Future Media Trends

With exquisite timing, the Leveson Report was issued just a couple of hours after the latest court appearances by Rebekah Brooks & Andy Coulson. Intriguing as it is to pore over the minutiae of the report as well as its main findings, Emily Bell displays clever counterintuition in a Guardian piece (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/28/leveson-irrelevant-21st-century-journalism ).
Formerly of the Guardian & Observer, Bell, who is now based in the US, observes:
"The free press of the 21st century consists of the distributed social platforms, the WordPress blogging software and the 'dark social' matter of the hidden web, as much as it is the venerable institutions that have local accountability to whatever regulator the UK government should seek to appoint.
"In her evidence to Leveson, Claire Enders -- a well-respected media analyst -- repeated what is probably a common perception, that important journalism needs to be done by existing institutions, as the web has produced nothing which would match the scale and projection of legacy organisations. From a distant perch in the US, where Pulitzer prizes now go to recent web entities such as Huffington Post and ProPublica, this assertion already seems out of date."
For all of today's (justified) broadcast coverage of Leveson, the trend identified by Bell is the one to track for the future.