Jill Abramson, the managing editor of The Times, answers a question about blogs and the balance between speed and accuracy.
And yes, as managing editor I feel like i am the worrier-in-chief, so I do worry about the issues you raise.
I like the immediacy of blogs and the democratizing effects of letting millions of voices bloom on the Web. Some blogging is brave, including the dispatches posted by Iraqi citizens, such as a dentist turned citizen journalist named Zeyad.
To work and cast a wide appeal, blogs often need more voice than a news story. While we do expect certain journalistic standards to apply to everything we publish, editors can’t be too rigid, either. . . .
Our New York politics blog was full of great stuff that could have been in the newspaper. I first realized the significance of that Playboy ad in the Ford-Corker race when I saw it at the top of our national political blog. So some of our worrying may be unnecessary.
