Thought Leader Q&A

Daylife, Getty Give Aggregation Tools to Publishers (for a Price)

by Mark Glaser

Upendra Shardanand re-focused Daylife from being a platform as well as destination site, putting the platform first and letting the site fall further into the background. Recently, Getty Images announced a partnership and $4 million investment in Daylife, with plans to sell Daylife services to its clients, including the SmartGalleries tool for showcasing photos online. Getty joins previous Daylife investors the New York Times Co., Craigslist's Craig Newmark and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.

• September 24, 2009
• 1 comment

NewspaperShift

Newspaper Editors Want Clear Credit When Bloggers Link to Them

by Simon Owens

If only every blogger could link to stories the way Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit does. The libertarian blogger, with his hundreds of thousands of readers, offers up dozens of daily snippets that typically consist of a single sentence and a link. Sometimes it's a headline or even a single word -- "Heh." As a result, those being linked by Reynolds...

• August 28, 2009
• 9 comments

Weblogs

Using the 'Steal-O-Meter' to Gauge if Stories Steal or Promote

by Mark Glaser

In the recent dust-up between the Washington Post and Gawker, Post reporter Ian Shapira was upset when his story was excerpted on the media gossip blog Gawker. While blogs and even mainstream news articles have been quoting, excerpting and summarizing other stories and blog posts for years, there's never been accepted etiquette on how to do so. According to Shapira,...

• August 13, 2009
• 16 comments

Legal Drama

Changing the Law to Save Newspapers: Some Modest Proposals

by Jeffrey D. Neuburger

As newsroom staffs continue to shrink and newspapers go out of business at an alarming rate, the difficulty newspapers have experienced in gaining economic traction online has been blamed on blogs and websites that link to content on newspaper sites. According to some, this kind of "free riding" is responsible at least in part for the distress in which newspapers...

• July 21, 2009
• 3 comments

Legal Drama

A Brief History of AP's Battles with News Aggregators

by Jeffrey D. Neuburger

The news is information, and information wants to be free, as the saying goes. But for news organizations, the news is a product that is collected, recorded and sold for profit. And those profits are now under extreme economic pressure, threatening some news organizations with extinction. Both online and traditional news outlets are regrouping, retrenching and reconsidering their business models...

• May 26, 2009
• 3 comments

NewspaperShift

Ohio Newspapers Share Content, But Don't Give Up Hope for AP

by Simon Owens

For many, last week's news that the Associated Press planned to begin to crack down on news aggregators that link and quote its content wasn't news at all. Media industry publications have long been reporting on the friction between the AP and aggregators -- a series of verbal swipes made at conferences and in news articles that perhaps reached an...

• April 20, 2009
• 2 comments

5Across

An After-Life for Newspapers

by Mark Glaser

Everywhere you look there are dark signs for newspapers: bankruptcies, less print editions, the threat of closings in San Francisco and Boston, layoffs and pay cuts. But the journalism of newspapers will live on in digital form online. How will this after-life look? We brought together five people for the latest episode of 5Across who are working for newspapers...

• April 9, 2009
• 1 comment

Digging Deeper

BusinessWeek.com Pushes into Aggregation, Video, Participation to Stand Out

by Mark Glaser

Business news is often about numbers. And when you check the audience numbers on the various top financial news sites online, the portals such as Yahoo Finance and MSN Money come out on top, followed by a jumble of online magazines such as Forbes.com, wire services such as Reuters, and online-only pubs like TheStreet.com. As of last August, BusinessWeek.com...

• January 23, 2008
• 3 comments

Media Usage

The Efficiency (and Shame) of Long-Distance Reporting

by Mark Glaser

My writer friend Marlene once had a dot-com job that seemed odd. She wrote for a travel site about various countries but never traveled to those countries. She simply aggregated information from other websites and did extensive online research before writing about them and putting together guides. But strange as it seemed at the time, I was destined to...

• January 22, 2008
• 3 comments

Digging Deeper

Topix Capitalizes on Forums, Reaches Rural Areas

by Mark Glaser

When local news aggregator Topix decided to set up online forums last December for every city and small town in America, they figured the forums would be a loss leader. After all, online forums have a bad reputation for unfettered discussion, gossip and slander, leading most news organizations to abandon them altogether online. And people on forums are usually...

• July 11, 2007
• 6 comments

Digging Deeper

Placeblog Pioneer Sees Geo-Tagging as Key to Local Aggregation

by Mark Glaser

For the past few years, bloggers have been living in a keyword-based world. When they write a blog post, they can tag the post by putting it into relevant topical categories. A post about the U.S. attorney general firing scandal might be tagged: "U.S. politics," "Alberto Gonzales," "attorney general firings." But the missing element for bloggers has been a...

• May 30, 2007
• 3 comments