This document discusses the transition from studying journalistic authority to studying digital "things" used in journalism. It summarizes interviews with aggregators who see their role as coordinating online content flows and making sense of the digital world rather than traditional journalism focused on local communities. Aggregators view their primary skill as news judgment and see aggregation as the future while traditional reporting is seen as "old" or "dying." They argue aggregation and reporting are entangled in practice but inhabit different information spheres, with aggregation focused on understanding the digital world through coordination and curation of internet content.

1. What Aggregators Do:
Discourse, Practice, and
Digital “Things”
C.W. Anderson
College of Staten Island (CUNY)
April 02, 2011
Twitter: @chanders
Website: http://cwanderson.org

2. A Transition Paper
 From the study of journalistic authority
 To the study of journalistic things

3. The Authority of Journalism
 Reporting
 Carried out on behalf of “the public”
 So, what is “reporting”?

4. Aggregation and “On the
Ground” Reporting …
 … Are valorized as different, via public
discourse
but
 … Are, in practice, entangled and identical
but
 … Are different, when it comes to the universe
of evidence they inhabit (???)

5. FCC Hearing: March 2010

6. Themes in March 2010 Hearing
 Valorization of “original reporting”
• Good for democracy
 What “original reporting” means is self-evident
 Conversations about technology name the
“enemy”:
• aggregation
 Aggregation is the enemy in copyright /
economic terms
 Aggregators means “Google.”

7. Qualitative Interviews With
Aggregators

8. Themes from 2009-2010
Interviews
 Aggregation concerned with coordinating the content
flow of non-employees
 Immediate immersion on the “digital flood”
 Moments of creative happiness overwhelmed by work &
drudgery
 Primary skill: news judgment
 Aggregation: “the elite”; reporting: “old fogies,” “dying.”
 News organizations report and aggregate
 Aggregator and Aggregatee
 We aggregate the internet.

9. From Practices to Things

10. Below Hybridity
 What is the dominant realm from which we gather
evidence?
 “What we do as aggregators isn’t about journalism. It’s
about making sense of the internet.” Traditional
journalism had “always been about making sense of the
public, and about your local community, but with the
internet, we aggregators need to make sense of this
digital world. It’s why the Huffington Post, for example,
has the guts to call an ‘internet newspaper.’ It’s about
the internet. It isn’t about journalism, at least the way
we’ve always thought of journalism up until now.”

11. So, what are the things we use
to build our journalism?