Is news liberated or enslaved? Consequences of news aggregation
Paweł Wieczorek
(University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland)
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the consequences of news aggregation in mobile applications. These applications retreive news items from the Internet, rank them and subsequently stream in the theme channels automatically. While doing so, they transform the original layout and context of the news. As a result, the news is situated beyond the control of the authors and editors. Is therefore the reference to the news as being “enslaved” justified? The conducted analyses allowed the author to draw different conclusions. News enslavement is abot its being protected against aggregators through licences and paywalls. Antoher question then arises: does observing only selected channels with many newsitems but on a limited number of topics limit or hel the reader? Habing considered all the pros and cons, the balance is positive: mobile applications enable readers’ acces to the news published on small, unknown and local sites.