When Fact Meets Opinion

As Internet media continues to emerge as a source that more and more people turn to for up to the minute news, the pressure for larger media outlets to compete with smaller content producers like bloggers, falls squarely on the shoulders of journalists.  When reporting that traditionally relies on well researched facts fails to keep pace with the arena of opinion that makes up much of the online space, necessity sometimes means that the boundary separating the two be obscured.  This dilemma not only forces journalists to rethink these rules, but requires that the audience be more aware of where they’re getting their information from.

[The] challenge is one that more and more print journalists are confronting as they are asked to write news stories, blog items, do analysis (often minutes after an event has occurred) and, in many cases, provide commentary for radio, television, and even online outlets. As newspaper Web sites blend in more with blogs that do not hold to the same journalistic rules, there is greater pressure to “write like them” — and sometimes cut corners on the principles of objectivity and balance that have been the oft-stated mainstay, for better or worse, of newspaper news coverage.

But more and more, both new media and old-fashioned news types are disagreeing with that approach. The growing trend is that the truth must surpass the 50/50 doctrine. “We have gotten it so wrong with the idea of giving equal play to both sides,” says Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of Huffingtonpost.com and a longtime proponent of trading arbitrary “balance” for truth. “We are not always going to be balanced. Very often, it is one side or the other.” She cited the ongoing arguments against global warming, which she contends mainstream journalists allowed for too long to go unchallenged: “We wasted a lot of journalistic capital on global warming trying to be balanced.”

Via [EditorandPublisher]