The question is not if traditional media and “new media” aggregate facts, whether or not we like the term aggregation it’s what journalism is designed to do.

The two points of debate, I think, are the ratio at which these outlets introduce new or otherwise unknown facts, and how much value add is created through unique insightful analysis of collected and known facts. (Perhaps adding in a minus for any depravation of value to the originator of the aggregated material — this applies to old media too: think a book review that gives away too much or scooping a business on their own product announcement.)

My point here is that I agree with Niles that media needs to get over this fear of aggregation. The way most publications use the Web is far from its intended use — we’re writing on a medium whose greatest strength is the hyperlink.

Proper use of this medium not only allows for more efficient writing but adding greater depth and value to a piece (see: wikipedia’s use of hyperlinks.) If traditional media recognize the abundant value to themselves in linking to competitors’ work they may well solve the “problem” of the aggregators by outflanking them.

And we’re not just talking about adding some off-site links peppered on the homepage but real aggregation: If your company has a text report but a competitor has a great video, talk about it in your piece and link to it.

The NYTimes’ Lede Blog is a great example of this done right.

On doing it wrong there’s the AP’s distribution of content online: Rather than replicating the same piece of content on 500 sites, it would serve the reader far better to replicate a link on 500 sites that all point to the originating source. This method may be bad for individual newspaper business, but it would certainly be good for the health of journalism.

If media wants to survive in the age of HTML it needs to stop fearing the proper use of the hyperlink.

Actually, this is a trick question… because they’re the same thing. In journalism, our “original” content always has been the product of aggregation.”

That is so very silly. A magazine stand is not a journalism organization, though it does have the virtue of paying the originators of the content they aggregate.

And conflating the compilation of information to create a finished work (the story) with simply listing the finished work of other journalism organizations is (as was noted earlier) sophistry.

If every journalism organization decided to switch to a pure aggregation model overnight, there would be no journalism to consume the next day. If they all switched to peddling pure original content however, there would be lots of organizations.

Aggregation is fundamentally a convenience engine, not a creation engine. It does add some value, though little compared to original work. But it

Journalists have been profiting off others for years. So let’s not get all sanctimonious when others do it off us, for a change. Accept that there is value added in aggregating our content, as there is value added in the reporting we do off the original sources of information we collect.

Let others have their profit from that added value, and learn what we can from their methods to create more value at lower expense than we have in the past. That’s all I’m saying.