Aggregation Forces Journalistic Evolution

Most of the many, many sites aggregating other people's content can't deliver much traffic, and some don't even try. What's more, a vast swath of readers couldn't care less about anything deeper than a headline [are you calling headlines shallow?], which is a problem for the nation's beleaguered journalistic institutions as they try to find a sustainable model for newsgathering on the web. The old model was supported by the newspaper's near-monopoly on local advertising and its ability to package all of its stories in a print product -- whether they were wanted or not. On the web, readers won't even "pay" for the content by clicking through to a free, theoretically ad-supported site. And the slump in online display advertising isn't helping.