Sometimes I just have to say, “what the fuck?” and the royal we doesn’t work as well. These are my thoughts—raronauer

Earlier today, my former coworker and current Brijit managing editor Bryan Keefer defended his site, claiming that it’s not for the pretentious and lazy.

Instead, he argued, the site is for the curious but overworked. It’s for people who do want to read lengthy Atlantic articles, but don’t have time to waste on the bad ones.

In nerd logic, this seems like a defensible position. Brijit can be thought of as a literary Grand Central: not the final destination, but the start of the journey.

But in business logic, this plan makes no sense at all. Unlike the MetroNorth trains, magazine articles can be picked up from anywhere like RSS feeds, blogs and the magazine’s own homepages. So why would anyone go to Brijit to find them?

Brijit is a free site, which means it hopes to sustain itself on advertisements. And for that business model to work, it’ll need a lot of readers. But for all the hits that Brijit gives to the New Yorker.com, how many hits is the New Yorker.com going to give back? Brijit offers no truly original content that would encourage other sites to link to it and introduce new readers to the site.

Along with the faulted business model, as Bryan acknowledged, Brijit will be competing with loads of other aggregate sites for readers. Michael Wolff’s Newser is a similar site with less of a magazine focus.

While Brijit has the Web 2.0 white space thing down, Newser is one of the most visually effective Web sites out there. The opening page has nine images up, but doesn’t look crowed. By design, Newser has more information up than Brijit.

Brijit editors could argue that their blurbs are more informative and better written than Newser’s. But for the $5 they’re paying per write-up, that argument is probably not true. And even if it were, who goes to these sites for the writing?

In any case, Slate has been offering summaries of magazines, newspaper and blogs for years. Of course, companies have always tried to copy successful business models online. But in the case of Brijit, which only aspires to be an extremely smart aggregate site, what’s the point?