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.

Former Wall Street media analyst Henry Blodget sent a couple of comments in the last day or so to Silicon Valley Insider on business models after the head of Gawker crowed about his traffic next to that of the Los Angeles Times.
He believes Gawker's business model is right and that The New York Times et al will be closer to that model than Gawker is to their model in five years.

Reed Business Information is discussing the notion of paying journalists according to the number of page views their work earns. They'd accept a lesser salary and be given bonuses on the basis of the Web traffic their work generated.
It has a faint echo of the recent kerfuffle at Gawker, where a number of contributors groused about the approach.
After all, page impressions are only one measurement --- and one that can be distorted rather easily --- and have the potential to induce very-low-common-denominator work. More difficult work, which may not produce as much traffic, might be diminished.
If we were to organize newspapers or newscasts on the basis of audience, a number of things would disappear. The newsroom's total package is what drives budgets that in turn accord compensation.
Many organizations provide bonuses when traffic objectives are reached, but moving to a new pay-per-view formula would be quite a grenade.