Why are sports aggregators beloved while news aggregators are reviled?

Forget Phillies, Dodgers, Angels, and Yankees fans—for true baseball loyalists, the real action resumes on Nov. 9, when baseball's general managers kick off their annual meetings. In fact, for the sports media, the opening weeks of baseball's offseason function in the same way that election years do for the more mainstream media. 

This might seem like the perfect time, then, to examine the sports corner of the debate between news aggregators and media outlets. Mark Gimein covered the anger toward aggregators for The Big Money back in April, noting that, in the worst cases, aggregators will steal a story's framing and ideas and leave the reader with no need to click through. The debate's grown only more heated since—except, curiously, in the sports world, where the media-aggregator relationship has remained surprisingly sympathetic, and maybe even symbiotic.

Take Tim Dierkes's hugely successful MLBTradeRumors. One of the Internet’s many answers to Horatio Alger, Dierkes started the site as a hobby in 2005 and now runs it full-time. Dierkes sells his own ads, regularly appears on sports radio, and bears a striking resemblance to Red Sox pitcher Jonathan Papelbon. His site draws enough visitors to compare it credibly to general news aggregators like Newser and The Daily Beast. (Given the apples-and-oranges nature of online stats, I'll cite both Alexa and Compete—and add that neither accounts for MLBTradeRumors' staggering 24,000 RSS subscribers.) 

A post from early May demonstrates Dierkes's method: He announces and links to "the latest from Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports," then condenses the 2,000-word story-and-sidebar combo into four bullet points and 132 words. All day, every day, Dierkes and a small army of part-timers monitor more than 225 RSS feeds, linking and updating at the speed of the Web. Occasionally, they'll add some analysis; the post immediately following the Rosenthal summary rounds up the Los Angeles Angels' 2010 contract options. Then again, when it mentions a different Rosenthal column, this post links back to the MLBTradeRumors summary instead of linking directly to Rosenthal and Fox Sports.

Of course, this is standard protocol for aggregators. But you don't hear complaining from Rosenthal. In fact, you hear just the opposite. In various interviews, Dierkes has outlined his chummy relationship with sports writers; a Chicago Tribune story even noted Jayson Stark, a senior baseball writer for ESPN, anxiously forwarding Dierkes his stories.

So why do the sports media get along with MLBTradeRumors? There may be a few formal reasons: Unlike most aggregators, which are built on big excerpts and tiny links, MLBTradeRumors rarely uses direct quotes. There's also the issue of audience. Perhaps passionate sports fans click through more often. (Then again, perhaps many readers, like me, rely on MLBTradeRumors as a cheat sheet for the torrent of sports discourse.) And it can't hurt that Dierkes's site has always seemed scrappy and lo-fi. He started out with an endearingly atrocious white-text-on-black-background design; even when he decided to redo the site, Dierkes crowdsourced it.

But there's a better explanation for the divergent reactions to MLBTradeRumors and aggregators more generally. In every post, Dierkes takes care not only to link to the story, but also to mention the reporter and outlet by name. For this season's first big trade, which unfolded in a series of feints and ambiguous items, MLBTradeRumors created a sprawling post, updating, time-stamping, and cross-checking each new detail. Posts like this turn the site into a kind of kingmaker. (And I'd submit that aggregators have done more than anything this side of Brett Favre's fancy to encourage the sports media's newfound passion for scoops.)

Does any of this matter to readers? Almost certainly not, given the citywide yawn that greets each and every byline strike. But it matters to reporters. Rosenthal, who spent 17 years at newspapers before heading to FoxSports.com, is no friend of new media—he recently led the charge against a blogger who speculated about a Phillies’ player and steroids—but he still sees value in MLBTradeRumors. "Baseball guys like credit—they like it a lot, believe me," Rosenthal told me. Cleverly, if also inadvertently, Dierkes has made this about journalists instead of page views or news.

Of course, winning over writers was never as big a problem as winning over publishers and editors. Dierkes's clear attribution helps here, too. First, it plays into one of the moment's hottest media strategies—building "brands," both individual and institutional.

Second, and more importantly, Dierkes highlights the hard news on which newspapers are staking their value. Again, it's worth comparing this to other aggregators: When the Huffington Post namechecks a writer, it's for an op-ed piece—something by a Maureen Dowd or a Meghan McCain, the kind of byline readers might actually notice, but not the expensive, access-driven journalism cherished by the media. When MLBTradeRumors names names, it does so for real reporting.

In his first e-mail to me, Dierkes admitted that "I am actually not too familiar with this aggregator debate you speak of." Even if it wasn't his intent, his site has still played a part in creating and abetting the sports media's unique mindset toward aggregators. Dierkes says that in “four years doing this, I can't think of one example where someone said, 'Don't link so much, don't excerpt so much.' "

Randy Harvey, who just moved from sports editor to associate editor at the Los Angeles Times, says that he and his staff reached out to Dierkes last year during baseball's winter meetings because they weren't getting as many mentions as other papers. (Dierkes says he didn't have the right RSS feed.) "We wanted to be on there," Harvey said. Even if the Times didn't make Dierkes's "Who Had The Scoop?" list at the end of the meetings, it's easy to see how that list helps the media and MLBTradeRumors maintain a friendly relationship.

Perhaps that list also qualifies as light pandering, but Dierkes has created enough good will to aggregate even from subscription sites. One of the standard arguments against charging for content is that aggregators will spread the information anyway. It's already happening in the sports world, where ESPN Insider and Baseball Prospectus stand as oft-overlooked examples of pay walls that work. But Dierkes aggressively aggregates from both sites and has seen no pushback.

While reporting this piece, I also talked to sports writers and editors at newspapers like the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, along with online outlets like Baseball Prospectus and FoxSports.com. All of them were enthusiastically pro-MLBTradeRumors and pro-aggregation. When I asked for a definition of appropriate aggregation, though, they all responded in exactly the same manner—a nervous chuckle, then some stammering, then the proffering of ridiculous, unhelpful extremes ("Well, if someone quoted 450 words from a 900-word article  … ").

The point is, the topic remains as murky for them as for anyone else. Perhaps that's why they're so supportive of MLBTradeRumors' concrete model and its concrete success.