Web leading to lower standards?

Yesterday’s early session at the Schuneman Symposium was full of hilarious photographs and war stories from the panelist’s pasts.

And that’s a great panel for anyone to watch, but it’s also a little defeatist to the idea of progress as it relates to new media. As journalists, we cannot focus on past glory days, but instead need to look to the future.

After wading through the fun, the panelists hit the problem on the head: we’re just not sure what works on the Web yet. Matthew Craig, a photographer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, talked about how companies had invested lots of time and resources into doing video, but then realized that video didn’t draw as much traffic as clickable slideshows.

His statement is a real testament to both how quickly things can change on the Web and how little we know. I had a professor last year who was so convinced about the pervasiveness of video that he believed we would eventually wear video screens on our clothes.

The panel discussion really fed my insecurity about whether the ship would right itself soon, but I did come away with a vague research idea. Craig talked about feeding the monster, or posting sometimes innocuous information to the Web as quickly as possible.

I wonder if many media companies have changed editing policies to post content to the Web quickly. It’s entirely possible that in some places they’ve eliminated editing for a Web update altogether just to get the story first. For all the doom and gloom that the Web has pushed on our industry, it’s certainly fostered greater competition.

Another great question is “have the standards of ‘news’ changed with the proliferation of news on the Internet?” That same competition that drives us to want the story first also pokes at an editor’s greatest insecurity: not having a potentially big story that everyone else has. Such insecurity can very easily lead to a less selective attitude when posting content to the Web.