'NY Times' to Bloggers: Opine, But Don't Persuade

If you're looking for an artifact that illustrates the awkward marriage of old and new media values, I can think of no better example than the memo The New York Times just circulated on "News Blogs and Online Columns."

Unintentional hilarity abounds. Apparently standards editor Craig Whitney (whom Gawker identifies as the author) suspects that donning the mantle of blogger somehow automatically inclines an otherwise enlightened Times writer to indulge in "racist, sexist or religious bias," a temptation he feels the need to warn against.

Whitney then prescribes proscribes "any suggestion of nasty, snide, sarcastic or condescending tone," ie. "'snark'" -- the juxtaposition suggesting that an overly arch one-liner is in some way the moral equivalent of racist slur. "If something could easily fit in a satirical Web site for young adults, it probably shouldn't go into the news pages of nytimes.com," he adds. Translation: You are not Maureen Dowd.

But the strangest part of the memo is the passage explaining the difference between "personal tone and voice and unqualified personal opinion." The latter is acceptable in opinion blogs, and in the opinion pages in general, but in news blogs and news-page columns opinions must be backed up with reporting and/or hedged with alternative points of view.

"So a blog or news column has to give readers the arguments and factual information that led to the writer's conclusion -- enough argument and fact on both or all sides of the issue to enable the reader to decide whether to agree or disagree. This is a fundamentally different requirement that does not apply to editorial or Op-Ed columns."

So much to unpack here! Is Whitney saying that news bloggers/columnists are allowed to express points of view as long as they're not overly persuasive about it? And, whether they're required to or not, shouldn't writers in the opinion pages also be encouraged to provide support for their arguments? Isn't that just good writing? (Dowd provides the ideal counterexample.)

Of course, this is not a new conundrum for the Times, which has been struggling for years to find a rational, comprehensible basis for its fussy distinctions about just how much opinion should be allowed where and how best to communicate those distinctions to readers. But there's something especially quaint about trying to enforce those strictures on the Web, where a typical reader has most likely arrived from an inbound link and doesn't know or care what section of the "newspaper" he's looking at, and won't stick around long enough to absorb all the earnest "on the one hand/on the other hand" B-matter.