“What Aggregators Do: Rhetoric, Practice, and Evidentiary Cultures Inside Web-EraJournalism.”C.W. Anderson, College of Staten Island (CUNY)
Abstract
This paper analyzes an increasingly valorized form of newswork-- “serious, old fashioned,”“boots on the ground reporting”-- through an exploration of its purported occupational opposite,news aggregation. The paper begins with a qualitative content analysis of the March 4, 2010 FCCworkshop “The Future of Media and Information Needs of Communities: Serving the PublicInterest in the Digital Era,” in which journalists and scholars, using public rhetoric, attempted todraw a sharp, clear boundary between original reporting and aggregation. In its second sectionthe paper turns to an exploration of the actual hybridized practices of journalistic aggregation.Connecting these threads is an argument (drawing on research in the sociology of expertise, thesociology of occupations, and journalism studies) that knowledge claims must be examined
both
as pure, line drawing arguments
and
as messy hybrids in which material practices need to beconstantly purified through this aforementioned rhetorical work. The paper finds that, beyondrhetorical attempts at differentiation, one source of the conflict between “aggregators” and“reporters” lies in different conceptions of the validity of digital evidence. I conclude by arguingthat a deeper understanding of this disagreement requires research into both the
material practices
and
material
objects
of 21
st
century newswork.
Introduction: Aggregate This!
The so-called “battle between bloggers and journalists” continues to rage, long past itsexpiration date, persisting in a journalistic world of increasing occupational overlap and hybridwork practices. In his recent excavation of the psychological roots of this conflict, NYU mediascholar Jay Rosen called the battle a “psychological thing,” and argued: “there’s something aboutbloggers versus journalists that permits the display of a preferred (or idealized) self among peoplein the press whose work lives have been disrupted by the Internet.” He concludes: “spitting atbloggers is closely related to gazing at your own reflection, and falling in love with it all over again” (Rosen 2011). For Rosen, pitting bloggers against journalists is pathological; self-mythologized communication producers denigrate their “evil opposite” via the creation of their ideal other.A recent article by former
New York Times
editor Bill Keller perfectly captures the spirit of the recent conflict. In a Spring 2011 opinion piece called “Aggregate This,” Keller made it clear that while what he called “’news aggregation” could mean “smart people sharing their readinglists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe … too often it amounts totaking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting
revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material” (Keller 2011a, np).Amongst the primary culprits in Keller’s world of barely disguised thievery was the Huffington Postand it’s CEO, Arianna Huffington. Keller followed up with an even blunter comment: “aggregatingthe work of others is no substitute for boots-on-the-ground journalism” (Keller 2011b, np). In her reply to Keller, Huffington chose not to directly address questions of theft, preferring to emphasizeher traditionalist bona fides. “Even before we merged with AOL,” Huffington argued, “HuffPosthad 148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism” (Huffington 2011, np).Drawing on extensive newsroom fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and contentanalysis, this paper argues that the primary “jurisdictional conflict” (Abbot 1988; Lewis 2011) in journalism today actually lies between reporting
and
aggregation rather than blogging and journalism. The paper proceeds in three parts. In the first section, I analyze the rhetorical battlebetween aggregators and reporters, as filtered through the lens of a March 2010 FCC hearing onthe future of journalism. During this hearing, FCC commissioners, bloggers, journalismexecutives, and academics sought to draw sharp lines designating exactly where reporting endedand aggregation began. In the second part of the paper I examine the actually existing, messypractices of “aggregation in action,” studying the work routines and informational practices of aggregators as they go about their daily labors. Evidence in this second section seems to castdoubt on the attempts (like those at the hearings in front of the FCC) to draw sharp jurisdictionallines, leading to speculation that journalistic expertise may be a chimera or simply an outcome of rhetorical power games.The final section of the paper dissents from this potentially pessimistic conclusion,arguing that deep-seated divisions between aggregators journalists over the
proper status of digital and analog evidence
point towards more substantive differences between reportorial andaggregative culture, and thus provides a clue as to the shifting nature of journalistic expertise. It ispossible to see expertise as simultaneously
more
than simply the outcome of rhetorical battlesover jurisdiction but also
not simply
the inherent, substantive property of a particular occupationalgroup. Both jurisdiction and expertise, in short, are
networked
phenomena
. They emerge, in the
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What Aggregators Do
This paper analyzes an increasingly valorized form of newswork-- “serious, old fashioned,” “boots on the ground reporting”-- through an exploration of its purported occupational opposite, news aggregation.
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