’t have anyone to sustain them. Along the same lines, as aggregators continue to water down the pool of information, repackaging bits of news and information without first verifying or doing their own reporting, credibility suffers and audiences become increasingly wary.

So maybe commandment No. 1 needs an amendment: Thou shall not steal other’s content—especially not on the Web.