NY Times: Do Print and Online Have Divergent Editorial Standards?

One thing we caution against when planning a communications strategy is painting with too broad a brush when it comes to bloggers.

Blogs, after all, are just technology. They can put the power of cheap and easy Web publishing into the hands of anyone.  That is why it is generally a mistake to have an overarching “blogger strategy,” or to have too many rules that just pertain to bloggers.  They can be written by truly independent voices, the new influencers – the people who were perhaps not that visible or vocal before blogging – or they can just as easily be run by reporters or analysts.

This can make things a bit tricky when it comes approaching and engaging bloggers. You need to take the time to learn about each one and better understand their roles.  Doing this can provide important information about agendas and possible biases.

A reasonable question to ask, as an example, is: what is the right approach to take when approaching a blog that is affiliated with a media brand? Should media and blogger relations professionals assume such blogs are bound by the same editorial standards?

A similar question was tackled by Clark Hoyt, who writes the NY Times Public Editor column.   Hoyt is an ombudsman for the Times, someone who fills the valuable role of asking tough questions and keeping the paper honest on issues like this.

In this week’s column, Hoyt examined a blog post by Times reporter Corey Kilgannon.   The post on The City Room blog offered a glimpse into the life of Jazz great Hank Jones, who recently passed.

It was not an unblemished view – apparently, Jones lived an isolated and cluttered existence in his final days – and his family took exception to the reporting, although fans seemed to appreciate the information.  Hoyt said:

… the blog post raised some big questions about reporting standards and ethics: Did Kilgannon cross that sometimes hard-to-define line between legitimate reporting and violating privacy? Did he put too much trust in a single source? Does The Times have lesser standards for online journalism than for print journalism? Did a journalistic device — what Kilgannon’s editor called a “snapshot” of one famous life — turn out to be misleading and unfair? How much can The Times satisfy our curiosity about a great artist before it is less like The Times and more like a gossip sheet?

A key question in all this is that the reporter did not check with Jones’ family before entering the room where Jones lived up until his final days.  Hoyt further reports:

It’s one of the awkward truths about journalism: finding out what readers want to know is often not pretty and involves rude questions and a bulldog determination to get around things like closed doors and yellow police tape. But good journalism also involves judgment about when to charge ahead and when to be restrained. Hank Jones’s room wasn’t a crime scene, and Kilgannon was not there on a breaking news story. Somewhere along the line, someone should have asked if the next of kin had been contacted for permission…

I asked Jamieson if this was an example of something much discussed in The Times’s newsroom: whether the paper has different journalistic standards for the Web. He said, “I use the same journalistic criteria” for blogs and the printed paper…

But I can’t help wondering whether a portrait of Jones in his later years would have been more deeply reported and carefully edited had it been conceived from the start as an article in the paper instead of a post on a blog. It’s an important question. The reputation of The Times rides on both forms of journalism.

It appears that even at the major media brands, which claim to adopt the same journalistic standards offline and online, the pressures to publish that come along with blogging force compromises, and it is safe to assume that the same rules do not necessarily apply as in other forms of media.

One other important difference – and this was not called out by Hoyt’s piece – is that the court we call the media in many cases has an appeal process for online articles, namely a comments section.   The comments on the City Room post in question featured a lively debate on some of the very same issues.