When Australians woke up on the morning of Thursday, February 18, this year, they discovered that life had changed overnight. Facebook, for many people across the globe their primary source of local and international news, had pulled the plug. Where before users had been able to log-on to the social media platform and catch-up on events from around the globe, they now found such content blocked. Media organisations were no longer able to share links with their followers across the country, as the social network responded to government proposals to force them to pay for carrying journalism by not carrying any at all. The move brought global attention to an issue that has been brewing for more than a decade, ever since the likes of Google and The Huffington Post – now a producer of its own content globally, but then also a news aggregator, carrying links to other organisations’ work – had started to collate the works of publishers and share snippets with their own readers. News aggregation is inevitable in this information age, but the relationship between aggregators and producers needs to be optimised for the benefit of both parties. A clash has been brewing. On the one hand, the news producers see the news aggregators as parasites – theword used bymediamogul Rupert Murdoch and then-Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson – stopping the traffic fromgoing to their sites by aggregating stories on their website, free-riding on their content and denying themboth traffic and revenue. On the other, Google, Facebook and the other aggregators say they are beneficial for the news producers. They argue that they provide a way for readers to find them, highlighting their work to a larger audience. News aggregators reduce the time and effort readers need to find the news they are interested in, but they can also serve to satiate the readers’ appetite, providing enough information that they do not feel compelled to click through to the original source. Long before the events in Australia, there were lawsuits in the US, where the law is clear regarding the maximum number of characters a news aggregator can display, while several European countries have experimented with imposing a tax on news aggregators, some countries even passing laws that mandated payment from aggregators to publishers for reproducing their content. Until now, no platform had removed content entirely, and the question of whether aggregators are legally permitted to reproduce an article’s headline and snippet without permission from – and possibly payment to – the producer, remains unresolved. STUCK BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE We carried out our own experiment to look at how often readers click through to the news producers from news aggregators sites. The main objective was to test whether the news aggregator was a parasite or whether it was beneficial for content producers, forming a symbiotic relationship – after all, the aggregators need good content to be produced for them to point you towards. What we found creates a quandary for producers. We designed and developed our own news aggregator for the research to allow us to study the effect of snippet length, the presence of a picture on aggregator links, and the number of related articles for any one story on the likelihood of a reader clicking on a link to the producer’s site. The results suggested that anarticle’s headlineprovidesall the informationa readersneeds todecide if it is close to their interests–anyadditional information 32 | ʼʼ Where before users had been able to log-on to the social media platform and catch-up on events from around the globe, they now found such content blocked. ʻʻ
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