Why did Newser's traffic fall off a cliff?
Michael Wolff, whose two-year-old site, Newser, is frequently cited as a model for the future of journalism, titled a typically provocative blog post yesterday, “I'm Proud to Kill the News.” He made the usual case that news aggregators understand the web better than newspaper websites.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after raising a $2.5 million first round, Michael Wolff's two-year-old aggregator Newser finds itself cited everywhere as a template for journalism's future while its own traffic falls off a cliff. Wolff answered the awkward timing yesterday with a characteristically combative blog post, 'I'm Proud to Kill the News,' restating his case that aggregators understand the web better than newspaper websites do.
The post lands mid-debate rather than in a vacuum: it follows by three weeks the Washington Post's Gawker-flavored meditation on the death of journalism, part of a running argument over whether sites that repackage others' reporting are parasitic or essential. That Newser is simultaneously a funded startup, a rhetorical standard-bearer, and a traffic underperformer makes it the cleanest test case in that fight.
First-order effects
- Wolff's core pitch — that aggregation beats legacy newsrooms at web distribution — now has to survive scrutiny of Newser's own audience numbers, weakening his position as the model's spokesman just after investors put money behind it.
Second-order effects
- Rival aggregators and newspaper sites both get ammunition: critics of aggregation can point to Newser's decline as evidence the model doesn't retain readers, while defenders can argue the problem is execution or measurement rather than the concept.
Third-order effects
- If traffic-chasing aggregation proves structurally fragile, the longer-term question shifts toward which news business actually owns durable audience relationships — original reporting versus repackaged content — shaping where the next round of news-industry capital flows.
The trend: The 2009 wave of aggregator-as-future-of-news startups is entering its first reality check, as funded aggregation sites confront whether repackaging other outlets' reporting builds lasting audiences.