Speed of Reporting via the Web Tests Accuracy and Ethics

More than 500 newspapers--a third of the country’s dailies--have created online editions in the last three years, a move born of business rather than journalistic impulses. As a result, cyberspace--where the lines between news and commerce are especially blurry--may be the newest battleground in the struggle to maintain editorial integrity.

Newspapers go online primarily because:

* The Internet is a more efficient medium than traditional print newspapers for classified advertising, and newspaper executives are terrified that other online services will capture this lucrative source of income, which now provides about 35% to 40% of the ad revenue for a typical big-city newspaper.

* Newspaper executives want to keep their readers from turning to other online news services.

* The investment in online publication is relatively minimal and permits newspapers to achieve an objective many have long sought--getting more than one opportunity to use the information they spend a great deal of money gathering every day.

But if newspapers want to draw large numbers of visitors to their sites so they can charge advertisers accordingly, they have to compete with other sites that often have much lower--or no--journalistic standards. Speed is the name of the Internet game, and as journalists in every medium have long known, speed is often the enemy of accuracy.

The Dallas Morning News learned that in January after publishing a report on its Web site that the staff of independent counsel Kenneth Starr had spoken with a Secret Service agent who was prepared to testify that he saw President Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky in a compromising situation. The next day, the News reported that its source for the story “said the information . . . was inaccurate.” The day after that, the News published a story that was a more tentative version of its original story.

A week later, the Wall Street Journal posted a story on its Web site saying that a White House steward had told a grand jury that he saw President Clinton and Lewinsky alone together in a study next to the Oval Office. The steward’s attorney promptly branded the story “absolutely false and irresponsible.” Like the Dallas Morning News, the Journal then printed a modified version of its online story.

Almost from the moment the Clinton/Lewinsky story broke--in Matt Drudge’s online report that Newsweek had the story but wasn’t publishing it--media critics have been attacking the Web. The accelerated news cycle and the absence of journalistic standards and traditional gatekeepers in the online world helped the Clinton/Lewinsky story reach critical mass.

But that’s not the only ethical concern facing the media as they venture into cyberspace in pursuit of profits. For all the strengths and benefits of the Internet, it’s still a relatively new medium with many unsolved problems. It’s so easy to copy something and pass it along on the Web, for example, that proprietorship and copyright laws often seem moot. Moreover, because the Web is so informal and errors are so easily and quickly corrected, many people writing for it seem less concerned with making mistakes than do most traditional journalists.

The seamless ease with which visitors to any Web site can click on a link and move to another site can eradicate the distinction between a serious news organization’s own practices and the often lower standards of other sites. Links can also prevent users from distinguishing legitimate news stories from advertisements.

The Web is filled with what PC World magazine calls “stealth sites,” material that is designed to look like news or, at least, “unbiased content” but that is actually advertising or other marketing material in disguise.

As Andrew Barnes, editor and president of the St. Petersburg Times, says: “Even on our Web site, you can’t tell if you have something the St. Pete editors chose or something from a chiropractor. . . . You go from news to advocacy with no modulation.”

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Papers Find Problems in Cyberspace

Many newspapers are turning to the Internet in search of profits, but they’re learning that journalistic standards can be a bit fuzzy there. The uproar over President Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky reached critical mass--and resulted in some stories of questionable validity--in part because of the speeded-up news cycle on the Web. The lines between news and commerce can also be fuzzy in the online world, where users can click on links that whisk them seamlessly between legitimate stories and “stealth” advertisements and advocacy.