The Media seems to have this lowest common denominator "popularity contest reporting": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_media https://en.wikipedia.org/w

The Media seems to have this lowest common denominator "popularity contest reporting": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory So -- what would make a social bookmarking service (reddit / machine-ranked news sites) more helpful? And, what would be helpful to a consumer of news? Would it be defined as, keeping the reader engaged and contributing to their suite of social causes (e.g. consuming media comprised of "40% Bieber, 30% Viability of the Planet, 30% Automobiles")? To make the bookmarking service more helpful, a service could facilitate codifying topics' seriousness. Perhaps manually through a user generated voting/weighting scheme, e.g. "[X] This story concerns life-or-death issues for 10-20 million people." Then once that information is associated with a subject, some smart agent could automatically carry this characterization around along with the user's surfing so that each article they read includes, in a side-bar perhaps, the "seriousness" of the subject. Making it helpful is the hard part, for me. So, finally to "help", it could help the reader conclude the projected utility of spending the time to actually read any given webpage, and share reports about their 'budget' of time spend consuming media of their preference.