1 Preprint excerpt: not for citation. Published version available in Craig, David and Zion, Lawrie (eds). 2014. Ethics for Digital Journalists: Emerging Best Practices. New York, Oxon: Routledge. The case for curatorial journalism...or, can you really be an ethical aggregator? Fiona Martin, University of Sydney As the world’s stores of information expand, we are putting a high price on businesses that can collect, filter, contextualize and link to relevant information online, or that help us to do it ourselves. The Huffington Post, a business built on aggregating blogs and snippets of political news, was valued at $315 million when it was bought by America Online in 2011. A year later Instagram, the photo sharing platform, sold to Facebook for $1 billion, while startup ventures Pinterest and Storify have already attracted equivalent angel investment in the democratization of social media curation (and in the hope of “monetizing” their users’ labor). Yet in some quarters encouraging aggregation and reuse is tantamount to supporting piracy and plagiarism. Legacy media companies have typically treated unlicensed news aggregators as thieves, or at least free riders. Not so long ago U.S. media executives called Google and the Huffington Post “parasites” on journalistic enterprise (Downie, 2010; Greenslade, 2009). In 2008 Associated Press (AP) started to pursue bloggers, such as the Drudge Retort, for copyright infringement after they excerpted its headlines and stories (Pérez-Peña 2009), and later led legal actions against aggregators, including AllinOne Headlines and news monitoring service Meltwater (Isbell 2010; Jasiewicz 2012). In 2010 Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd websites blocked UK search engine Newsnow from indexing their content to prevent it being captured and reposted (Weaver, 2013) and the New York Times briefly managed to get Apple to remove its Pulse newsreader from the Apps store on copyright grounds (Singel, 2010). Despite the introduction of paywalls around newspaper content, there are signs of an old media retreat from flatly opposing aggregation. Murdoch’s sites have reopened to search as a marketing strategy (Andrews, 2012) and AP has dropped ongoing litigation against Meltwater, partnering it in data services innovation (Beaujon, 2013). But debates about how