Aggregate...responsibly

   I learned a new word recently: aggregate. Although this is a new word for me, it's not a new social media concept. It's been evolving for years.

   According to the Merriam-Webster definition, aggregate is the collection of units or particles into a body, mass or amount. What that means in the journalism world is that sites like AOL News and Yahoo! News collect mass amounts of stories from other media sources, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and repost them.

   Are these aggregation sites content thieves or bargain story outlets? Sure, the stories link back to the original source, but did they pay the journalists who wrote the stories or the photographers who took the photos?

   "For the first time in our history, the news increasingly is produced by companies outside journalism, and this new economic organization is important. We are facing the possibility that independent news will be replaced by self-interested commercialism posing as news," wrote Elements of Journalism authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel.

   To be fair, aggregation has its advantages. It's convenient for busy readers who want a broad range of news, and some sites have even hired people to manage hyper-local news, including local bloggers (citizen communicators) dedicated to covering their own community. 

   The problem with this latter point is that too many bloggers, masquerading as journalists, are willing to work for free for the chance to expression themselves and get published. I fear these bloggers are being taken advantage of by greedy aggregators hungary for space filler and original content.

   For this reason, media literacy should be a mandatory class for all college freshmen or sophomores. It's just too easy to misinform the public, which has been relying on ethical journalism (reliable, accurate, fair transparent) for hundreds of years. 

   This is where journalism educators can make a difference. We can't stop aggregation, but we can help make it more ethical by teaching journalism values to everyone, not just journalism majors.