The more I think about the issue of redundant news coverage on the web, the more I’m both perplexed and fascinated. Read the following on Facebook’s announcement of Facebook Connect — seriously, read it all:

Nothing like the biggest business story in recent memory — JPMorgan buys Bear Stearns for $2 (a share) — breaking on a Sunday to bring into sharp relief the difference between news on the web and news in print — not to mention differences in how news is presented on the web.

The Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is undoubtedly a big story, which every media outlet is covering, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Google News currently shows 2,580 versions of this story. But when you stop and think about, you have to ask — WHY are there 2,580 versions of this story?

You can hum along […]

How can newsrooms do more online with fewer resources? By leveraging the reporting that bloggers in their communities have ALREADY published on the web. Using “local link journalism,” reporters can seek out and link to reporting on a story that’s been published across their local blogosphere and just needs to be pulled together.

And isn’t pulling […]

The link journalism meme seems to have legs, based on the number of smart people who picked it up. Now it’s time to kick it up a notch, with the concept of NETWORKED link journalism, which can give journalists, collectively, the power of Digg and Google to direct huge amounts of traffic on the web.

A cornerstone of journalism has always been reporting what key sources say, put in context and given perspective, alongside reported facts.

It’s time to reinvent that process on the web — make it dynamic — using the fundamental mechanism for connecting information and people: the LINK

Jack Lail, an editor and journalist with a deep understanding of the web, big vision, and a “let’s do it” innovator’s spirit, set out to publish “the best Tennessee election coverage that can be found on the Internet” — he rounded up a group of journalists and bloggers, set them up on Publish2, and off […]

Publish2 is organizing a network of newsrooms, journalists, freelancers and network-affiliated bloggers to aggregate the best news coverage of the “Super Tuesday” February 5 U.S. primary elections, leading up to it and after. Publish2 is still in private beta, but we’re going to syndicate everything out via RSS feeds.

Publish2’s web-based bookmarking feature will aggregate bookmarks […]

So Clinton and McCain won in New Hampshire. All the polls got it wrong. Great upset story. This morning, I wanted to read about how it happened, but I only had time to read one article before getting to work.

This presented an interesting question. How should I figure out who’s got the best coverage of […]

NYTimes.com wasn’t the first traditional media brand to aggregate third-party content — and it certainly won’t be the last. But the New York Times, once considered the national newspaper of record, represented one of the last bastions of the traditional media approach to content, i.e. we produce it ALL ourselves.

And if anyone makes a […]

Every ranking system is at risk for gaming, and the TechMeme Leaderboard is no different, as Dave Winer points out regarding today’s pile on to Jason Calacanis Web 3.0 meme. (Ironically, Jason himself anticipated the problem when the Leaderboard debuted.) This was a problem before the Leaderboard, but providing a lasting reward to this behavior […]

One of the many reasons why Techmeme is the leading tech news aggregator among tech insiders is that it aggregates traditional media brands alongside new media brands. No place is this more evident than the new Techmeme Leaderboard — the top 25 is a near perfect mix of media brands that are 2 years old, […]

Linking to third-party websites used to be anathema to the traditional media mindset — why would we send people AWAY? We want to keep (read: trap) them HERE. Attitudes began to change when an online media company that did nothing but send people away started making billions in advertising (i.e. Google).

Still, most media companies resist […]

Many newspaper executives, most infamously Tribune acquirer Sam Zell, have made an enemy out of Google and other online aggregators who disintermediate newspapers and all other traditional media. This is of course a wrongheaded way to think about content on the Web, since these aggregators drive a significant amount of traffic to newspapers.

But the […]

Yesterday, to my surprise, I got quite a bit of traffic from the Wall Street Journal. When I checked out the referring URL, I discovered that the WSJ was linking to Publishing 2.0 through the automated Sphere widget related links, which is radical because you could construe my page views as having been stolen […]

Linking to other media companies’ content used to be unthinkable for traditional media brands, but attitudes have changed after Google made $10 billion in advertising by doing nothing but link to other media companies’ content (and run ads on other companies’ content).

Last week, Inform announced that a number of high profile media companies would […]

Traditional media sites used to recoil at the idea of linking to any content other than their own. This made these sites one-way islands in the link-driven web ecosystem, but worse is they have suffered disintermediation at the hands of Google, Digg, and other aggregators that don’t discriminate and that prioritize what’s best for the […]

The issue of whether Google’s indexing of news sites constitutes copyright infringement is likely to receive more attention following a report that Google has entered into licensing agreements with several large UK news groups, similar to the licensing deals that Google has made with the Associated Press in the U.S. and Agence France-Presse in France. […]

Digital media has unbundled content, disrupting legacy businesses that sell bundled media like albums and newspapers. But that doesn’t mean there is no value in bundling content, as Nick Carr observes in a lyrical deconstruction of David Weinberger’s assertion that the track is the natural unit of music.

Did NBC Universal and News Corp cut a deal to create content for the web? New production capabilities? New armies of web-only content creators? No. This is about creating a platform for aggregating and distributing existing content, which they already have too much of.

You’re looking at the new media business. It’s not longer about creating […]