> "Trending" isn't an editorial strategy. It is the abdication of editorial strategy.
Not sure I understand your point. “Trending” is exactly what it says on the cover. On the other hand, calling topics picked by the editor trending would be a bit of a perversion of the meaning of the word, no?
Trending topic is a bit of a misnomer. Twitter isn't identifying "topics" here, per se; they're just extracting the most common substrings verbatim from recent tweets.
A human editor might see a topic like this becoming popular and summarize it as "Synagogue Vandalism". They wouldn't just present it as "Kill All Jews" with no other context.
Trending has connotations of acceptance. When wearing jeans is trending, for example, it might mean that jeans are “good” and “acceptable” to wear.
The “trending” you’re referring to would be better described as “high traffic”. There’s a hundred thousand people on the roads rushing to get home right now, that doesn’t mean that traveling by car is “trending”.
Not sure I understand your point. “Trending” is exactly what it says on the cover. On the other hand, calling topics picked by the editor trending would be a bit of a perversion of the meaning of the word, no?