In today's Media Notes column, Howard Kurtz wonders why Mike Allen is considered influential for simply aggregating the work of other reporters: "[H]is claim to fame ... is his daily digest called the Playbook. ... But if the thing is merely a digest of items from elsewhere, with a few scooplets, birthdays and insider gossip thrown in, is the column really . . . influential? ... Now I'm all for aggregation; I do some of that here."

Yeah, some:

Words in Howard Kurtz's Media Notes column today: 2,152

Words in Kurtz's column that were written by Kurtz: 645

So Kurtz wrote less than 30 percent of his column today; the rest was ... aggregation. (And I'm giving him credit for the words that introduced excerpts of other people's work, and words that paraphrased the work of others. The actual original content in Kurtz's column is even lower than that.)

But, as Kurtz says, there's some value in aggregation. People are busy, and don't have time to go find everything they should read on their own. And if you want to know what Hot Air or National Review have to say about something without actually visiting Hot Air or National Review, Kurtz is your guy. Except for one little problem: For aggregation to be valuable, it has to be accurate. And there's some question as to whether Howard Kurtz actually reads the articles he summarizes, just as there is question as to whether he reads the reporting he praises, or watches the television appearances he fact-checks or tells the truth about issues he writes about.

So if Kurtz is wondering why his own aggregation doesn't win him the praise Allen receives, maybe it's because Kurtz does a lousy job of aggregating. If you can't trust an aggregator to be an accurate summary of the content it aggregates, what good is it?