Survey Finds Slack Standards at Magazine Web Sites

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

The only thing standard about magazines’ Web sites is that there are no standards.

That is the chief finding of a research project conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review, which surveyed 665 consumer magazines on the practices and profitability of their Web sites.

“There isn’t yet a generally accepted set of norms for this new medium,” said Victor Navasky, chairman of the magazine. “There’s chaos out there.”

Columbia plans to release the survey on Monday, and publish an accompanying article on the magazine’s Web site at CJR.org.

For the project, Mr. Navasky and his researchers contacted about 3,000 magazines in the summer and fall of 2009, and 665 of them completed the survey. They represented a range of sizes: about 12 percent of respondents had print circulations of more than 500,000, which represents most major consumer magazines, like Time, Wired and Redbook.

About 51 percent had circulations of less than 100,000, which tend to be niche publications like ArtNews, New Jersey Monthly or Nascar Illustrated.

There was wide variance in most of the answers to survey questions — how and whether the sites made money, for one. Only a third of the Web sites reported making a profit.

More than half the magazines put their entire print editions online free. Four percent put all or almost all print content behind a paywall, and 10 percent put some of it behind a paywall. The rest post only some of their print output online, but all of it free.

But profitability and paywall did not appear to be tightly linked. About 49 percent of unprofitable Web sites gave away all of their content, and 65 percent of profitable Web sites did the same.

Copy-editing requirements online were less stringent than those in print at 48 percent of the magazines. And 11 percent did not copy-edit online-only articles at all.

A similar trend held with fact-checking. Although 57 percent of the magazines fact-check online submissions in the same way they fact-check print articles, 27 percent used a less-stringent process. And 8 percent did not fact-check online-only content at all. (The other 8 percent did not fact-check either print or online articles.)

There was also variance in how corrections were indicated to readers. Almost all of the magazine sites — 87 percent — corrected minor errors, like typos and misspellings, without telling readers of the change. And 45 percent of the sites changed factual errors without letting readers know they had gotten it wrong.

Those that did alert readers to errors had different ways of signaling it; 37 percent corrected the error and added an editor’s note explaining what had been changed, 6 percent left the inaccuracies intact and added an editor’s note about the error, and 1 percent put corrections in a special area of the site.

“One of the things that it appears to mean is that there’s this trade-off of standards for speed,” Mr. Navasky said of those topics. “The conventional wisdom is that you have to be there first in order to get traffic, and you need traffic in order to sell ads, therefore you do not have time to do conventional copy-editing and fact-checking.”

The sites’ approach to comments was not standardized, either. More than 40 percent of the sites depended on staff members to approve comments at their discretion, while just over 10 percent did not moderate comments at all. A slightly larger percentage used an automatic system to filter for comments that included offensive words or spam.

Mr. Navasky said he hoped the study would spark conversations about standards for magazines’ Web sites, similar to the standards that the American Society of Magazine Editors establishes for print editions.

“This is something where no one knows what anyone else is doing,” he said. “This is the first attempt to at least get the data out there,” he added, saying he would like the Columbia Journalism Review to hold a conference about the findings.

“The next step is to get everyone in a room together, and see whether we can identify the best practices,” he said.