OpEd: If you have news, it will be aggregated

If you have news, it will be aggregated and/or curated:

More than anything, it means that trying to recreate the scarcity of content that used to exist in print — when media outlets controlled not only the creation of news but the platforms through which it was distributed — by using paywalls and subscription apps is fundamentally a losing battle. Many users want that content to be part of a larger digital experience, whether it’s through an aggregation app like Flipboard or through Facebook or Twitter. If your content is not designed to take advantage of that, you will be missing a larger and larger proportion of the audience you need.

One response to that is to shrink your audience down to those who will pay, as some outlets like the Financial Times have done and several of Rupert Murdoch’s British papers are trying to do. The other approach is to be as open and distributed as possible, to try to take advantage of the democracy of distribution instead of fighting it, and then to find other ways to monetize that audience and their attention, whether it’s e-books or live events or the “reverse paywall” model Jeff Jarvis and others have proposed. Either way, aggregation and curation are the new reality of media, whether media companies like it or not.

Source: Gigaom