Future

FutureThere’s been a lot of commentary flying around about a recent incident in which The Huffington Post “over-aggregated” a piece from Advertising Age, including a complaint from the original writer, an apology from one of the Huffington Post’s new senior editors, and the suspension of the HuffPo writer responsible for the post. This incident has proven to be another handy stick for traditional media outlets to beat The Huffington Post with, since it has become the poster child for the negative aspects of aggregation. But it doesn’t change the fact that aggregation, broadly speaking, is a crucial — and fundamentally valuable.


part of the future of media.This particular case got its start when Simon Dumenco, who writes a media column for Advertising Age, complained about a Huffington Post piece that seemed to pull most of the facts from his original article and reproduce them verbatim, without giving much credit to the magazine or adding anything of value to the original. Dumenco’s column, entitled “What It’s Like to Get Used and Abused by the Huffington Post,” described how he had put together a piece in June — using stats from Trendrr to talk about trending topic.


and then not long afterward, The Huffington Post published a piece summarizing the article.Disingenuous links and cherrypicked contentAlthough the HuffPo mentioned Advertising Age specifically in its post, and included a link to Dumenco’s original article at the bottom, the Ad Age writer was still incensed. The link at the bottom of the HuffPo piece, he wrote, was “disingenuous… because Huffpo had already cherrypicked all the essential content” from his article. Dumenco also noted that while some aggregators like The Huffington Post defend what they do based on the traffic they send by linking, the rewritten Ad Age piece only sent a measly 57 pageviews to the original source of the article. He wrote:

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