Gatherers and Packagers: When Product and Brand Cleave 4 Realz

Jeff Jarvis writes about the coming economics of news:

When the packager takes up and presents the gatherer’s content in whole and monetizes it—mostly with advertising—they share the revenue. When the gatherer just links, the gatherer monetizes the traffic, likely as part of an ad network as well.

I think this is right. In the first case, the content is on the “packager’s” page or in its feed; in the second, the content is on the “gatherer’s” page or in its feed. In both cases, advertising monetized the content (let’s say) and readers or viewers found it by way of the packager’s brand (a coarse but inevitable word).

To me, however, the location of the user’s experience seems unimportant—in fact, the whole point of disaggregating journalism into two functions, imho, is to free up the content from the chains of fixed locations. Jarvis writes, “The packagers’ job would be to find the best news and information for their audience no matter where it comes from.” I agree, but why not let it go anywhere too—anywhere, that is, where the packager can still monetize it? (See Attributor if that sounds crazy.)

Couple this with the idea that rss-like subscriptions are on the move as the mechanism by which we get our content, replacing search in part. (As has been said before, there’s no spam on twitter. Why not? Followers just unsubscribe.) The result is that the packager still maintains his incentive to burnish his reputation and sell his brand. After all, that’s what sploggers are: packagers without consciences who get traffic via search.

So I agree with Jarvis: “reliably bringing you the best package and feed of news that matters to you from the best sources” is how “news brands survive and succeed.” That’s how “the packagers are now motivated to assure that there are good sources.”