Russell Smith on Tina Brown's The Daily Beast, the latest in a series of websites that originates nothing and collates everything.
Brown's new Web magazine is not so much a magazine as an aggregator: It's one of those websites that collects news and entertainment stories from elsewhere and provides links to them. Aggregators serve an increasingly important function in the sea of information: They filter and direct you to what they deem to be the most interesting. (The new Daily Beast's phrase is “sift, sort and curate.”) What's even more useful is that the aggregators usually provide a paragraph summarizing the article you are thinking of reading – so you usually don't have to read it at all. It's stacks and stacks of magazines in pill form.
There are now so many aggregators (from Google News to the Drudge Report) and “community blogs” (BoingBoing, MetaFilter), and even personalized aggregators that will seek only stories you're interested in, that it's only a matter of time before we develop aggregator aggregators, or supra-aggregators, to fish and sort only on these sites. Actually, The Daily Beast has started to do this: Its “sites we like” section refers you to other aggregators.
All of these sites have a sort of a general slant or theme: BoingBoing has a lot of quirky videos; MetaFilter has too, but it's highbrow and left-leaning; The Huffington Post is pro-Democrat, and so on. The Beast's thing is a very Vanity-Fair-like mix of U.S. political chatter and pop culture, with a bit of tabloid salaciousness for fun (an interview with the father of murdered beauty-pageant contestant JonBenet Ramsay). It's light and easy.
Brown's shift from dense print to this curatorial medium represents the current culture of reference itself. These Web magazines, like so much of contemporary culture, make the line between the original and the recycled hard to locate. If you repackage news, just as one might use a sample in a pop song, does it become your news? The very reference to Waugh in the title is an amusing acknowledgment of postmodernity: naming a real news source after a fictional one which is exaggeratedly inaccurate and corrupt is, well, I don't think it means anything at all. It's just a reference, a nod to something else, like an echo of the Beatles in a Britney-Ministry mash-up. This is a common product of the culture that accepts collage as a means of communication.
There has even been a minor dustup over the question of this site's originality: It turns out the logo of The Daily Beast looks almost exactly like that of the Philadelphia Daily News (a print paper). Same colours, same font. Reference or rip-off? Doesn't matter. That's how we make stuff these days: We rearrange old stuff.
But in the technological age we live in, there's a hell of a lot of old stuff. So long as there's electricity and storage servers, it can live forever.
It's virtually impossible to keep up with the flood of information out there, so that creates a niche for the aggregators.
And to a certain extent, newspaper filled an aggregational role, especially in pre-Internet times.
Studies done of major Canadian newspapers in the early 1990s found a relatively small proportion of news stories were truly original in nature.
While more great, original reportage and commentary is always welcome, I think aggregating sites are a useful and inevitable part of the media ecosystem.