[rayiner]

If journalism, as a profession, is to add more societal value than random blog posts, I think there needs to be a fundamental reworking of the medium. As it currently stands, the medium itself encourages sloppiness. A modest proposal:

1) Articles should, like legal briefs, support each non-trivial point with a footnote or citation. Primary sources, such as presses releases, documents, and transcripts, should be hyperlinked from the footnotes.

2) Long form articles—unless they appear in a literary magazine—should contain section headings ordered in a logical manner.

3) An adversarial aspect should be introduced into the medium. When a judge receives a legal brief, she doesn’t review the brief in isolation. Typically, there is an opening brief, a response, and a reply. It should be a matter of journalist practice to write response articles to other articles. Aggregators like Google News could then make it easy to see, for example, the Wall Street Journal’s response to a New York Times article.

[bjelkeman-again]

The the first points are very much on point for me. I don’t get why sources aren’t referenced. Is it because they are afraid the reader will leave the news site? An attempt at sandboxing the user?

The second point, particularly US writing/journalism seems to really have a very different writing culture than the European. It seems to want to be a story with a beginning a history etc before getting to the meat of the article. It often feels like the writer is paid by the word rather than interested to getting the point across. European journalism ties to get the hook in early, and the expand on it and draw you into the article more upfront with the meat of it.