Every piece of reliable news you have ever read began with something expensive: a reporter making calls, standing outside a courtroom, cultivating a source, or checking a document line by line. Distribution, by contrast, has become nearly free. That imbalance, costly reporting, free copying, is the central economic problem of modern journalism.
The copy-paste economy
In the worst corners of the web, entire "news" sites are assembled by lifting other outlets' articles wholesale, stripping the byline, and wrapping the text in advertising. The original newsroom pays the reporters; the copyist collects the revenue. Search engines and advertising networks have grown steadily more aggressive about demoting and defunding these operations, and rightly so: a web where copying beats reporting is a web that eventually has nothing left to copy.
Aggregation done honestly
Aggregation itself is not the villain. Readers genuinely need help navigating dozens of publishers, and a good index, one front page that shows what the BBC, Dawn, Al Jazeera and the wire services are all reporting right now, is a real service. The test that separates a useful aggregator from a parasite is simple and old-fashioned: credit and traffic. Does the aggregator name the newsroom prominently? Does it link readers to the original story, or trap them on its own pages? Does it honour removal requests?
Why readers should care
This might sound like an industry squabble, but the stakes belong to readers. Newsrooms fund investigations out of the audience that their journalism attracts. Every honest link is a small payment into that system; every stripped copy is a small withdrawal from it. The long-term supply of trustworthy reporting, the kind that gets officials to answer questions and companies to correct their claims, depends on distribution models that send value back to the source.
Our position
This site is built on the honest side of that line by design. We index headlines and summaries, we display them with the publisher's name attached, and we send every reader who wants the full story directly to the newsroom that reported it. We add our own value where it is legitimately ours to add, in curation, in speed, and in original editorials like this one.
Journalism survives on a simple bargain: those who benefit from the news help sustain the people who gather it.
Keeping that bargain is not just an ethical stance. It is the only version of the news economy in which, ten years from now, there is still something worth aggregating.
