Journalists Get Their Own News Aggregator
April 1st, 2008 | by Brad King |Well, I took a day off to attend the Cincinnati Reds Opening Day (loss) Celebration. Now we’re back to news about journalism.
A VC firm has funded a news aggregation service for journalists. The company, Publish2, is the latest in a series of human-search oriented websites that remove technology from the selection process.
The site allows journalists from around the country to submit and rank (I assume) the most important stories of the day, which is supposed to lend credibility to the stories.
I’ve been highly critical of other human-search sites such as Alltop. Guy Kawasaki and I had a public back-and-forth about his platform — which also offers self-selected stories and sites — on Twitter.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these types of services. It’s the Web, man, and that means anyone can build on the platform. But I have questions about services that self-select who can participate. By the very design, the service won’t be as complete as it could be.
As for Publish2, the business model should be interesting. I’m not sure if it will be a service sold internally or one that’s ad-supported for everyone. And what’s the incentive for journalists to participate? We are, by our very nature, loathe to participate in anything that can be construed as partial.
Last, but certainly not least, why in the world do we need another aggregation service? The tools already exist for anyone to use. The only logical conclusion is that this will be an internal tool.
