After talking with Jill on Friday, I have decided that it might be a better idea to switch courses for this project. Sort of going off of Dr. Stewart's Google idea, I was thinking about investigating the effects that news organizations that rely primarily on aggregation for their stories are having on the organizations that actually report the stories.
The prime example of this, of course, is Google, with its Google News feature. Also prominent, however, is the Huffington Post. An article recently ran on Slate.com defending the practices of the company based on the idea that they were in line with American journalistic traditions.
Clearly, organizations such as the Associated Press and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation are not pleased with the practices of these sites. The AP, in particular, is concerned with the lack of profit that they are seeing from these other sites and is trying to figure out just what to make of them at this point.
My goal for the project would be to determine whether aggregators, in particular Google and the Huffington Post, are good for the dissemination of news or bad for it. I think that I could probably find a fair amount of scholarly research and could definitely make it relevant, since aggregation wouldn't really be possible without the Internet, at least not to the degree that we have seen it.
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I like this idea. I feel that many news organizations use news aggregators to generate story ideas. It allows an unbiased computer to pick out certain stories based on a pre-determined set of key words or another criteria such as geographic location.
ReplyDeleteI feel that news aggregators allow running RSS feeds to work. They allow the RSS to consistantly check for updates and then the aggregator can email the rsults to you. Aggregators save time because it finds then news and you don't have to keep running web searches.
However, I feel that it becomes a problem when jounrlaist at the ground level are no longer seeking stories. I can't imagine a newsroom where eveverything is determined by the AP or AFP wire services because their stories are the only ones coming over the aggreggator at that time. Despite, this technology journalsits must stay connected to their communities.
Don Jason
dj320306@ohio.edu