During Week 5 we talked about digging into Facebook and Twitter to find out about subjects in the news.
In cases, for example, where someone dies, we can sometimes add the term "RIP" to their name and find pages dedicated to them, with photos, commentary and family history.
I used the case of a young man killed in a stabbing recently in Santa Monica. We used Facebook to discover a little about him, including that he and the suspect knew each other and went to high school together.
I got into aggregation more. I wanted to make the point that journalism has a history of aggregation. In Washington when the New York Times gets a huge scoop on the president, for example, often other outlets follow, crediting the paper. Contemporary aggregation is no less legitimate. In fact, with the ability to link, it's more so, as we're driving traffic to the source.
In local television news, outlets have long used a form of shadow aggregation: One station will jump on breaking news, City News Service, a pay-service wire, will pick it up, and the competition will break into programming to announce that "wire services are reporting" that a major event just happened. Yep.
But you can do better: One way is take a story that's already been developed and move it forward. Sometimes a phone call or two can "advance" the story, or give it an exclusive spin or scoop. Even though say, the Los Angeles Times discovered some news, you can be first to discover a new development. You still need to link to the originator, however.
In fact, if all you have is one source for your story, and it's another outlet and its well-done reporting, it's often the rule that you should just do a few grafs and then let readers find out more by jumping to the original via your embedded link.
Unless you have fresh info, expertise or a unique perspective on a story, a la Gawker, that's the way to go.
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