Urbane Sprawl

Imagine you have ten friends. They all have interesting lives, go on adventures, think deep thoughts. You love to get together with each one and hear everything they have to say.

But then the friends slowly start to change. They realize that it’s expensive and tiring to go on adventures and think deep thoughts.

Let’s say two become story filters. They’ve heard everything that the remaining eight friends are doing, and they tell you the coolest stories and deepest thoughts. You don’t have to talk to those eight people anymore — you can just talk to these two!

But then three more convert. They become commentators. There are five people left still doing stuff; the commentators look at the stories the filters are talking about and reflect on them — snidely or thoughtfully. It’s easier for them to talk about what the OTHER friends are doing than to actually DO stuff themselves.

Indeed, filtering and commentating is so easy that more and more of your friends convert. Five, four, three… now only a fraction of your friends are doing or thinking anything! But, the few things left being done and thought are getting a lot more organization and dissection.

What’ll happen? Eventually, perhaps, there won’t be ANY original adventures or thoughts.

Of course, this is what’s happening with online media.

This week saw the launch of The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s new web venture. (Which, incidentally, is already having some problems.) The site’s tag-line is “Read This Skip That,” and it’s premise is that it “curates” the web into what is “provocative and essential,” according to managing editor Edward Felsenthal.

The Beast has very little original content, instead offering a “cheat sheet,” which highlights the big stories on the web each day, and a “big fat story” section, which attempts to illuminate all angles of the day’s biggest story with links to a dozen or so links from different sources.

The Daily Beast is just more evidence that, increasingly, the A’s and B’s of the web are outweighing the C’s. Here’s what I mean.

A is for Aggregators:
Aggregators like The Daily Beast or Digg or Real Clear Politics just compile and “curate” the articles on the web and/or organize them in new ways. For instance, Digg is all user-based: readers vote articles up or down, and so the most popular articles are at the top. Real Clear Politics is all editor-based: the website presents the most interesting (in their eyes) political stories of the day. The Daily Beast does a little of both: its cheat sheet sums up the biggest stories of the day, then lets readers vote them up or down on the cheat sheet page. These are your filter friends.

B is for Blogs
Blogs are all about linking to other stories, and so they are in a way aggregators themselves. But they produce more original content. This content, though, is just reflection on, jokes about, judgments of, etc., other sources’ original reportage or rumination. Paradigmatic example: Gawker links to a New York Times article and then says something snarky about it. These are your commentator friends.

C is for Content
Original content. Like a New York Times article. Or a conventional-wisdom-challenging opinion piece on Slate. These outlets require paying reporters or writers and then editing their work. Much harder than aggregating or commentating. These are your remaining doers and thinkers.

So, the apparent trend of C’s to A’s and B’s: Good or Bad thing?

The Slate article about The Beast’s launch said, in response to Brown’s claim that the site isn’t just an aggregator:

Brown protests too much. Aggregating carries no shame: Sites that exist primarily to link to other sites embody the Web in its purest form. Linking is the soul of the Web, and the companies that recognized this early have seen enormous success. (Yahoo was a thriving Web directory before it was a corporate tragedy.) The online-news business came to prominence on the back of outbound links—you may have first visited Matt Drudge’s page for unsourced Clinton administration gossip, but if you kept coming back, it was for his irresistible tabloid eye. …

Brown is correct that all aggregators are as much about what they omit as what they include. Omission, indeed, is their primary feature—you go to the Daily Beast or BuzzFeed or HuffPo because they’ve already scanned through the news, gossip, funny videos, games, and assorted ephemera that hits the Internet each day and will presumably give you just the good stuff. In this light, “Does the world need another aggregator?” is as silly a question as “Does the world need another map?” The answer is always yes—different people need different guides for different purposes. And as the Web expands, with more people posting ever-stupider stuff each day, we’re only going to need more, and better, aggregators.

So this view of web media says that you’re not losing your doing and thinking friends to aggregation; you’re just making NEW friends who are commenting on the adventures and meditations of your original ten. And since The Daily Beast is a brand new site, it does seem that we’re just making a new friend, getting a new map, or [insert your metaphor of choice].

But this optimism ignores our sneaking suspicion that there is only a finite amount of media out there to be distributed amongst aggregation, professional blogging, and content creation — there are only so many readers, so there is only so much money with which to pay a finite amount of writers, editors, etc. Put simply: you only have ten friends.

Instead, the conversion hypothesis is supported by other recent events. Take this story from Gawker about a prominent group of Alt Weeklies switching from doing original criticism to blogging and aggregation:

Eason wants his alt-weekly writers to spend all week writing for the web—being bloggers, in essence—and then, at the end of the week, somebody pulls the best bits from the website and puts them together to create the print edition.

Problem: These cities don’t need any more bloggers. There are already too many of us! What they need is more original content. Otherwise the bloggers just end up talking about each other, which is the most boring thing in the world. Shit, how much original content is left in Atlanta, anyhow? In DC, the City Paper has already stopped running cover story features. Is it raining pigs? I believe it is.

Again: we don’t need more bloggers. Content is really much more worthwhile. Invest in it. Any asshole can blog, shit. You have reporters. Use them!

Which is it? Will we, someday soon, lose our original content altogether?

Blogging and aggregation are obviously the dominant strategy for new and existing publications. They’re cheaper, easier, and very popular. Original reportage and criticism are harder and more expensive.

But I’d argue that it’s impossible for this trend to continue to its logical conclusion. Instead, there will have to be an equilibrium. If there’s nothing to blog about and aggregate, it will become worthwhile to shift (back) to original content creation, to fill the vacuum.

Still, this equilibrium might leave us with many fewer content creators than would be optimal for how collectively informed and thoughtful we are.

But we need content: it wouldn’t make sense just to have the “AB’s of Web Media,” would it?