BBC to aggregate headlines from commercial outlets

In an interview with The Independent, Erik Huggers, the BBC's director of Future Media and Technology, said that decision would enhance the flow of information on the website: "The inflow of content [to BBC Online] is still limited to a bit of UGC [user-generated content] and a bit of commenting but I think what we'll start to see is - just like we're making news available on third party news websites through some of the technology and innovation that [was developed] in this division - I think it's going to be interesting to see over the next year or so how there's going to be potential for making it flow the other way round as well."

The BBC currently already has a news blog titled "See Also" which launched earlier this month and links to external news sources such as the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Times. The blog appears to have been a way to 'test the water' for the decision announced late last week.
 
In July, the corporation began helping its rivals by licensing video news content to UK newspaper sites, though in a recent interview with StrategyEye, BBC's COO of Future Media and Technology, Kerstin Mogull, reiterated the BBC's commitment to free news.

"I think there's room for the BBC and newspapers to do well online," she said. "One thing to mention is that we are, free of charge, sharing quite a lot of our content with The Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph, The Independent and their websites. So we can help in that way, and we're interested in helping again as part of the partnership agenda."

Whilst the BBC appears to be offering a helping hand to its commercial counterparts, some remain sceptical as to whether or not the aggregation of rival organisation headlines will be welcomed or not, for two key reasons. Firstly, as Ian Burell, Media Editor of The Independent notes: "The BBC's transformation into an aggregator of the news of other organisations will be culturally difficult for an institution that has always fiercely maintained its independence and upheld rigid quality controls." Secondly, aggregation as a method to push traffic to websites has been criticised by many outlets. In an interview with Sky News last month media mogul Rupert Murdoch accused Google News, of 'stealing stories' and has since threatened to pull his content from the search engines result listing.

The news comes as the debate over paywalls gathers steam, with more publications considering them as an option to generate revenue online with print news publications  struggling to draw precious advertising and subscription dollars. Murdoch is leading the effort to charge online, and has announced that all his websites will introduce paywalls in the coming year.  Recently, Johnston Press, the the second largest newspaper owner (measured by weekly circulation) in Britain, has similarly taken up arms and announced a trial of paywalls in some of their publications in order to research how consumers react to them. Many other publications are simply waiting to see how everything pans out before taking the leap themselves.

Source : The Independent