Thursday 24 October 2019

Book review: Aggregating the News: Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority, Mark Coddington (2019)

In April 2011 a story I had written about what was then the world’s hottest chilli, a story which had been published on the website of Australian Geographic, was plagiarised. They took the quotes, changed some text, rewrote the content, and published their version on their own website. I don’t remember if they put a link to the story I had written with my editor’s help. But this kind of thing happens all the time and journalists complain, particularly, about a media outlet that originated in the UK (which I shall not name here, but the name rhymes with “fail”). You see their gripes in comments on Twitter all the time.

So I was intrigued by Cottington’s idea of writing a book – which he seems to have started researching by at least 2015 – about aggregators. In fact it turns out to be a highly interesting and revealing book about journalism in the digital age more generally, so can be read profitably by many people. The point of the book is summed up as much by the second half of the subtitle as it is by the first half.

Even though aggregators – who assemble finished stories and videos mainly using material they source from the websites of other news outlets – are aware of the opprobrium that is aimed at them, their stories are read each week by hundreds of thousands, in fact by millions, of people. You wonder if perhaps (as I suggested in 2013) media literacy shouldn't be taught at secondary schools. In fact the reason that Coddington’s book is so interesting is precisely because of the profound changes that are happening in journalism, in politics, and in the public sphere more generally. This is a global phenomenon.

The matter of authority versus readability – who are all these people clicking on these secondhand stories? – presents us with something of a conundrum. Presumably people know that what they are clicking on is cobbled together from other sources, but it seems they cannot help themselves. They need the hit that news can provide if it is about something that is close to their hearts. The trivial is more compelling than the in-depth, and consumer behaviour confirms this fact.

But still people complain. I have written before, on this blog, about how people say the media is superficial. In my mind all news stories are proxies for larger debates, and aggregation in particular emphasises this point.

Yet while people know that aggregation is not based on actual reporting – in the traditional sense of the word – still they click, and companies that specialise in aggregation – plus branches of larger media companies involved in the practice as well – rake in the money that their overworked, often young, and inexperienced journalists make every day. Coddington takes time to examine how such people feel, and this is a good thing to do. It’s hard enough for regular journalists to avoid public criticism – everyone wants something from journalists then, at the drop of a hat, people turn around and criticise you – so how much harder is life for people doing aggregation?

I was a bit surprised by one fact the book unearths. An employee at one aggregator (at least one, I don’t remember the details precisely) said they don’t use sources on blogs. It seems rather restricting to limit yourself to only mainstream media outlets. Many good stories have come from blogs initially, such as the Theranos investigation. In fact, using blogs as sources could result in a higher-quality product from aggregators. There is a lot of repetition even among media outlets that do original reporting, but it seems that people in the community don’t mind.

When it comes down to it the public is in charge. They don’t have to click, but Coddington doesn’t analyse this aspect of the business in any detail, just as he doesn’t talk about how the news cycle is characterised by sharp peaks and troughs. People don’t stick with one issue for very long but when they do, they do so obsessively. A major issue, such as the US Democrats’ announcement recently of a presidential impeachment investigation, can die down within a few days.

Coddington also doesn’t talk about how people use narratives to create community, something which, since language is innate, is a species behaviour. I’ve written about these things on the blog many times over the past year or so. For example, on 2 July 2018, in the first in what would turn out to be a series of posts with theories of the act of narrative. A recent study has confirmed this intuition. It talks about “moral grandstanding” as an expression of “status-seeking personality traits”.

Coddington keeps his focus squarely on the aggregators themselves, and in doing so he goes into a lot of detail about a shadowy industry. Keeping in mind the reservations I express, I think that this is a very illuminating book. It forms a kind of corrective to the streams of criticism (and worse) that is aimed at journalists every day.

To finish off, just a small point for the publisher: the subtitle given on the book’s web page and on the graphic used for the cover of the Kindle edition is ‘Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority’, which is not what appears on the title page of the Kindle edition. Here you read ‘Secondhand Storytelling and the Changing World of Digital Journalism’ which, Coddington told me, was just a preliminary version. 

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