Summer Media Internship

I’m going to avoid using the word “blog” because it’s a term used to denote a medium, and thus has no significant ethical strings attached to it. Penthouse is a magazine and The Economist is a magazine. They are the same medium, does that mean they have the same standards? I don’t think so.

What’s much more important than the medium is the function. News websites should have the same standards as newspapers because they’re (ideally) striving toward the same goal: disseminating accurate information. The goals of the NYT web-only articles are the same as those in the paper edition, so yes, they should both meet the same standards. Those standards have been created to ensure the veracity of articles, so why not carry that over to web-only articles? Why should there be more lax standards for an article because it isn’t set on paper?

The real difficulty in this situation may be negotiating the quick turn-around time of web-only articles and today’s “Information NOW!” culture, with the slower, more methodical process typical of print articles.