One night over drinks awhile back, a old college chum confessed he chose journalism as his major because he thought it would be easy.
“My senior year in high school, I had no clear career interests and no prospects,” he said. “So, when we had a career day at school and a reporter came to speak, I listened and thought, ‘How hard can this be? People tell you things and you write them down. Cinch.’”
Many years and many more reporting awards later, he rolls his eyes when he thinks about that.
“If I really wanted ‘easy,’ I should have flapped my arms and flown to the moon.”
I think of that conversation now as journalism’s latest progeny compares news gathering to “aggregation,” or the more impressive-sounding “curation.” In more than one dictionary, the term applies to the preservation and maintenance of digital assets, or from far back in linguistic history, to cure an ill.
But just this decade, aggregation and curation have evolved into solid euphemisms for repackaging pre-published Web content — a boon to social media, which encourages users to share and trade information among private networks, and to “content farms,” or Web-based operations that generate large amounts of type intended to attract automated search engines.
Sure, Web-scraping serves a purpose by bringing together facts and figures otherwise lost in the digital flood, allowing easier comparisons of those details for clarity and accuracy. Unfortunately, practiced aggregators and curators have compared themselves to journalists, saying that what they do is more efficient and socially responsive than journalism as it has been practiced in excess of a century.
Even seasoned journalists are swayed by the disturbing perspective gaining ground among the digital set and crystalized on the blog site GigaOm last week beneath the headline “Are aggregation and curation journalism? Wrong question.”
The GigaOm post by writer Matthew Ingram opened by taking to task the critics of an online piece in Forbes by blogger Kashmir Hill. She had summarized a long book excerpt about data and privacy from New York Times Magazine titled “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” which Forbes recapped with the puckish headline “How Target Found Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.” The headline was sexier than the Times’ topper and certain to generate mouse clicks. And it did — almost more of them than the Times’s story.
Ingram called out the critics who bellyached about Hill’s “borrowing” content and Forbes recasting it better than the Times did. He insisted the recasting was a favor to the Times and emblematic of the new wave in attention-getting that traditional journalists must accept and surf readily if they are to survive in media. Ingram then surmised, correctly, that Hill’s product demonstrated the “new media ecosystem” where aggregation and curation can add value to news reporting and broadcasting.
(To Ingram’s credit, he highlighted a Forbes piece containing clear, precise attribution to the original source, a rare trait in aggregated Web content.)
But then Ingram’s train of logic derailed when it leapt forward to say this same aggregation/curation is identical to journalism, in that with both pursuits “information is provided that increases our knowledge about an important topic."
“Isn’t that a pretty good definition of journalism, not whether someone made a phone call or has a specific degree, or whether they travelled to a war zone or not?” Ingram asks.
In the end, he concludes, journalism’s top priority is “to serve the reader — either by informing them or entertaining them, or some combination of the two.”
Yes, journalism does have to serve the reader; that was the original point of it. But accurate, ethical and complete service can’t come from cut-and-paste tactics alone. It is, in fact, the goal of complete service that makes credible, responsible journalism much harder than it looks, and why my college buddy rolled his eyes at thinking journalism might be a “cinch.”
Any notion of simplicity my friend and I had was discarded in college. Where we attended journalism school, 90 percent of the studies had nothing to do with the physical act of reporting. It was a given that students coming into the program knew how to write, so much of the time we labored over law (the better for us to protect an interview subject’s rights and our own) and we labored over ethics (the better for us to be accountable to our readers by citing exact sources). We studied logic and policy analysis (the better for us to avoid having politicians and corporations pull the wool over our eyes), and we studied civil discourse (the better for us to conduct our interviews and research without fear or favor).
In other words, the professors were trying to develop something in all of us called “news judgment,” not just news gathering.
And we learned early a crude yet crucial truth about rooting out information: There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. (Food for thought perhaps for GigaOm’s headline writers.)
A lot of those lessons have been honed for me by on-the-job experience over the years. And as I look back, I see that my schooling answered crucial questions that mere curation in today’s vein could not.
“Curation,” my friend muttered. “Sounds like another word for scrapbooking.”
Aggregation, curation — call it what you will — are just part of the whole in journalism. To truly serve readers and viewers, one must also understand where those should begin and end. Confusing those with journalism, or assuming a simplified method of information-gathering can fully replace it, is no service to anyone.
