Waning Attention Spans Call for Aggregation and Curation
In the same way that Service Journalism sets out to directly answer the needs and concerns of consumers through listicles and digestible guides; aggregation and curation means to do the same but with less of an emphasis on creating content and more on presenting it.
Both include links to other sources, organized formatting, and concentrated areas of focus. But within the last decade, media startups dedicated to this idea have revolutionized it to the point that almost every mainstream outlet has incorporated aggregation or curation to their work.
However, unlike Service Journalism, which often includes its own research and reporting, aggregation and curation is entirely dependent on the work of others. This simple delineation beckons what place it even has in the media landscape.
The truth is that the absolute abundance of media is more likely to shelter people from the news than anything else. Despite having the world’s knowledge at the tips of one’s fingertips, most are overwhelmed by the mega-conglomerate outlets they are familiar with.
In 2012, Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin recognized a particular dilemma facing millennial women, who were often discouraged from keeping up current events through antiquated models. As two news buffs themselves, they attempted to bridge this gap by providing a “skim” of the day’s major headlines, editorialized for their majority female readership. And hence, theSkimm was born.
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Investors were once wary of their unique email newsletter deliverance, but the news service has since proven to be a major success, considering they have amassed 7 million subscribers in 7 years. And have almost entirely operated out of aggregating and curating for their viewers.
Since then, there have been a slew of sites based on the model of majorly curating and minorly creating content.
Huffington Post, Vulture, The Cut, and LinkedIn Today are all examples of platforms dedicated to making readers’ lives easier by putting all the news from everywhere they would want to go, all in one place.
Similar to Service Journalism, there is a huge convenience to having information brought together on one domain. And that is exactly the purpose of aggregation and curation.
Adding to the similarities of Service Journalism, aggregation and curation also have a tendency to be put down in the journalistic sphere for lack of authenticity.
Bill Keller, a former executive editor-in-chief of The New York Times, once said about the model of the Huffington Post that “In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.” And yet, even The Times is not immune to such a temptation. The NYT Now app, for example, aggregates content from The Times as well as from the web.
In some ways, many of us are already aggregating and curating our own content. The algorithms of our daily visited social medias are attuned to what we want to see and we venture from there. So despite Keller’s wishes, this is our new reality.
