Columbia Journalism Review Releases Research on Magazines and Their Websites

Yesterday, the Columbia Journalism Review magazine released the results of a recent survey and report on magazines' websites. The purpose of the research, which surveyed 665 consumer magazines on the practices and profitability of their websites, was "to identify some best (and worst) practices; clarify journalistic standards for new media; and guide journalists and media companies towards a business model that allow revenues not only to be allocated more efficiently, but also channeled back into the kind of news-gathering operations that are essential for democracy."

The conclusion of the research project, Victor Navasky, chairman of Columbia Journalism Review magazine, stated in a recent New York Times article, "There’s chaos out there.”

Among the topics in the project is one of the hottest topics in the magazine industry: content. We weren't surprised to read among the results that CJR found more than half the magazines put their entire print editions online for free. A small four percent of magazines put all or almost all print content behind a pay wall and 10 percent put some of it behind a pay wall. Still, the rest post only some of their print output online, but all of it free.

However, we were surprised to read that fact-checking and copy-editing practices were less strict at a lot of the magazines. Navasky concluded in The New York Times, that speed of posting the content--to get traffic--is a higher priority than copy-editing.

Comments

[web design]

It is very important that magazines have really good websites because some people know them only from the web. I also discovered many interesting magazine when I came across their websites by accident.