Former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. Is Down on News Aggregators

Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, ripped into news aggregators like The Huffington Post, Drudge Report, and NewsNow while delivering the James Cameron Memorial Lecture at London’s City University Wednesday night, saying that they populate their sites “with news, opinion, features, photographs and video that they continuously collect — some would say steal — from other national and local news sites,” paidContent reported.

Highlights from Downie’s speech, via paidContent:

Revealing photos of and stories about entertainment celebrities account for much of the highly touted Web traffic to The Huffington Post… Though they purport to be a new form of journalism, these aggregators are primarily parasites living off journalism produced by others.

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