Online Journalism vs. Print Journalism: Real Time vs. Batch Processing
from the think-about-it dept
Last week, there was a bit of a silly fight over the NY Times publishing an article noting that blogs sometimes publish rumors. I didn't find the story to be all that bad, actually, as it did a fair job explaining why those blogs publish rumors without confirmation, and how they do it in a reasonable way (i.e., saying it's a rumor and hasn't been confirmed). Some felt the article was a hit piece, but on the whole it actually seemed pretty reasonable and accurate. Still, in response to that, Cody Brown (via Jay Rosen) put up a fascinating and thought-provoking writeup comparing online to print journalism -- noting that print is "batch processing" while online is "real-time processing" and explaining why this makes it so difficult for print to either understand the value of online journalism, or to keep up with it. To be honest, I think the point was made even clearer in last week's hilarious Daily Show takedown of the NY Times, where Jason Jones refers to the newspaper as "aged news" and asks Rick Berke, the assistant managing editor to point out a single article in today's newspaper that "happened today" (at around 3 minutes):Fair enough... But what happened on Friday? That's when the NY Times falsely reported that The Pirate Bay had lost its appeal... and that false story has remained uncorrected at least up until I published this story. It appears that the "pride" the NY Times takes in getting the story right doesn't necessarily extend to things like The Pirate Bay.
Filed Under: batch processing, fact checking, journalism, online, print, real-time
Companies: ny times
