News Aggregation vs. Real News Reporting - Who Pays for the Real Thing?

In his zeal to promote his own fortunes by insisting, in a recent article that news aggregators are on the path to the future, tech expert Michael Arrington doesn't really acknowledge the foundational objections by media outlet owners such as Mark Cuban, Rupert Murdoch and others against aggregation.

Here's the rub . . . It costs real money - lots of it - to do something other than analyze and then (frequently) only regurgitate/reprint corporate and government press releases - a popular pastime of many bloggers. All those news and investigative reporters working for traditional media outlets are also real people who earn real money and tap into comparatively massive resources in order to check facts, challenge statements, and generally stress sources of information to determine what's real and what's bullshit. Arrington, by contrast, works in his home attic office and relies on the broader Internet 'community' for many of his leads, and primarily on himself for his analyses. Arrington and many others like him are essentially one-man bands, none of whom have access to the refining environments defined by the internal editorial peer review embedded in the structures of so-called traditional media.

I'm not suggesting that Arrington can't do good work. He frequently does. But his recent negative comments about paywalls bespeak his personal fear about not being able to freely feed a portion of his TechCrunch blog, and seem to me to be a poorly disguised plea for free information. Rupert Murdoch on the other hand (among others), seems bent on preventing Arrington and all of the news aggregators from freely profiting simply by sucking news leads from the web site of Murdoch's publications without contributing to the cost of assembling, checking, analyzing and writing all that original stuff in the first place.

Arrington, for his part, and many other well-known bloggers, would have us believe that new aggregation is great. After all, they say, don't MSN, Yahoo and Google offer home pages containing aggregated news? Absolutely! But unfottunately for Arrington, he does not have the refining resources that Google for one, brings to the table - Google and its competitors all have the financial resources to establish their own news bureaux and reportage if it comes to that. So in my view it's not a David vs. Goliath position that Arrington takes. I believe he's doing nothing more than trying to skew opinion to serve on his own self-interest.

If Rupert Murdoch and all his peers want to square off with Google, Microsoft/MSN and Yahoo, good luck to them all. But if Murdoch thinks he'll hurt Google, for example, he's dead wrong. There's nothing to stop Google from going into direct competition with Murdoch and either equaling him or beating him at his own game. Frankly, I hope it happens because I'm just as fed up as Arrington seems to be with traditional media. The problem is, I think Arrington isn't telling us his real reasons for deriding paywalls, and that's not what blogging and news reporting and real communication are all about. Sorry Michael - I don't buy it.