You've probably heard of Huffington Post, which was just bought by AOL for $315 million.
These are popular sites for online news. With more people getting their news online, these news aggregators are becoming a huge part of the distribution of news.
How will this affect public relations, and who are these news aggregators?
Some are single-person sites, like the Drudge Report, that grew into internet behemoths. Most of these specialize in a type of news. Drudge is political. Perez Hilton focuses on celebrities and pop culture.
Yet for every well-known news aggregator like the Drudge Report and Perez Hilton, there are thousands of blogs aggregating -- and commenting on -- local news.
Most state capitals have a shadow press corps of bloggers who link to news stories, summarize what's happening, analyze or comment on the issues of the day. The same is true of big cities, county seats, even neighborhoods.
News is getting more and more local, and more specialized. News aggregators are speeding up that process.
Instead of sending your material to all the dominant newspapers, TV stations and radio news stations in your media market, you may be tailoring what you send to beat reporters, niche blogs and news aggregators who specialize in your field.
Huffington Post is a good example of what's happening.
There are 6,000 unpaid bloggers producing content for Huffington Post, and this is the source of strength -- that's a lot of content -- and controversy. News aggregators of all sorts are getting criticized for happily taking the page views and ad revenues from the news gatherers who did the hard work of actually digging up and creating that news.
News aggregators of all sorts are using their newfound muscle and money to hire reporters, to gather their own news. AOL / Huffington Post is now moving into local news with Patch news sites.
A natural reaction of the mainstream press -- that these are probably some of the 6,000 unpaid bloggers at Huffington Post who are now making a little money as semi-pro journalists -- might be off.
The two Patch reporters that I've interacted with last worked for major U.S. daily newspapers that won Pulitzer prizes. I'm not shocked by that, with 15,000 journalists laid off from newsrooms around the country as newspaper ad revenues took a big hit. Most of those journalists still want to write for a living.
I hear patch.com reporters are working internet start-up hours and filing more, shorter stories than when they worked at papers. They aren't getting rich, but the reporters I've talked to seem happy to be writing for a living vs. selling insurance or Avon.
Here's somebody who's taken a harder look at patch.com, how much it's paying journalists and whether the revenue model makes any sense.
This is the first big wave of news aggregators getting into the news gathering business. It won't be the last. And it adds another type of media animal that public relations pros need to figure out how to feed and handle.