Anger and aggregation

The Seattle alt weekly The Stranger had an interesting piece on what might be in store for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if Hearst doesn't find a buyer by mid-March for Washington state's oldest business. A Hearst exec interviewed reporters to hear their ideas for an online-only version of the P-I.

In a significant departure from longstanding P-I practice, the new website, as currently conceived, will become, in part, an aggregator of links to interesting stories and blog posts elsewhere. If that sounds familiar, it should. The model has been pioneered by sites like HuffingtonPost.com, which takes an eclectic, opinionated, and often celebrity-focused approach to information gathering, mixing reports from its tiny staff with blog posts by notable actors and politicos, photo albums of fabulous people, and a constant stream of links to the hot news stories of the day (almost all originally reported by other publications).