Web journalism has benefits but requires a delicate balancing act

Last week, I wrote that a hastily published article on The New York Times' Web site highlighted a fear in newsrooms that the Internet, with its emphasis on minute-to-minute competition, is undermining the values of print journalism, which put a premium on accuracy, tone and context.

The offending article contained an anonymous political attack on Caroline Kennedy and broadcast vague allegations — highly exaggerated, it turned out — that she had nanny and tax problems.

Those responsible for guiding nytimes.com, the most widely read newspaper Web site in the nation, thought I had posed a false choice between speed and quality. "Bad calls happen in all kinds of time pressures," said Jonathan Landman, the deputy managing editor in charge of Web operations. "God knows, we've made notorious mistakes very slowly." He said The Times' failure to treat the Bush administration's case for the war in Iraq more skeptically, and its coverage of Wen Ho Lee, who was accused of espionage before the case fell apart, were not based on snap, Web-driven decisions.

"Of course working fast increases the chance for error, and clearly that is a danger to acknowledge seriously and address carefully," Landman wrote in a statement I have posted in The Public Editor's Journal at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com. "But absence of error isn't the only value. If it was, we'd long ago have scrapped daily and weekly newspapers and magazines in favor of refereed scholarly journals. Speed is a value too. Speed gets information to people when they want it and need it."

He said, "Journalistic quality has always involved a combination of speed, thoroughness, authority, discovery, seriousness, humor and many other things that sometimes conflict with each other. The trick is to find the right balance."

That is the trick. And Landman is right, as he later told me, that the Internet offers "a new kind of landscape of advantages and disadvantages." They include immediacy but fewer layers of editing; the opportunity to develop a story in real time but demands to "feed the beast" that can prevent deeper reporting; keen competition but wasted time chasing false leads published by less reliable sources; the ability to fix mistakes quickly but no way to prevent them from ricocheting around the world first.