In the photo here, you will see six items featured at the same time on the homepage of Current. for almost the entire day of February 18th, 2010.
You will notice that one of them is different than the others.
You will notice that it is a serious news story about something that actually fucking matters, that happened today.
You may notice, if you've spent time on Current.com that it is ALSO the ONLY USER POSTED STORY on the front page.
For those of you who don't know, Current.com used to be a news aggregation website that had an open source model for journalism. Users could create content, and then the community could vote on it.
The users generally had a decent sense of journalistic integrity, and otherwise overlooked stories often trended on the site's front page.
Now, it regularly features nonsensical staff picks, or videos that are created in house by staff. Regularly the front page is flodded with 'news items' that have minimal votes, without any regard to the user population or what stories are actually trending on the site.
It used to be that current.com was ahead of the 24 hour news networks by several news cycles. Today the story of a disgruntled man flying an airplane into a federal building did not reach the front page until nearly 10 hours after it happened.
Recently there was a shift in management, with Al Gore stepping away and some new guy from MTV stepping up to the plate. And the journalistic integrity of current.com has since been steadily sliding downhill into mindless garbage. Just like MTV moved away from showing music videos, and toward mindless garbage. Who'da thunk?
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