Aggregating the Aggregators and the "Editorial Layer"

Just read an interesting post on the future of media consumption from Matt Dickman, digital marketing guru at Fleishman-Hillard and author of the Techno//Marketer blog. They've got a group of trendspotters that have taken a stab at what the future of the media business might look like (available as a downloadable .pdf here).

Of course, he's talking cutting-edge consumer culture, so it's a little trend-forward for the B2B world, but couple of things stood out for me as applicable to where this market we inhabit might be in 3, 5 and most definitely 10 years. Definitely worth a read, especially for gems like these few sentences about competing with your own "newsmaster" readers, and how media companies might adapt one of our advantages -- putting news into proper context -- to stay relevant.

RSS and the Growth of ‘Newsmasters’
As content floods the Web, RSS has made youth ruthlessly efficient media consumers. They are much better synthesizers of information than older generations and can handle many more information streams per day. However, many young people still desire editors to trim away the fat and give us the skinny on what’s cool, important, and newsworthy. As a result, RSS-based services with an editorial layer are beginning to emerge. RCRD LBL, a collection of free, exclusive tracks by handpicked artists gives access to tour dates, new tracks, artist information, and editorial content — all via RSS.
RSS will ultimately enable newsmasters to “set their preferences” and hone their feeds to perfection so they no longer have to do the work of combing through all news. This can only happen once they’ve specialized and refined their niches, or become hyper-aggregators (aggregating aggregators).

Sure, you might not be there yet. You might be nowhere near being an aggregator's aggregator. But it's about time to start that conversation.