Old-Media Values in New-Media Venues

[Commentary] 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.

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. 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. Expectations in respect to design have improved since the advent of new media, but also concerning careful editing. The results of a reader study suggest that, while there’s always the case of that quickie aggregation post that goes viral, readers do reward enterprise. It’s been refreshing to confirm that, on the web, as in print, quality, however it might be defined or measured, is the ultimate driver of success. The changing newsroom culture may be one of the best opportunities for transmitting mainstream journalism values to the new order of things.