Aggregating the News

Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority

Mark Coddington

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231547192
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Journalismus

Aggregated news fills our social media feeds, our smartphone apps, and our e-mail inboxes. Much of the news that we consume originated elsewhere and has been reassembled, repackaged, and republished from other sources, but how is that news made? Is it a twenty-first-century digital adaptation of the traditional values and practices of journalistic and investigative reporting, or is it something different—shoddier, less scrupulous, more dangerous?

Mark Coddington gives a vivid account of the work of aggregation—how such content is produced, what its values are, and how it fits into today's changing journalistic profession. Aggregating the News presents an analysis built on observation and interviews of news aggregators in a variety of settings, exploring how aggregators weigh sources, reshape news narratives, and manage life on the fringes of journalism. Coddington finds that aggregation is defined by its derivative relationship to reporting, which colors it with a sense of inferiority. Aggregators strive to be seen as legitimate journalists, but they are constrained by commercial pressures, professional disapproval, and limited access to important forms of evidence. The first comprehensive treatment of news aggregation as a practice, Aggregating the News deepens our understanding of how news and knowledge are produced and consumed in the digital age. By centering aggregation, Coddington sheds new light on how journalistic authority and legitimacy are created—and the consequences when their foundations are eroded.

CHAPTER ONE

Gathering Evidence of Evidence

Aggregation as Second-Order Newswork

It’s shortly after 8 a.m. when Samantha¹ receives a story assignment from her editor at VidNews: a new British study has found that half of people in the UK will get cancer at some point in their lives. Or perhaps two-thirds. Samantha’s editor, Luke, has found a BBC article on the study citing the one in two statistic and a web article by the British newspaper the Telegraph citing the figure as two out of three. He sends a message to Samantha on Google’s Gchat messenger system noting the discrepancy and asking her to determine the cause: Is one of the organizations misreporting the number, or is there some other difference, like a geographical one?²

“interestingggggggg,” types Samantha before pulling up the stories on her computer at a workspace she shares with other producers and editors in VidNews’ small, sunlit newsroom, a converted radiology office. She’s in her early twenties, two years out of college, having come to VidNews from a stint at a local TV news station. She’s in TV-style on-camera makeup today, ready for the “anchor” intros and standups she’ll record for several VidNews videos throughout the day. For this assignment, she’ll be required to write the script for a ninety-second video on the study with graphics and stock photos and video, then hand it off to a producer to create the graphics and stitch together the visual elements. In this case, Samantha will add the voiceover and on-camera read for her own video.

Samantha reads through both stories and finds generally the same information—a description of the study, background information on cancer rates, quotes from an interview with one of the researchers. She probably needs the original study to adjudicate the factual dispute, so she searches for it on Google News. She finds an article on the tech site Mashable, which links to a press release by the research group that conducted the study. That press release links to a blog post by the group, which has a link to the study as well as a slick graphical explanatory video similar to the one she’s been assigned to create. The reason for the high cancer rate, the video explains, is largely because people are living longer.

Samantha watches the video and quickly starts on her own script. Without having read the original study yet, she goes with “half” as the number in her lead because the Telegraph used “more than half” in addition to two out of three in its article, and Luke has suggested via Gchat that he thinks the discrepancy might simply be a rounding difference. Most of the other information she needs for her story—the reasons for the rise, the background on survival rate—comes from the research group’s press release and blog post. She breezes through a draft and adds links to the press release, the Telegraph article, the original study, and U.S. Social Security data she has used to refer to Americans’ life expectancy.

As she waits to see if VidNews’ graphics editor will be able to create graphics for her video, she decides to finally wade into the study itself to check on the Telegraph’s two-thirds figure. She finds the number, 53.5 percent, and keeps “half” in her lead. “I mean, it’s 53.5,” she says. “That’s pretty much half.” This raises questions about why the Telegraph is using two-thirds and whether the story should now be that the Telegraph is misreporting cancer statistics. “I don’t really just want to call out the Telegraph,” she says. We’re both scouring the Telegraph’s article for the origin of its two-thirds claim when I find it: the 53.5 percent figure in the study is for people born in 1960, and the two-thirds number comes from an interview with the researcher, who estimates that two-thirds of children born today will get cancer. Samantha’s concerns are immediately assuaged. She adds a quote from the Telegraph’s interview and moves on toward the editing process, where she’ll add background and links to Mayo Clinic and the World Health Organization based on Google searches for cancer survival rates and early detection.

Samantha produced a brief, explanatory report on an important new scientific study by comparing sources, evaluating them, and following a trail of evidence back to the original source to resolve differences between them. But many journalists wouldn’t consider her work reporting—she didn’t contact anyone, she didn’t do anything to check the veracity of the Telegraph’s quotes from the researcher, and her sources were largely the published reports of other journalists, as well as a press release. Much about her newsgathering process is quite similar to reporting, but those subtle differences are telling. The processes of aggregation and reporting—and the work that other aggregators do to find and validate information and present it as news—not only shape the veracity and credibility of the information we receive as news consumers each day, but they also form very different foundations for journalism’s authority to present news as valid. For all their overlap in practices, aggregation’s shift to gathering news secondhand from others’ reporting undermines aggregators’ authority, as well as their own confidence in the reliability of their accounts. It is in this respect that aggregation’s difference from reporting is pivotal in determining its value for journalism.

HOW REPORTING AND AGGREGATION TURN INFORMATION INTO “THE NEWS”

If aggregation has a competing form against which it is measured in the journalistic world, it is reporting. Aggregation and reporting are certainly not the only forms of work that go into producing news: there’s also editing, design, and distribution. But aggregation and reporting are often set in opposition as the two primary means of gathering and organizing the information that becomes news reports. Scholars have described them as the two dominant forms of newswork in the digital age, and they have noted the shift from reporting as a means of newsgathering toward, as one researcher put it, “the filtration, selection, and gatekeeping of already existing content.”³ Journalists are keen to set them against each other as well, often drawing a sharp boundary between aggregation and the work of creating original news, often valorized as “shoe-leather reporting,” “boots-on-the-ground reporting,” “original reporting,” or simply “real journalism.”⁴ In the discourse and mythology of professional journalism, reporting involves going to the scene of major events, knocking on doors, cornering public officials, unearthing hard-to-find documents, and uncovering scoops that drive public discussion and official action.⁵ In actuality, of course, reporting is often much less adventurous: getting a press release and making a couple of phone calls to flesh it out or making a quick call to an organization’s spokesperson to confirm details of a competitor’s story.

Aggregation and reporting are tangled both in practice and in history. As we have seen in the introduction, aggregation predates reporting throughout U.S. and UK journalism history and has existed alongside it for more than a century through news organizations’ digests of news and opinion and their interweaving of staff-written and wire copy. For decades reporters have done only minimal rewriting and information-gathering to produce their own reports from press releases or competitors’ accounts.⁶ Even when reporting is at its most ambitious, it is a process of pulling together information from disparate sources, both published and unpublished, and compressing it into a summary for busy audiences—which is essentially what aggregation does, too. And in today’s digital news environment, many journalists are doing aggregation and reporting within the same job. It’s important, then, not to conceive of aggregation and reporting as cleanly divided binaries. Still, there are important general distinctions between the two practices, which begin to emerge as we examine them as forms of journalistic knowledge production.

The fundamental difference is that aggregation is a step further removed from the evidence on which both practices rely. It is, as journalism scholar C. W. Anderson has described, second-order newswork—a process of piecing together bits of firsthand (and secondhand) information that have been published already, often gathered by journalists through reporting—and repackaging them into new forms.⁷ This derivative, second-hand relationship to reporting colors virtually everything else about aggregation. At the narrowest level, it indelibly shapes aggregators’ techniques of gathering and verifying information. But more broadly, it’s a key to the fundamental dynamics examined in this book: because aggregation is a knockoff of reporting, it has difficulty serving as a foundation for journalistic authority the way that reporting can. The ripple effects are dramatic. The relative lack of journalistic authority makes it more difficult to build a sustained audience around aggregation. It makes aggregation less economically valuable to advertisers and subscribers than reported work.⁸ And it undermines many aggregators’ sense of their own value and identity as professionals, which in turn can erode their commitment to doing aggregation for long enough to make substantial improvements to their work. To understand the magnitude of this difference, though, it helps to start with reporting and aggregation’s shared epistemological roots.

The core commonality between reporting and aggregation is their orientation around gathering evidence to build claims of knowledge regarding news events—often through what journalists conceive of as facts—and authoritatively presenting those claims to the public. This is a process that is fundamentally epistemological—that is, it’s a process of producing and publicly justifying knowledge. Media scholar Mats Ekström distinguishes between philosophical epistemology (theories of the nature of knowledge and possibility of scientific truth) and sociological epistemology (the routines and procedures that determine how knowledge is produced, expressed, and justified).⁹ The latter is the main object I’m concerned with here. Journalists are hardly philosophers (to say the least), but they do spend their days analyzing information in order to produce knowledge. They evaluate sources of evidence, weigh competing pieces of information, organize that information, and then present it to the public in ways that appear justified enough to be considered news facts. That’s epistemological work—the work of knowledge production. Those knowledge-oriented routines and procedures are what provide us the news and determine whether it’s trustworthy.

Journalists’ main claim to cultural authority is their ability to provide reliable information on current events. That claim rests on the public’s acceptance that the information is factual and the means of its production validate that factuality.¹⁰ If journalism’s democratic function is to provide people with the information they need to effectively self-govern, then the epistemological questions of how that information is produced, and whether the public accepts those production methods as valid, are crucial to journalism’s democratic value as well.¹¹ Public acceptance has withered in recent decades, as trust in the media has dropped to some of its lowest levels in numerous countries around the world.¹² This mistrust has political roots, of course; it’s shot through with ideology and tribalism. But it’s also deeply epistemological. One 2016 poll of Americans found that one of the top two reasons they cited for losing trust in a news source—running neck-and-neck with perceptions of bias—was that they “found facts that were wrong.”¹³ At a deeper level, the news media have faced increased skepticism of whether they can find facts at all—a shift in which “the notion that journalists or anyone else can arrive at a truthful account of things or follow an objective method of verification has been eroded in the public mind,” as former journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel lamented in their 2007 classic, The Elements of Journalism.¹⁴ Journalism’s knowledge-producing practices, then, are particularly important and imperiled. Aggregation’s derivative nature provides a further challenge to the legitimacy of those practices, but aggregation also represents a possible avenue for those practices to adapt to the digital information age.

Modern American reporting’s knowledge-producing process starts with the belief that there is a reality “out there” that reporters should strive to depict, and that they can do so using a set of methods meant to gather information with minimal subjective interference.¹⁵ This approach to knowledge has much in common with science. Indeed, many journalists of the early 1900s, led by the political commentator Walter Lippmann, expressed an admiration for science and invoked scientific language as a rationale for their own reporting methods. Lippmann advocated a form of “objective” reporting based on scientific methods of evidence-gathering, and even through the 1960s, several strands of journalism, both mainstream and niche, explicitly emulated science’s techniques of knowledge production.¹⁶ In practice, of course, journalism does not engage in anything resembling a formal scientific method. Journalists’ hypotheses take the form of hunches and common-sense assumptions rather than theoretically grounded propositions, and their evidence-gathering techniques are born much more out of organizational and time constraints than out of systematic attempts to measure reality. Journalists have long acknowledged these shortcomings: even Lippmann famously declared that “news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.” Objectivity was seen as an unattainable myth by many journalists as early as the 1930s and became a term of abuse within much of professional journalism by the 1960s.¹⁷ In practice, today’s journalists tend to be circumspect about the extent to which they can claim to have captured the truth in news accounts and operate from a more pragmatic mindset that, in the words of Watergate reporting legend Carl Bernstein, strives for “the best obtainable version of the truth.”¹⁸

One of the main constraints limiting reporters’ efforts to gather and validate reliable information is time. With the exception of extensive (and expensive) investigative reporting projects that constitute a very small portion of journalistic work, reporting takes place on extremely tight time schedules, typically on the scale of hours or days. These constraints mean that journalists don’t have time to rigorously confirm all of the knowledge they produce, so they’re forced to rely on “an established network of sources who deliver information that is assumed, a priori, to be justified,” as Mats Ekström has put it.¹⁹ When the mayor says that five city employees have been laid off to help resolve a $300,000 funding shortfall in the city public works department, reporters don’t typically have the time to independently verify that the layoffs have occurred or to conduct their own audit of the city’s books to confirm the shortfall amount; they simply present the information as factual and attribute it to the mayor. Instead of fully gathering and presenting the kind of direct and rigorous empirical evidence needed to support the factual claim, the reporter allows the mayor’s statement to stand alone as sufficient evidence. As the sociologist Mark Fishman wrote several decades ago, the mayor’s claim is bureaucratically verified—the source is in a position to know, so she’s assumed to know what she asserts—which means the claim doesn’t have to be meticulously verified.²⁰

This kind of evidence may not be rigorously verified, but the reporting process, such as it is, revolves around gathering it. At bottom, the evidence that reporters use to constitute their information and justify their knowledge claims comes down to three basic forms, which C. W. Anderson refers to as “the holy trinity of news objects”: observation, interviews, and documents.²¹ Each object plays a complementary role in establishing the factuality of news reports, and together they form the raw material that constitutes the knowledge produced by reporting. Observation is often positioned at the top of reporters’ hierarchy of evidence, regarded as the most reliable and authentic. It is validated by the journalist’s physical proximity to the events she recounts, as well as her firsthand testimony without havi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Understanding Aggregation in Context
• 1. Gathering Evidence of Evidence: Aggregation as Second-Order Newswork
• 2. Making News by Managing Uncertainty
• 3. Inferiority and Identity: Aggregators and the Journalistic Profession
• 4. Clickbait, Analytics, and Gut Feelings: How Aggregators Understand Their Audiences
• 5. Atomization and the Breakdown (and Rebuilding) of News Narrative
• 6. Conclusion: Aggregation, Authority, and Uncertainty
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index