US media ethics project StinkyJournalism has done some digging into the issue of blogs on newspaper websites and whether these posts fall under the same editing process as other items on the site.

During the recent financial downturn, some US newspapers, including the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor, have stopped publishing print editions altogether, opting for online-only editions. All major US newspapers have a representative internet presence and publish much more content online than they could fit into their print editions. Along with this change, social media as an integrated tool plays a role in the news landscape now more than ever. However, these changes also raise questions about ethics, legal issues and journalistic standards.

Therefore, StinkyJournalism thought it would be worthwhile to learn more about how newspapers manage blogs published on their websites. We looked at 10 major US newspapers and their 591 published blogs. We categorized the blogs based on their content and took notice of the blogs’ authors. Some of the results were unexpected, even surprising.

You can read the full results of the study at this link on the StinkyJournalism site, but some key findings were:

• 404 of 591 (68 per cent) blogs published by newspapers were edited, according to the newspapers themselves;
• Only eight of the 591 blogs – 1 per cent – dealt with traditional news;
• Seven of the 10 newspapers studied said they edit all blogs.