Getting past the headline-the role of news aggregators in the business model

There is an interesting piece by Michael Learmonth and Nat Ives over at Newspaper Project.

It focuses on the aggregation of news concept and what it does to business models.

many sites aggregating other people's content can't deliver that much traffic, and some don't even try. What's more, a vast swath of readers couldn't care less about anything deeper than a headline, which is a problem for the nation's beleaguered journalistic institutions as they try to find a sustainable model for newsgathering on the web.

I particularly liked the comments of Jane Seagrave, senior VP-global product development at the Associated Press,who said

There are a lot of people who never want to know more than 'Six Killed in Iraq,so that the money spent -- to put reporters in place, to guarantee their security, in many cases to compensate their widows and orphans when they're killed in action -- is not offset by any actual income from the work."

If this is the case in our information savvy world,it could spell massive problems for journalism.What Jane is saying is that people no longer have a need for the detail.