Aggregation and News Portals

CARLOS ARCILA CALDERÓN

University of Salamanca, Spain

With the emergence and popularization of the Internet and the consolidation of dig-
ital journalism, news reports, and other journalistic stories are accessible through the
World Wide Web, embedded in specific digital outlets such as news aggregators or news
portals. A news aggregator is a website that manually or automatically includes news
contents and that can be accessed from a computer or from any digital device, such
as smartphones or tables, with an Internet connection. A news portal is a more generic
form to name news aggregators, using the extended conception of “web portals,” which
refers to any key site that access and organize information on the Internet.
Initially, news contents were uploaded to news portals in a very rudimentary way by
digitalizing the broadcast contents of newspapers, radio, and TV without any special
treatment or modification. This process is known as shovelware and implies that news
reports were not originally produced by the news portals (i.e., scanning newspapers
and uploading a JPEG image or a PDF file). In fact, it was evident that news produc-
tion routines were not adapted for a new media and news portals remain an alternative
“window” of the traditional media with the exceptions of few native online media in
the very first years of the Internet. However, twenty-first-century journalism became
more digital and the growing interest in Internet contents as well as the investment of
technological companies and media conglomerates in digital newsmaking caused the
landscape to evolve.
The evolution meant the inclusion of hypertext, multimedia, interactivity, and
constant updating, but also the development from simple texts in HTML formats to
different flexible structures such as XML. Changes were also evident in the dynamics
of news uploading and the use of content management systems (CMS) and more
recently of content aggregators and syndicators (Del Águila-Obra, Padilla-Meléndez
& Serarols-Tarrés, 2007). CMS allowed technicians, editors, and reporters to work
collaboratively in order to manage the increasing amount on contents with speed
and ease, and also to reconfigure the appearance and functionality of news portals by
including, for instance, better archives and interactive fields. In the case of content
aggregators or syndicators we find that they allowed the emergence of indepen-
dent websites, not depending on traditional news media, by the use of different
sources.
One of the biggest initial challenges of aggregators and news portals was the consis-
tent incorporation of multimedia journalism in order to create a real hypermedia space
for newsmaking. Hypermedia results from the combination of hypertext and multime-
dia, meaning that any text, image, audio, or video might be linked to other contents.

The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. Tim P. Vos and Folker Hanusch (General Editors),
Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh and Annika Sehl (Associate Editors).
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118841570.iejs0118
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This term also refers to the coherent selection or combination of media formats to cre-
ate harmonic multimedia contents or, in other words, to elaborate news stories with
the appropriate materials (e.g., a video on a groundbreaking interview or an interactive
infographic on stock market information). The CMS facilitated the management, incor-
poration, and curation of multimedia contents in news portals produced by journalists
and their teams, but it was the use of social media as a reporting tool that recently
produced a significant increase of multimedia contents. Even when aggregators and
news portals nowadays fully support all multimedia contents, less attention is paid
to the coherence in the integration of formats. Instead, journalists, editors, and web
designers believe that with enough multimedia materials users should be in charge of
selecting and combining text, video, or audio from the same portal or even from other
sources.
During the first decade of the twenty-first century the discussions about news por-
tals focused on the topic of access and its business model. In fact, many online media
decided to close their open contents and establish a monthly fee or pay-per-view sys-
tem to access all their current contents or their archives. But this policy was challenged
by users who were not fully convinced of paying for online news and many news por-
tals had to reinforce the advertisement incomes and reopen their sites; or at least to
configure a specific policy allowing some free articles and charging for the others (as
is the case of The New York Times that now gives free access only to a few articles per
month). Most digital native media and traditional online media are nowadays partially
free and many of them offer different paid personalized services. Big media compa-
nies are concerned about automatic collection of their contents by web aggregators. A
web aggregator allows users to find information from a large variety of sources with
little effort and time (Chowdhury & Landoni, 2006). Aggregators such as Google News
(see Figure 1), Yahoo! News, or Huffington Post automatically collect millions of news
articles (or contents from sites like blogs), helping users to classify, filter, and visualize
information by topics, dates, places, languages, and so forth (Hennig et al., 2011). But
big media companies, who feel threatened by these aggregators and see it as a violation
of their ownership, are taking legal measures to make their contents exclusive (Isbell,
2010).
Automatic news aggregators have a relevant place in the digital media ecology
because they attract visitors by hosting collections of third-party contents or links to
other news portals, resulting in personalized contents that might increase Internet
traffic. These aggregators index headlines and leads of original news pieces and a link
to them. By 2008 Belgium press demanded from Google News to stop indexing their
contents and a judge ordered Google News to remove all related contents. Something
similar happened later to Associated Press (Quinn, 2014) and many other media and
news wire agencies that finally succeeded and had their news removed from automatic
aggregators. In this sense, even with the growing importance of automatic news aggre-
gators, there exists a social polemic about the legal and ethical implications of these
websites and their competition with the original sources (Jeon & Nasr, 2016), because
the content producers should have the first claim to access on their own websites
(Dellarocas, Sutanto, Calin, & Palme, 2016). A partial solution to this competition is
the creation of syndicators. According to Del Águila-Obra et al. (2007), the difference
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Figure 1 Screenshot of the aggregator Google News. Source: https://news.google.com/

03/28/2018.

between content aggregators and syndicators is the “establishment of costly agreements

with each data source.” This means that syndicators and news portals establish a
legal agreement (including a payment by the syndicator) in order to have contents
on both websites, but all the while being aware that the inclusion in the syndicator’s
database may not be as fast as the indexing process made by an automatic news
aggregator.
News portals usually generate their own contents but it can be said that they might
also aggregate or even syndicate news, which means that news portals are digital outlets
that create or spread information using digital devices. In fact, the recent success of
news portals is linked to their capability of adaptation to news application programs
in mobile devices or to the complex social media environment where news rapidly
circulates. In other words, users are accessing news portal contents not only from
traditional navigators on their personal computers, but also from apps in their mobile
phones or from short messages on Twitter or Facebook. This represents a significant
change in the way news portals promote their contents, given that normal users now
spend more time using their mobile apps (that includes social media) than using their
computer.
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Another development on news aggregators or news portals is the inclusion of

innovative journalistic contents such as those resulting from data journalism. Data
interaction and data visualization are particularly effictive on news portals because
users can experience all the advantages of data analysis, making these sites the most
appropriate outlet to distribute reports derived from data journalism. In addition, we
find that other media innovation products (business projects, literacy programs, multi-
media/transmedia storytelling, etc.) are mostly developed specifically to be embedded
within news portals, which implies that in contemporary journalistic practices and
genres more digital platforms converge than in traditional media. However, recent
studies suggest that users prefer news aggregators not only to access these innovative
contents, but also to avoid opinionated contents; and, at least in the United States,
younger and nonwhite users are more likely to visit these websites (Lee & Chyi, 2015).
From the media companies’ perspective, one of the great advantages of automatic
news aggregators is the reduction of costs because they link to other content providers
but maintain part of the Internet traffic within the aggregator. In fact, it is not clear if
users prefer to read the headline and lead embedded within the aggregator or if they
prefer to investigate in depth, go to the original source, or visit a website, such as The
New York Times (nytimes.com) or even Google, both identified by Chiou and Tucker
(2017) as the top news and non-news websites visited after Google News and Yahoo!
News. On the other hand, one of the great challenges remains to be the permanent
tension with content providers and the legal risks of using third-party news.
In sum, aggregators and news portals are digital outlets who specialize in the distri-
bution of journalistic information. The presentation of the contents has varied from the
manual digitalization and upload of news pieces (text, audio, video) to the automatic
aggregation of multimedia contents. The media landscape and the business models are
in continuous adaptation to the innovative contents and narratives as well as to the
tensions generated by the automatic syndication of third-party materials.

SEE ALSO: 21st-Century Journalism: Digital; Data Journalism; Digital Journalism;

Multimedia Journalism; News Apps; News Production Routines; Social Media as
Distribution Tool; Social Media as Reporting Tool

References

Chiou, L., & Tucker, C. (2017). Content aggregation by platforms: The case of the news media.
Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 26(4), 782–805. doi:10.1111/jems.12207
Chowdhury, S., & Landoni, M. (2006). News aggregator services: User expectations and experi-
ence. Online Information Review, 30(2), 100–115. doi:10.1108/14684520610659157
Del Águila-Obra, A. R., Padilla-Meléndez, A., & Serarols-Tarrés, C. (2007). Value creation and
new intermediaries on Internet: An exploratory analysis of the online news industry and the
Web content aggregators. International Journal of Information Management, 27(3), 187–199.
doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2006.12.003
Dellarocas, C., Sutanto, J., Calin, M., & Palme, E. (2016). Attention allocation in information-rich
environments: The case of news aggregators. Management Science, 62(9), 2543–2562.
doi:10.1287/mnsc.2015.2237
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Hennig, L., Ploch, D., Prawdzik, D., Armbruster, B., Büscher, C., De Luca, E. W., … Albayrak, S.
(2011). SPIGA—a multilingual news aggregator. Proceedings of GSCL. Retrieved from http://
www.dai-labor.de/fileadmin/Files/Publikationen/Buchdatei/GSCL_Spiga_FINAL.pdf
Isbell, K. (2010). The rise of the news aggregator: Legal implications and best practices. Berkman
Center Research Publication No. 2010–10. SSRN. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1670339
Jeon, D.-S., & Nasr, N. (2016). News aggregators and competition among newspapers
on the Internet. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 8(4), 91–114. doi:10.1257/
mic.20140151
Lee, A. M., & Chyi, H. I. (2015). The rise of online news aggregators: Consumption
and competition. International Journal on Media Management, 17(1), 3–24. doi:10.1080/
14241277.2014.997383
Quinn, D. J. (2014). Associated Press v. Meltwater: Are courts being fair to news aggregators? Min-
nesota Journal of Law Science & Technology, 15(2), art. 11. Retrieved from https://scholarship.
law.umn.edu/mjlst/vol15/iss2/11

Further reading

Bakker, P. (2012). Aggregation, content farms and Huffinization: The rise of low-pay and no-pay
journalism. Journalism Practice, 6(5–6), 627–637. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012.667266
Beam, M. A., & Kosicki, G. M. (2014). Personalized news portals: Filtering systems and increased
news exposure. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 91(1), 59–77.
Dellarocas, C., Katona, Z., & Rand, W. (2013). Media, aggregators and the link economy:
Strategic hyperlink formation in content networks. Management Science, 59(10), 2360–2379.
doi:10.1287/mnsc.2013.1710

Carlos Arcila Calderón is an assistant professor at the University of Salamanca (Spain).

He is editor-in-chief of the peer-review journal Disertaciones. He has served as chair of
the “Digital Communication, Networks and Processes” division of the Latin American
Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC). His research focuses on the
adoption of digital technologies and the use of computational methods. His recent work
has been published in Communication Theory, Comunicar, Media, War & Conflict,
Television & New Media, and El Profesional de la Información.