Aggregation & Curation

The focus of week five in my media and entrepreneurship class was centered around the concepts of aggregation and curation. Compared to previous weeks, these were concepts that were a little more unfamiliar to me, so I walked away from the readings with a real sense of enlightenment.

What I realized soon after I jumped into the different readings was that while aggregation and curation were rather foreign concepts to me, if you take the time to look, we see examples all around us. Below are a few early takeaways I came away with:

1. Options. Everyone desires options in life, be it your place of residence, your workplace and occupation, your school, or simply your means of providing for your loved ones. But in recent years, we’ve seen an eruption of consumer optionality from a media standpoint. This is due to the fact that, as Gaby Goldberg put it in her Medium post, there is an overload of content. Now, more than ever, media consumers can pick and choose exactly the content they want to see. At this point, given the advancement of algorithms behind different media platforms, consumers hardly need to do that work themselves — as it is typically pre-curated on a silver platter for their enjoyment.
2. The growing importance of a Total Accessible Market (TAM). Another highlight from Goldberg’s piece was her reference to the concept of a total accessible market in the context of Uber. Goldberg talked about how Uber used its platform as a ride sharing service to add UberEats into its services, thus expanding their Total Accessible Market. We see this in music streaming services (she mentions Spotify) as well as videos streaming services like Netflix or Hulu. Platforms like these have been able to exhibit continual and exponential growth because of the expansion of their respective TAMs. Furthermore, the authors we read this week seem to believe that these patterns will be mirrored in the field of journalism. It will be important to keep in mind how to maximize the total accessible market for the content we seek to create in the near future.
3. It’s not a problem to play the game like everyone else, but we have to do it the right way. And by “right way” I am referring directly to Ann Friedman’s arguments in the Columbia Journalism Review. I found it interesting how Friedman is a former editor who understands the tricks behind metrics and generating views to your content. This stuck out to me because as journalists it is our responsibility to uphold the standards of ethical aggregation since we are the minority of people who will understand how this system works. For example, her emphasis on clearly identifying the source of the work and linking their original articles directly (rather than linking to your own page where a reader can be “re-redirected” to the original piece) particularly stands out. Aggregation will only be as useful as we make it, and the incentive to invest time into producing quality content will diminish if it becomes harder to receive credit for your work. But proven success stories such as theSkimm and The NewsRun show that this can be done the right way.

I very much enjoyed these readings this week as they have opened my eyes to a part of this industry with which I was not very knowledgeable. I intend on finding some examples of aggregation that are more closely aligned with my interests and brainstorming ways I can put these tools to use.