Andrew Golis

I wrote last week that I thought the next phase of media combat would be over who can do the most effective mix of linking aggregation and reporting.  Big aggregators like us at TPM and Huffington Post are expanding our reporting staffs at a quick pace, and newspapers are gradually waking up to the need to pull together the best of the web, not just the best of their own newsroom.

This week, washingtonpost.com is launching Political Browser, a link blog to aggregate the day’s news.  It’s an important step forward for them, a tacit acknowledgment that their participation in the linking economy has been weak and they’ve lost audience as a result.

The site, I should note, is produced by a former TPM intern.  So far it looks like an extended version of Slate’s “Today’s Papers” mixed with a delicious feed.  Nothing much to crow about, but they’ll likely have a steep learning curve and mix up the formatting as they get a sense of the medium. I’ll be curious to watch to see if they can innovate within the Post’s bureaucracy at the pace necessary to catch up to where other online publications are.

Either way, the battle has been joined.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.