Soundbite: “To Aggregate, Or Report?” Is All About The Benjamins

“You get what you pay for” has become a truism of free online content of widely varying quality. But in a Twitter klatsch, Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, Editorialiste Andrew Nusca, and AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka examine the otherside of the equation: publishers with fewer resources are forced to lean on the reporting of others to a greater degree. Then again, as Lam points out, even in the pre-link era, there were plenty of ‘real’ journalists who rereported others’ work without attribution: