Bringing News Standards the Web

by Robert Giles

Once upon a time, a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. It revolutionized business practices, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information. Romances blossomed. Secret codes were devised by some users and cracked by others. The benefits of this network were hyped by its advocates and dismissed by its skeptics. Governments and regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes toward everything from newsgathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought.

You might be familiar with this story of the mid‑19^th-century invention of the telegraph. Its creation, during the time of Queen Victoria, inspired writer Tom Standage to call it the Victorian Internet. Standage has written a book by that title, chronicling the age of the telegraph and its remarkable impact. Not the least of its cosmic influence was on journalism. In newsrooms of the early 19th century, timeliness was not a priority. Newspapers were almost exclusively local. National and world news was taken from other papers that had arrived by post. Those reprinted items told of events that had taken place weeks before. The larger papers had correspondents overseas who wrote long dispatches and mailed them. The news from foreign lands could travel no faster than the ships that carried it.

James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald was one of many who thought

the telegraph would put newspapers out of business. It was a logical conclusion, he said, because if the telegraph brought the news to every newsroom at the same time, it would eliminate the competitive advantage he had over his rivals. All that would be left to newspapers was commentary and analysis. It was not very long until newspaper owners began to see the telegraph as a great opportunity—one, in fact, that may have saved newspapers by enabling them to print news from everywhere.

The story of the telegraph offers a useful perch from which to consider the Internet and its impact on journalism. Even compared to the revolutionary influence of the telegraph, the expanding universe of the Internet is astonishing. Cyberspace has been colonized more rapidly than any other evolution in history. The Internet literally burst upon the American scene, without much warning—a true information explosion.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Communication Policy has recently published a report on the Internet called “Surveying the Digital Future.” It documents just how swiftly Americans and our global neighbors have taken to the World Wide Web. When electricity became available to the public in the United States, it took 46 years to wire 30 percent of American homes. After the invention of the telephone, 38 years passed before the telephone would reach 30 percent of American households. For television, it was 17 years. The Internet took seven years.

In January 1994, the Center for Communication Policy at UCLA, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and Vice President Gore organized the first Information Superhighway Conference. Bold statements about the future of the Internet were made and the meeting came to be considered the benchmark for measuring the growth of the World Wide Web. In 1994, few Americans had heard of the Internet. By 1997, 19 million Americans were on the Web. That number passed 100 million in 1999. An interesting footnote is to compare that number—100 million and growing—to the circulation of daily and Sunday newspapers: 120 million and declining. Globally, there are more than 240 million users.

New enrollment of Internet users remains high even after five years of explosive growth. In the first quarter of 2000, according to the UCLA report, more than 5 million Americans joined the online world—roughly 55,000 new users every day. The technology that supports the Web is expanding with supersonic speed. The Internet’s capacity to carry information doubles every 100 days. Earlier this year the number of documents on line that could be indexed passed one billion. Every 24 hours the content of the Web increases by 3.2 million pages.

An essential context for this extraordinary growth is journalism and how its values are influencing content on the Web and how the excesses of the free and irreverent nature of the Web are influencing journalistic behavior. The context is important because the Internet is replacing other media as a prime source of news and information, although not to the extent one might suspect. The UCLA report suggests that Internet users also depend on other more traditional forms of communication. Internet users are far more likely than non‑users to read newspapers and books and listen to the radio. Significantly, those who use the Web watch 28 percent less television—nearly 5 hours a week—than those who do not use the Internet. A recent survey by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that key segments of the nation’s news audience—particularly younger and better‑educated Americans and those seeking financial information—are turning increasingly to the Internet.

Different perspectives on the impact of the Web on newspaper readership are to be found in studies by Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and the Newspaper Association of America. Both surveys demonstrate that Internet users are more likely to be regular newspaper readers than people who do not use the Web. The NAA survey was based on 3,883 interviews in the top 50 newspaper markets. Its researchers concluded that few readers of online newspapers were abandoning the printed editions. The growth and the impact of the Internet are not limited to the United States. We are not alone in being influenced by the speed, reach and increasing technological power of the Internet. On a global basis it is becoming a powerful voice for democracy in many third world countries.

These countries do not have a constitutional First Amendment, but as more and more of them are wired with the technology developed in the United States, they are acquiring the robust, freewheeling values of our First Amendment. In his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard scholar of the Internet, writes that nations wake up to find that their telephone lines are tools of free expression, that email carries news of their repression far beyond their borders, that images are no longer the monopoly of state‑run television stations but can be transmitted from a simple modem.

In 1997, at a Freedom Forum conference in Nairobi, Kenya, I listened with deep admiration as a young Nigerian journalist, Babafemi Ojudu, explained how he and his colleagues used the Internet to circumvent the regime of Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. His own news organization had no Web site, but his and other news organizations had been posting news and information on a site maintained in the United States, called Africa.com.

Persecuted journalists can be rescued, he said, “when you get information out on the Web that you have been tortured, beaten; that your wife was arrested.” Two days later, as he returned home from the Nairobi meeting, Babafemi was seized at the Nigerian border by the state security service. News of his imprisonment moved quickly on the Web, enabling such organizations as the Committee to Protect Journalists and The Freedom Forum to press for his release. He was imprisoned for 248 days, held in solitary confinement, interrogated constantly but never charged. Babafemi was released only after the death of Abacha and the rise to power of General Abdulsalam Abubakar.

Last year, I was in Bamako, the capital of Mali, a small West African nation that is among the world’s poorest. During our media conference, The Freedom Forum organized for local journalists a demonstration of email and online translation software as tools for newsgathering. Mali is in the heart of old French West Africa, and French remains the official language as well as the language of journalism. The translation software is of particular interest to journalists in that part of the world because it can be used to translate English language websites into French. The demonstration took place at the Spider Cyber Café. It is a small, plain, concrete block building located on a dusty road outside Bamako. The Cyber Café had a dozen terminals with high‑speed Internet access. More than 40 Malian journalists jammed into that hot, tiny room, taking turns at the terminals and drinking in the details of a technology that evoked a stark contrast with the world in which these young journalists lived.

These two stories from Africa are truly inspiring examples of how the Internet is enabling journalists to strengthen a fragile free press in countries with fledgling democracies that are still governed by repressive regimes. The Internet has effectively opened new avenues of expression in African countries where dictators have traditionally suppressed information and free speech. The Web is so valuable there because everything else—free press, free radio, free television, free postal service—has been outlawed or is rigidly controlled. S.M. Kadhi, a Kenyan journalism professor, puts it this way: “Miraculously, all these means of communication are combined in an Internet and have now been placed on the doorsteps of the people of Africa,” giving Africans access to a global society.

At the very moment journalists in Mali were eagerly taking in their lessons at the Spider Cyber Café, China was shutting down 127 Internet cafés in Shanghai. The government said the spread of online information was threatening to mushroom out of control. Additional moves this year against the flow of information online are evidence that the Internet is at the heart of the struggle for free expression in China. In August the Communist Party said the nation had to beef up its online presence to combat infiltration by its ideological enemies. The People’s Daily, in an officially approved front‑page commentary, described the Web as an important battleground for public and international opinion and said China “must work hard to grasp the initiative online.”

An Associated Press story described China’s leaders as eager to promote the Web’s economic benefits but increasingly nervous that the Web was giving people access to uncensored news and information. The People’s Daily commentary was published one day after news that the organizers of the country’s first dissident website—known as the New Cultural Forum—were being hunted by police. A few days later, the son of Chinese President Jiang Zemin made a speech in Shanghai proposing that China build an Internet independent of the World Wide Web. Jiang Mianheng, who was educated in the United States and is said to be savvy about the new technology, urged Chinese scientists to create a Web in Chinese as part of a strategy to break the West’s “monopoly on information resources and related industries.”

Early last month, China issued new rules that make domestic Internet firms responsible for blocking all “illegal and subversive material” from their sites and for reporting to police anyone who spreads such information. “The rules,” according to London’s Daily Telegraph, “cover all content that threatens social stability, Communist Party authority or reunification with Taiwan.” The Committee to Protect Journalists finds the new regulations “dismaying” and said they represent China’s “most systematic effort to date to control the Internet.”

These examples suggest several important things about the global reach of the Internet.

2. In many countries, where dictatorships or totalitarian governments want to control the flow of information, courageous journalists are getting their stories out on the Web in ways that are not possible over government‑controlled radio and television or in some newspapers whose owners are friendly to the government.

3. Repressive governments now recognize that the Internet has become a window on global society, a window that can let in the truth and can undermine its practices of putting its own spin on events.

The UCLA report suggests how important news is on the Internet. Browsing the Web, including the search of news sites, is the most popular Internet activity. Reading news ranks fourth. Checking email and pursuing a hobby ranked second and third.

The Internet, like the telegraph and the typewriter and the computer and the videocam, is fundamentally a tool that can help tell stories. And, as we learned from the cycles of change brought on by each new technology, mastery of that is not a substitute for journalistic skills and values. Staying true to journalistic values and principles in an age of new media has it own historical antecedents. To a considerable extent, the standards of journalism are a product of the history and traditions of news organizations. Those standards are passed from editors to reporters, from generation to generation, and help shape a newspaper’s character. In some newsrooms, the standards are written down. In others, they are learned through experience, through coaching and editing, and through a process in which young journalists observe and try to emulate those who have mastered the craft.

In the early days of network television, news departments typically had a manual of standards. One such was the CBS News Standards and Practices Manual. Here is an excerpt from the 1976 edition, written by Richard Salant, then president of CBS News:

It is particularly important that we recognize that we are not in show business and should not use any of the dramatic licenses . . . or the underscoring and the punctuation which entertainment and fiction may and do properly use. This may make us a little less interesting to some, but that is the price we pay for dealing with facts and truth, which may often be duller and with more loose ends than fiction.

But as television news became the business of television news, good journalism as envisioned in the CBS manual has given way to news judgment more typically influenced by ratings and profit margins. Two events, both a consequence of President Clinton’s affair with a White House intern, were transforming influences in shaping the role, the reach and the limits of responsibility for news on the Web.

The first was the emergence of the “Drudge Report.” At the time he posted details of an investigation in progress at Newsweek magazine of the Clinton‑Lewinsky story in January 1998, Drudge was a publisher of Hollywood gossip working out of a small apartment in Los Angeles. Within days he was a national figure. Simultaneously, the visits to his website rose dramatically. Some described him as a reincarnation of Walter Winchell, who brought undisguised and unabashed gossip to the public press in the 1920s. Drudge’s scoops were mostly taken from other journalists. But he gave them a heartbeat quality that helped draw even more attention to himself. The mainstream press gave him a cachet that his journalism did not merit. He appeared on “Meet the Press” and was invited to help ABC News analyze President Clinton’s State of the Union message. Others in the press went on the attack, sharply criticizing Drudge for being inaccurate, biased, an online gossip and a distributor of unedited work of mainstream journalists. The fascination with Drudge’s revelations about the President seemed to influence a developing frenzy among the Washington press corps to be first with the latest developments in the story, even at the expense of failing to identify sources adequately.

In this low moment of American journalism, two distinguished newspapers had to withdraw and retract stories hastily posted on their own websites. The Dallas Morning News and The Wall Street Journal are remembered from that time as newspapers that put up stories based on third-party sources, who—as was later acknowledged—did not have first hand knowledge of the events they were describing. It is undeniable that Matt Drudge changed the way journalism works by demonstrating the influence of reporting posted on the Web. The “Drudge Report” today includes links to many wire services and news websites world wide—and thus is bookmarked by many journalists—but Drudge himself is largely ignored. The marketplace has discredited him because his standards of journalism do not engender trust. Meantime, journalism seems to be recovering its sanity and is attempting to reestablish traditional reporting guidelines about the attribution of personal attacks on individuals.

The second transforming influence on journalism and the Web was the release of the Starr Report to Congress on the Clinton‑Lewinsky affair. As Jon Katz, a student of the new media and author of a recent book called Geeks, says, big stories inevitably transform the news media. The assassination of President Kennedy legitimized TV news. The death of Elvis fueled the supermarket tabloid culture. The Persian Gulf War vastly increased the influence of cable news. The O.J. Simpson trial fused traditional and entertainment media.

The release of the Starr Report in September 1998 ratified the Internet as America’s premier means of rapid dissemination of critical civic information in a country that long has celebrated the public’s right to know. The report was published on the Internet at the same time it was given to reporters. Until this moment in the history of the press in the United States, it was the major news organizations that alone received this kind of information first, and they decided how much of it the rest of us could and should see. That afternoon, news anchors and field reporters were scrambling on the air to read portions of the report and interpret their apparent meaning for viewers. But in homes and offices around the country and the world, people were downloading the Starr Report folder and deciding for themselves what they wanted to read and what it meant.

Did journalism become less necessary at that moment, or was it just challenged and altered? Posting the Starr Report gave the public an unfiltered version. It did not need a journalist to sort out the lead, to provide the context, to interpret the independent counsel’s conclusions. To some it was a splendid example of democracy. For journalists, it was a revealing moment. The capacity to post documents and reports on the Web gave the public a vital point of comparison. They could match the real thing against a version in their local newspaper and on the nightly news broadcast. As documents and transcripts on the Web become a potential check against truthful reporting, they raise the bar in newsrooms everywhere for accuracy, balance and fairness. With the Internet thus established as a legitimate provider of news, the question turns to the standards and the integrity of journalism on the Web. The daily newspaper remains the most dependable and accurate source of news and the leader in sustaining standards.

In spite of that, newspaper credibility has suffered. The influence of the Clinton‑Lewinsky story and the willingness of newspapers to lower the bar on attribution contributed. Newspaper credibility also suffers as a consequence of the public’s tendency to see them as part of the same media world in which excesses thrive on the Web and in which “infotainment” programs on cable television present themselves as news shows whose programming violates many of the basic conventions of accuracy, balance and fairness. The Freedom Forum’s examination of fairness in newspapers disclosed a wide range of journalistic practices at newspapers that the public believes is unfair. The tendency to publish rumors without ascertaining facts and without attribution to a named source was high on the list of public concerns. Other points we heard repeatedly included inaccuracy, reportorial incompetence, failure to understand the basics of complex issues, editors and reporters having preconceived notions of the story line, institutional reluctance to publish corrections, rudeness and a lack of civility in the reporting process, and failure to devote adequate space to worthy stories.

On the Internet, there is no space problem. But every other concern about fairness—concerns supported by example after example in our meetings around the country—easily translates into the world of Web journalism. And if the press is seen as not fair, whether in print, on the television screen or on the Web, then the news organization will eventually lose trust and will not be seen as credible.

One can find a variety of opinions about the relative standards and measures of credibility between the Web and the mainstream press. Jon Katz says, “The old media aren’t in a position to be giving anyone ethics lessons. Traditional journalism is Disney and GE and AOL Time Warner. You’re not talking about Thomas Paine here.”

Moreover, one might note, Katz is not talking about The New York Times or The Washington Post, either. Katz continues, arguing that some “Web sites, such as Slashdot,” for which he writes a column, “are in many ways more reliable and accountable to readers than the traditional press is to theirs.” “When I get something wrong,” he says, “10,000 people jump up my nose.” By contrast, he contends that the old media are not receptive to feedback. To make the point he notes that many print publications refuse to provide their writers’ email addresses and that the practice of having an ombudsman is not enough; writers should be in direct contact with their readers.

Jim Naughton, a long‑time editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and now president of the Poynter Institute, argues that there are not a lot of standards in the new media. He predicts that Internet journalism’s success will be dependent on its credibility. A survey by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that the most credible Internet news sources are Web sites run by network or cable TV outlets or national newspapers. The poll also ranked better‑known Internet names, such as Yahoo!, America Online and Netscape, higher than lesser known sites.

But a different survey of online news editors concludes that news posted online may be less accurate than in the newspapers that sponsor the online posts. The key findings in this study by journalism professors at the University of Memphis and Elon College in North Carolina are that online news outlets are not as likely to follow the general ethical standards of traditional journalism. Two‑thirds of the 200 online editors surveyed said that some breaking news goes online before it goes through traditional print editing. Issues of accuracy and credibility are at risk because of these characteristics typical of newspaper online operations:

2. Lack of established ethics protocols specific to online newsgathering and Web publishing.

3. Absence of clearly defined practices for fact‑checking and editing in the rapid‑fire world of instant e‑news, as well as for policing chat rooms and the manipulation of images.

4. Failure to have clear and consistent placement of corrections and clarifications.

Some of the concerns raised in the study are found in the afternoon online editions of leading daily newspapers. David Broder, The Washington Post columnist, told a conference of news ombudsmen recently that stories routinely go into the Post’s online afternoon edition without the same kind of rigorous editing the print version of the paper receives. “It makes a lot of us in the newsroom wince,” he said. In time, the websites of daily newspapers will learn to strike a better balance between the rush to be first in posting stories that can have an instant global reach and the traditional editing standards that have sustained the value of newspapers over decades as the most reliable source of news.

Nowhere are accuracy and clarity more important than in the coverage of money issues. The intersection of the new information economy with the stunning growth of the number of American households invested in the stock market and the emergence of the Internet are critical to understanding the importance of journalistic values and standards for covering financial news on the Web. A generation ago, the business beat was the province of reporters who watched the market ticker tapes and rewrote corporate handouts. Today, financial journalism is serving demanding audiences who expect reporting that is grounded on an authoritative grasp of exceedingly complex topics. They are demanding because increasingly business stories have a meaning for shareholder value—what might the news mean to the reader’s portfolio?

So great has been the growth of international business news its volume is now rivaling international political news. Financial news on the Web offers the important qualities of immediacy and accessibility. It can be customized by each user. The global nature of financial markets means that Internet news organizations are at work around the clock trying to serve the unyielding master of timeliness as well as fill a seemingly insatiable hunger for more and more news. The Internet has democratized access to information that once was prohibitively expensive and tailored for professional investors, providing for us a clear example of how the Web has become the freest part of American communications culture.

Independent dot‑com companies have been created with dedicated staffs that focus on financial news in a way that only The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times once did.

TheStreet.com is an example of a new company that has captured a niche of the business news market but that is now struggling with challenges to its stability that are influencing its journalistic values. TheStreet.com was a high flyer in the market following its public offering in 1999. In recent months the market has been harsh in its assessment of dot‑com news organizations and TheStreet.com’s stock plummeted to a low of under $3 a share in October. Its original strategy was that people would pay for information that might enhance the value of their stock portfolios.

been forced to restructure its business model. It is now free for users and depends on advertising for its revenue. But the adjustment is forcing it to cut costs and staff, and compete more aggressively for top journalists.

Other independent news sites are encountering similar difficulties. Salon.com is reducing budget and staff. APBNews.com, a highly regarded online news company, simply ran out of money and let its entire staff go. The site has continued to operate on a limited basis with a handful of volunteers while the owners looked for new investors, who have pumped renewed life into APBNews.com. As one of the early entries in the world of financial Web sites, The Street.com set an important standard for its journalists: No one could own stock. It is a standard that its editor, David Kansas, says is rigorously followed. Other financial journalists view this rule as simply too rigid, even as they recognize that one of the greatest ethical dilemmas for the dot-com financial news sites is their enormous ability to influence markets and the undeniable need for their journalists to be absolutely scrupulous.

The example that makes this point is the fraudulent story posted on the Web in August 2000 about a company called Emulex. A press release was posted on Internet Wire, a public relations distribution service in Los Angeles. It reported a restatement of Emulex earnings, the departure of a top executive and an investigation of accounting irregularities by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The story was dutifully picked up by major business wires and television stations, and within minutes, the company’s stock had dropped by more than 50 percent. Those who examined the press release noted that it was amateurishly written, capitalizing words for no reason and failing to mention in the body of the story either of two major points in the headline: the SEC investigation and the resignation of the CEO.

The Emulex story is one of several such examples of reckless use of the Web in ways that made markets move. And while the appropriate government agencies are investigating the perpetrators of the fraud in each case, the larger question remains for journalism: How did those stories get posted without appropriate editorial review?

The Web can be freer, more irreverent, opinionated and feisty. In our democratic society, such qualities have an enduring value in the spirit of free expression. In our democratic society, this culture makes the Web distinctive from more traditional forms of journalism and complicates the translation of standards to journalism on the Web.

Mark Jurkowitz, who covers media for The Boston Globe, wrote an item recently about a story that Newsweek sports correspondent Mark Starr posted on the company website. The piece was called, “The Most Hated Team in Baseball”—a pointed, personalized look at the psychology of Yankees haters. It could have run in the magazine, suggested Jurkowitz, but it seemed eminently more suited for the opinionated online universe. Or, as Starr expressed it, “the Web encourages you to be a little more attitudinal.” Jurkowitz defines the difference this way: Matt Drudge evokes an image of the online journalist—“a boisterous blender of gossip, news and advocacy—while David Broder is representative of the more traditional journalist, tethered to newsroom standards, structure and stodginess.”

As mainstream news organizations press their journalists into duty as online writers, there is the inevitable clash between the urgency of timeliness and the concern for care and precision. Scott Rosenberg, former critic and columnist for the old San Francisco Examiner, who is now managing editor of Salon.com, says:

The one thing that doesn’t work online is the Olympian, supposedly objective voice of the old‑fashioned American journalism. It’s a voice that belongs to a different medium. We’re talking about tone. You can do great, high quality journalism without necessarily adopting the old media tone.

Dan Kennedy, a media critic for the weekly The Boston Phoenix, told Jurkowitz that “writing for weekly publications has always meant more time for thinking. The real danger in Web journalism is that you get into a pattern of more writing/less thinking.”

Jon Katz argues that it is the readers themselves who are taking over the critical editing function from traditional newsroom editors. “To me,” Katz says, “the surprising thing is the degree to which I am held accountable by readers for what I am doing.” He says, “Whatever you are writing, your column makes its way to the most knowledgeable people on the subject. What you learn is your column is not the last word, it’s the first word. It’s incredibly humbling.”

Ann Compton, who covered the White House for many years and is now running ABCNews.com, explained that the Internet enabled the network to scale back its coverage of the political conventions. She also said that its dot‑com staff approached the story differently from the way the network’s television journalists would have. “We write more brightly. We throw in more slang. There is a richness to the dot.com coverage that you really can’t do on television.”

The Internet may be transforming political campaign coverage in other ways also. It is interactive; it has the space to reprint party platforms and campaign speeches, and it does a better job of covering third-party candidates than the mainstream press. One major innovation in the election of 2000 has been searchable video online that was introduced by C‑SPAN.

A final, and important, point about standards and ethics on the Web is the need to separate content and commerce. Two forces that set the Web apart from other media—linking and interactivity—also are forces making the firewall between news and nonnews content harder to define. In a daily newspaper, a reader cannot be sent to another newspaper for more detail or a different point of view. But in seconds on the Web, a reader of a story about, say, a hate group can be transported to a hate site. And the fact that a reader can move almost seamlessly between news and products and services related to the story is both a blessing and a curse. It is similar to the way metropolitan papers have dealt with real estate or automotive news for generations, but yet it is not the same.

Rich Jaroslovsky, president of the Online News Association and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal interactive, is leading his organization in a project to develop strong guidelines for online journalism, including recommendations on how these principles and guidelines might be enforced.

Here is what the future looks like to me: More and more, the old media will influence the new media; the standards of mainstream journalism will become the standards for the Web. This will happen for several reasons. The mainstream news media—meaning daily newspapers, newsmagazines and the major television news organizations—will remain the dominant news sites. These news organizations are discovering, and will continue to discover, that they can build credibility and trust with their audiences only by combining speed, technological innovation and standards. Moreover, standards for newsgathering, in the traditional and the new media, have the full attention and devotion of the most influential organizations in the news world: the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Online News Association, the Radio and Television News Directors Association, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Nieman Foundation. That is a prominent list, and probably not a complete one.

It is reasonable to suggest that the quality of newsgathering on the Web will be improved as a consequence of the renewed commitment to journalistic standards taking place in each of these organizations. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the old media will ever be able to adapt fully to the culture of the new media. Can newspaper editors get over the idea that the Web is not a place for Olympian voices from the mountain top, as the printed newspaper has been? Can editors understand that the Web is an interactive place where there are fewer rules and fewer limits—an open system that will forever be in contrast to the closed, controlled nature of the traditional newsroom? Readers on the Web have accepted the new culture for what it is, but maybe they are on a different planet from editors.

[1] This lecture was delivered November 10, 2000 under the sponsorship of Washington and Lee’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communications’ Knight Program in the Ethics of Journalism.

2 Robert Giles is Curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.