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International news agency Reuters is dipping its toe into the somewhat hot aggregator game with a new linkblog called Counterparties.
Drawing more than one comparison to the Drudge Report, Counterparties will carry between 20 and 30 of the day’s more prominent financial, news and opinion pieces- but the site will be a pure link dump, with no original content. And according to Nieman Journalism Lab, the new model could signal a shift for wide-spanning journalism networks like Reuters:
The past few years have seen the AP experimenting with “accountability journalism.” They’ve seen Reuters itself expanding into investigative reporting and commentary and video, news-y and opinion-y and silly. One thing that those experiments have in common is that they emphasize, implicitly, the voices and the personalities and, finally, the brands of the news agencies’ individual journalists.
Reuters blogging editor Felix Salmon is heading up Counterparties, and he spoke to the value of less content and more positioning inherent with aggregation sites:
“The whole idea here is to have real voice and attitude… Basically, the page is entirely built by humans. It’s not some sort of weird technology algorithm. But it’s powered by a weird technology algorithm.”
Salmon continues:
“Counterparties is based on, literally, my Google Reader list of blogs that I read and my list of people I follow on Twitter.”
The Reuters blogger goes on to namecheck other aggregators- Fark, Reddit, Techmeme, Memeorandum, and Drudge- in a comparison of the site’s interface and general look. Indeed, Counterparties is a bit more polished and branded than its peers- but it lacks the social aspect and commenting interface that keeps users coming back to popular link sites. It will be interesting to see if Counterparties catches on- even more so to see if it can tease out a readership without the interactive interface.
