Magazines and Their Web Sites
A Columbia Journalism Review survey and report
By Victor Navasky with Evan Lerner
CJR recently conducted a survey of standards and practices at magazine Web sites. The full report can be viewed here.
John Perry Barlow, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, once observed that where the new (i.e. digital) media are concerned, “we are immigrants in the land of our children.” Nowhere is this more true than in the no-man’s land between print magazines (old media) and their Web sites (new media).
Virtually every significant magazine in the United States—and increasingly abroad—either already has, or is in the process of establishing, a Web site. These interactive Internet offspring speak to a new generation of magazine readers, and often reach audiences well beyond those of their parent publications. But their rise has also created a vast set of ethical, culture, legal, and business issues. Although those involved with magazines and their Web sites have varying levels of knowledge and sophistication about their métier, it’s fair to say that the proprietors of these sites don’t, for the most part, know what one another is doing, that there are no generally accepted standards or practices, that each Web site is making it up as it goes along, that it is like the wild west out there.
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?
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/magazines_and_their_web_sites.php________________________________________________________
In short, this article goes exactly with what the media is constantly going through: change. Companies are still trying to figure out what they should do to compensate for the change in technology and resources that our generation is rapidly obtaining. Advertising, business, commercialization, social ethics, norms: all of these things are being re-written by the day. In this case, magazines branching out to their websites has become sort of a new front in journalism, which really hasn't been a huge deal until recently. The thing is, no one really knows how to do it properly yet; things keep on changing so much, that no one really has the formatting of a website for newsprint/magazines yet. It's a new thing for people to perfect in this digital age of electronic media. If print media wants to compete in the digital market of our today's society, it needs to learn how to adapt to the internet to be successful. With that, a whole new can of worms is opened up in how to regulate and standardize it.
My discussion question is this: With new forms of print media breaking into the online scene, can and should the government be allowed to control what content and information the website contains, regardless if the content is allowed within the physical print itself?
