Slate: “Today’s Papers” Now Yesterday’s News

Slate has retired their “Today’s Papers” feature, an early pioneer of news consolidation. Acknowledging that they “haven’t been doing the kind of aggregation most of our readers want”, they’ve introduced “The Slatest,” a thrice-daily “list of the 12 most important news stories, blog entries, magazine features, and Web videos of the moment”.

Editor David Plotz, in discussing the move, explained that “from Huffington Post to Real Clear Politics to Newser to that cute little Web site around the corner [who could that be?!], everyone on the Internet seems to be summarizing and repackaging the stories of the day. There’s so much aggregating going on that hardly anyone is left to write the original stories that get aggregated”. Whose stories were included in the inaugural “Slatest,” you ask? NYT, WaPo, LA Times, WSJ, USA Today, AP, BBC, etc… the same sources included in “Today’s Papers” of yore.

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