Covering New Media as Indicator of Protest Level
Some friends and I were discussing the apparent absence of passionate protest in American politics the past few years. I suggested that the current generation has taken its protest to the Internet in the form of hundreds of sites, meet-ups, Twitterfabs, etc., and that this makes the revolution less visible to those who are not socially networked. That led to the idea that it might be useful for the mainstream media to begin to cover these new channels of activism as part of their regular news coverage rather than only when something big like the Iran riots take place. Networks and print media could compete on the basis of who can find the best, most accurate, insightful and interesting reporting of these topics on the Net. Which led me to the point of this post. What may be needed is for a smallish number of sites to emerge who take on the role of monitoring all these other sites and filtering, selecting and organizing their content for ready access by media and the public. Salon.com used to have a section that summarized the most interesting posts from blogs from the left and right but it went away. I don't know if they found no interest in it or if the editor left or what, but it was a highly valuable resource for me. Does anyone know of sites like this that critically aggregate political site contents?
