Techmeme Offers Tech News at Internet Speed
SAN FRANCISCO — News lovers in Washington can't live without Mike Allen at Politico. Hollywood squabbles over the relative merits of Sharon Waxman's TheWrap versus Nikki Finke's Deadline. The newspaper industry reads the news collected by Jim Romenesko.
Context & Ripple Effects
Techmeme had already drawn scrutiny over both its pull on readers in a 2008 examination of the Techmeme habit and the breadth of its editorial lens in a critique of its perceived myopia. The 2007 account of how Gabe Rivera's service worked placed the product in the emerging class of specialist news aggregators alongside influential vertical-news figures named in the article.
First-order effects
- Techmeme gains validation as a technology-news destination whose value is rapid aggregation, putting its selection and ranking of stories at the center of what readers encounter.
Second-order effects
- Technology publishers and independent bloggers have a stronger incentive to publish quickly and frame stories competitively, because inclusion in a high-speed aggregation feed can concentrate attention on a small set of links.
Third-order effects
- If specialist aggregators continue to become habitual entry points, editorial influence shifts partly from outlets that originate reporting to services that rank, cluster, and direct readers toward it.
The trend: Specialist news aggregation is becoming a distinct layer of media power, defined by the ability to organize attention around fast-moving coverage.