Old-Media Values in New-Media Venues - Bob Cohn - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/old-media-values-in-new-media-venues/280367
Once upon a time, there was old media. It was reported, edited, top-edited, copy-edited, and fact-checked. It was good.
And there was new media. It was fast, hungry, loosely edited, quick to fix the mistakes it often made. It was good enough.
For a while, readers and journalists alike seemed willing to accept that there might be different standards. People expected less of digital in the early days; it was, everyone said, “just the web." Accuracy and fairness and good writing and smart design—all that mattered, of course, but it was sometimes hard to square those demands with the implications of everyone’s favorite analogy, that the web was “the wild west.”
These days, the web seems a bit less wild and more polished. Everywhere you look, there are signs that publishers are importing traditional journalism values to the constantly shifting digital environment. The web continues to do what it does better than print—delivering on-the-minute stories with a conversational tone to an always-connected audience—and the blog post, as one distinct unit of digital journalism, still offers what Andrew Sullivan called in 2008 “the spontaneous expression of instantaneous thought…accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers.” But increasingly, digital journalism does its business while embracing certain core beliefs typically associated with old media.