Council Created to Regulate Aggregation, Bloggers

Information hits the Web and just like that the news spreads like fire. Stories are frantically re-reported and some are missing an important detail — attribution.

David Carr, media reporter for The New York Times, wrote an article on Monday about a group of editors who plan to establish guidelines for ethical aggregation and blogging and another journalism duo who have created symbols they call the Curator's Code.

Simon Dumenco, Ad Age's editor at large, Bill Falk, editor-in-chief of The Week, Julia Turner deputy editor of Slate will be on the "Is Aggregation Theft?" panel on Tuesday during the South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX., to discuss the promotion of a news organization's work versus stealing reporting.

Over the weekend on another panel, Dumenco introduced The Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation as a way to set standards for aggregators, Carr reported. Editors from The New York Observer, The Atlantic, Esquire, Longreads.com and New York Magazine have joined the committee.

Demenco told Carr the council would be set up similar to the American Society of Magazine Editors, which has created editorial standards for the magazine industry. One key issue Dumenco told Carr he wants to address is the fact site traffic isn't also routed back to the original source of news.

Demenco didn't tell Carr many details about what sort of guidelines for aggregation will be set in place or how will they be enforced. His basic message is aggregation isn't bad if done properly. It's a simple idea really. Give credit where it's due.

Carr quoted Demenco saying: "This is not an anti-aggregation group, we are pro-aggregation. We want some simple, common-sense rules. There should be some kind of variation of the Golden Rule here, which is that you should aggregate others as you would wish to be aggregated yourself."

The committee has support from big name editors, but how will the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation reel-in the blogosphere?

A Gawker reporter responded to Carr's piece by saying the committee is unneeded. The rebuttal blog post was slapped with this headline, "We Don't Need No Stinking Seal of Approval from the Blog Police."

"This sort of top-down, expert-heavy, credential-credulous media structure is exactly what blogging has so brilliantly been destroying for more than a decade," Hamilton Nolan, a senior writer wrote. "The internet is where the upstarts are on equal footing with the experts."

Others in the industry have picked out the Council's missing links, too. Mediabistro, a well-known news aggregator, thinks the Council is a good idea, but noted the problems the committee is facing.

"Maybe the most troubling thing is that for a group developing rules for bloggers, there aren't many bloggers taking part," Chris O'Shea wrote in his Mediabistro article.

The other big idea that has emerged during South by Southwest is the Curator's Code, which is Reporter Maria Popova's idea that writers could stamp their articles with a symbol to note whether the the original news was reported by another news organization or was inspired by another article, Carr reported. Kelli Anderson designed two symbols that would offer a crutch for reporters to clearly state whether the story was "via" another source or a "hat tip." (Check out the symbols in the New York Times column.)

"Discovery of information is a form of intellectual labor," Popova told the Carr. "When we don't honor discovery, we are robbing somebody's time and labor. The Curator's Code is an attempt to solve some of that."

So what do you think? Does the news and blogging industry need aggregation guidelines? Sound off in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL