Canadian commentator David Frum, a notable conservative journalist,
spoke this week to a joint meeting of The Canadian Club and the Canadian Journalism Foundation on trends in journalism. He paints a difficult picture of a craft losing some of its moorings and a public lesser served.
Frum identified five principal points:
1. De-monopolization. Frum doesn't suggest this is bad, but he believes it has become easy to participate.
2. De-professionalization. Or, as he puts it: "Who must worry about journalism ethics? Nobody who doesn't want to."
3. Rising demands on the media consumer. The audience is left to fend for itself more often.
4. Information inequality. The informed are better informed, the ill-informed are more so.
5. The increasing importance of strategic communication and miscommunication. Collectively media are stronger than ever, he argues, but individually they are weaker than before.
News organizations everywhere are contending with the flood of comments and the challenge of what to do about them. Do you leave them alone? Do you let the community rank and reorganize them? Or do you curate them?
Gawker appears to be moving into the latter territory with its media site, Jezebel, in elevating what it considers the best comments. Essentially, if you're deemed "funniest, thoughtful, intelligent, well-argued" you'll move up the rankings to be in Tier 1. To be anywhere other than in Tier 1 is, well, not to be anywhere deemed good.
Obviously it's a subjective call, but it's a serious attempt to sift through what are often phenomenally long lists of comments to find the ones more likely to advance the debate.
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