The idea of MySpace launching a news aggregator is hardly surprising. After all MySpace parent Newscorp is not only one of the world’s largest newspaper and TV news companies but also one of the most creative. (FoxNews changed the tone of TV news forever. I’m certain Newscorp is more comfortable than most with blog-style news that mixes information, opinion and personality.)

Terry Heaton, who had the first post on MySpace News, says the service will gather stuff from websites, blogs, and members, combining Google News-style and Digg-style functionality. Om Malik offers the phrase social news.

The story comes a day after an enormous thread centering around a Doc Searls’ post recirculated all the old saws about traditional vs. citizen journalism–everyone’s a reporter, its the relationship that matters, etc.

Most of the conversation around the impact of Web 2.0 on news focuses on the newspaper’s role as producer of information and the impact of citizen journalism on professional journalism.

That impact is real and enormous and barely hinted at by the creeping blogification of newspapers (Chris Heuer wrote about USAToday’s makeover this week). Socially-enabling national newspapers has had an impact on the way newspaper people work. A friend at The Times said that there is competition in the newsroom to be at the top of the daily “most e-mailed” list. That competition is a kind of social feedback. So to are comments (but only when editors and reporters are involved in the conversation).

But social news does more than just undermine the news gathering primacy of traditional journalism. It also unwinds the aggregator function of newspapers.

Ten years ago technology gave people the power to be reporters of their own lives. Today technology enables community aggregation. That’s what Digg and Technorati and del.icio.us allow–something beyond the self-selected aggregation of RSS feeds. Tagging, ranking and sharing create public hierarchical lists of information. That’s what newspaper editors used to do. The Internet is an enormous, on-going Page One meeting.

Can any one aggregation service capture all that? We’ll find out. So far efforts to pull together that kind of grand unified shared aggregation haven’t lived up to the promise. Maybe MySpace News, which will have both the problems and benefits of serving a closed group of members, will show us how it can be done.  Will it be to all sources of information or just those with which it cuts deals? How will it exploit it’s members input? And most of all will newspapers feel the influence?