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The Columbia Journalism Review recently published a big study on magazine websites. Both Daily Intel and (gasp!) The Times beat us to the punch on this one, but I think (#onlineeditors making “decisions”) it’s worthy to publish here on The Tag.

[The study found] that there are no generally accepted standards and practices; that each magazine’s Web site is making it up as it goes along; that, as CJR put it in our proposal to the MacArthur foundation (which funded this survey), it is like the Wild West out there.

Yeehah! (This is so meta. For instance, Tumblr doesn’t have a blockquote button; instead I had to go in to the HTML code [#marketableskills #journalist2.0] and use the <blockquote> tag, which shows you that the Tumblr people don’t think their users will be quoting blocks of text very often. UPDATE: Apparently you can easily blockquote in Tumblr. My apologies. However I still know how to do it in HTML. This is still meta because the study discusses how most corrections online are never announced.)

As we suspected,

more than a few respondents reported, as one put it, that “instead of developing stories for print and then republishing them online, we now do the opposite—develop for online, and [at the end of the month] pick the strongest articles to appear in print.”

Copy editing for the web is also rare. 59 percent of those surveyed said that “either there was no copy editing whatsoever online (11 percent), or that copy editing is less rigorous than in the print edition.”

On an even more frightening note, the industry is unsure of what exactly a blog is:

64 percent of respondents said their Web sites featured blogs, although not everybody can agree on exactly what a blog is. One definition: it’s a Web-based location where an author or authors routinely add content with an eye to engaging directly with readers. One editor says if it’s copy-edited, “it wouldn’t be a blog.” (And he adds, “We probably couldn’t afford [copy editing]. But you know, we hire [bloggers] for their skill as journalists so it’s almost like we’re pre-editing them by who we hire. [Blogging is] more high wire than print, where everything gets edited.”)

This won’t be edited (has it been pre-edited?), so I guess we’re cool. We were worried for a second. Not sure why you have copy edit the journalists writing for print.

But hey, even if you are a magazine editor struggling to find the best (read: most profitable) mission for your website, rest assured! The iPad will save us all!