It is a tangled Web, indeed --- so finds the august Columbia Journalism Review in investigating the practices of magazines online. With the help of a MacArthur Foundation grant, CJR editor Victor Navasky and seedmagazine.com editor Evan Lerner found the Wild West is alive and not so well.
If there is a method to the madness of online magazines, the researchers didn't find one. Instead they unfurled anything but best practices: dysfunctional editing techniques, relative apathy about standards of digital against print, and paltry measures to correct the mistakes.
When publishers are in charge of the sites, they tend to make better decisions and are more likely to be profitable. But that's a stretch in both cases. Mainly the study found a weak business rationale and a weaker journalistic rationale for the conduct of hundreds of magazine sites.
While the authors didn't find a recklessness about accuracy, they did note the speed rules "in a way that tends to undermine traditional journalistic standards."
If there is a method to the madness of online magazines, the researchers didn't find one. Instead they unfurled anything but best practices: dysfunctional editing techniques, relative apathy about standards of digital against print, and paltry measures to correct the mistakes.
When publishers are in charge of the sites, they tend to make better decisions and are more likely to be profitable. But that's a stretch in both cases. Mainly the study found a weak business rationale and a weaker journalistic rationale for the conduct of hundreds of magazine sites.
While the authors didn't find a recklessness about accuracy, they did note the speed rules "in a way that tends to undermine traditional journalistic standards."
