The Hill Doesn’t Understand Aggregation
On Wednesday at 4:24 p.m., Washingtonian published a small but hard-won real-estate scoop that reflected patient reporting conducted over a couple of days by Ben Freed. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson bought a new house in D.C.’s swanky Kalorama neighborhood, the same area President Obama, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and Jeff Bezos have all recently bought houses.
Ben worked from a tip to get the story, pulling records, making lots of phone calls, and consulting numerous databases in D.C. and Texas before he nailed it all down.
Forty-seven minutes later, Mark Hensch, a reporter at The Hill, aggregated Ben’s story. Normally, this is a nothing-to-see-here fact of life. You break news, other publishers are going to aggregate it. This has ever been the case in American journalism. But by any standard, The Hill’s aggregation is a breathtaking work of larceny.
Since I chose that word, a bill of particulars is in order. Among the points made in Ben’s story that Hensch also makes:
- The price of the house.
- The seller of the house, and his wife.
- The number of bedrooms and bathrooms and its architectural style.
- The name of the seller’s agent.
- Names of recent well-known buyers of Kalorama real estate.
- Commerce Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross’s purchase of a home nearby in Massachusetts Avenue Heights.
- The number of minutes it takes to walk between Tillerson’s new house and the “Soviet Safeway” where he was once spotted shopping. (Hensch kindly links to Ben’s story about this incident.)
- HUD Secretary nominee Ben Carson’s recent purchase of a of a home in Vienna. (Hensch links to The Hill’s aggregation of Ben’s story about this purchase.)
Here’s what Hensch’s story has that Washingtonian’s does not:
- The square footage of Jeff Bezos’ house.
- The square footage of the Obamas’ house.
- The square footage of Wilbur Ross’ house, and the price he paid for it.
I wrote to The Hill’s editor, Bob Cusack, on Wednesday night to complain about what I believe to be Hensch gnawing every last hunk of meat off our story’s bones. In his reply Cusack noted correctly that the Hill links to our story and credits us; he also told me tartly that this is how aggregation works.
Not quite, Bob! Aggregation is fine. Responsible aggregation points readers to the work of other journalists and builds on it. (For instance, while writing this post, I checked the nomination statuses of Carson and Ross by using this handy tracker from The Atlantic.) What The Hill has done here is rip off our story completely, adding nothing more of value than the dimensions of three houses its readers are not likely to furnish, paint, or carpet. Speaking of dimensions, here’s how much traffic The Hill referred to our story on Wednesday:
Thanks for the link.
