Journalism's Changing Norms of Accountability: A Study of Corrections Policies of Major News Web Sites.

As the landscape of journalism changes, the journalistic paradigm may also be shifting, both for news organizations that are moving content online and for news organizations that have from inception been online-only. Two questions are raised by the digital transition-how print news sources are adapting with the availability of technology and whether journalism is changing with its new medium. To understand whether journalistic norms are shifting, this paper studied the corrections policies of 30 major news Web sites because the ethics that define journalism-the quest for accuracy and credibility-are manifest in these policies. Print publications with corresponding Web sites mostly adhere to the norms of print corrections policies with minor adaptations for the use of technology, while online-only news sources were less likely to have stated policies and seemed less concerned with the rhetoric of accuracy or with transparency, a marked difference from traditional journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]