Monday, March 1, 2010

Magazine Web Sites: Built for Speed, Not for Accuracy

Link to March 1 New York Times article, "Survey Finds Slack Editing at Magazine Web Sites".

Excerpt: “One of the things that it appears to mean is that there’s this trade-off of standards for speed,” Mr. Navasky [chairman of CJR] said of those topics. “The conventional wisdom is that you have to be there first in order to get traffic, and you need traffic in order to sell ads, therefore you do not have time to do conventional copy-editing and fact-checking.” [Emphasis added.]

Link to March 1 Columbia Journalism Review article, "Magazines and Their Web Sites".

Excerpt: It was against this background, and with funding provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, that the Columbia Journalism Review undertook the first comprehensive study of online practices of print magazines. The survey had various goals: to identify some best (and worst) practices; clarify journalistic standards for new media; and guide journalists and media companies towards a business model that allow revenues not only to be allocated more efficiently, but also channeled back into the kind of news-gathering operations that are essential for democracy.

Among the questions the Columbia Journalism Review survey asked: What fact-checking and copy-editing standards apply to magazine Web sites, if any? Who oversees the editorial content of online material, and with what consequences? And what business model is applied to these Web publications, and with what consequences for profitability?

Link to 58-page report. (pdf file)

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