First off, it is clear that there are different kinds of new articles, and that the criteria will vary according to these. For instance, the McClatchy piece you pointed to and the gargantuan investigative piece by Paul Salopek that poemless points to below, while both obviously being journalism, are birds of a very different feather. (You also call the New York Times article about Belgium that spawned this discussion a "survey", implying that this type of article has its own particular criteria that other types of articles do not.)
Having said that, there are some standards which hopefully can be expected across the board. Dan Gillmor identified four:
- relevance (or pertinence)
For example, while applying the thoroughness or fairness criterion, a journalist may consider mentioning -- in this McClatchy piece -- Ahmadinejad's comments about gays in Iran. However, when one applies the relevance criterion, mentioning those remarks would be overextending the piece, whose topic is Bush's remarks, and it would be a very subjective (although in the current context of U.S.-Iranian confrontation very understandable) conflation of two speeches that have no a priori relation to one another.
Similarly, by the relevance criterion, the following sentence is worth including in the article (though perhaps not obviously so), because it (may) shed some light on how the targets of Bush's speech immediately reacted to it:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat in the U.N. chamber, often checking his watch, during Bush's remarks. Cuban officials walked out during Bush's 20-minute speech.
Looking at the criticism of the article about Belgium that set off this diary, there were attacks based on the article's violation of thoroughness, fairness, accuracy, and relevance.
The article was attacked based on relevance because it mentions Vlaams Belang at all --
what is more worrying is that the Vlaams Belang is being given credibility in the eyes of the NYT readership.
-- as well as based on fairness because not only does it mention Vlaams Belang but also
puts the Vlaams Belang at the top of their article and all the counterbalancing evidence and nuance at the bottom of the piece with no mention at all of the Cordon Sanitaire.
In a comment in that diary, you call out the article on accuracy:
For one thing, and this is important in a survey like this, Belgium wasn't created as a buffer state to contain France - an enlarged and unified Netherlands including the southern, Austrian parts, was. Well before 1830. Belgium is the result of, in fact, a backlash against this Dutch-speaking and Protestant buffer state on the part of its Catholics (both Flemisch and French).
Belgium is the result of, in fact, a backlash against this Dutch-speaking and Protestant buffer state on the part of its Catholics (both Flemisch and French).
-- which should be easy enough to verify, as well as on thoroughness:
The NYT journalist does not seem to trouble herself with the details of this, which might open up some insights (ie, Catholic identity is increaslingly less relevant, thus perhaps too Belgium's raison d'etre?
In another comment, Jerome offers a "reality-based article" which I have yet to read. It will be interesting to do so while thinking about these criteria of "good journalism". Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Immediate difficulty becomes apparent when doing so: in order to evaluate an article based on these criteria, the reader must already be an expert on the article's topic, or at least have more information about the topic than is covered in the article.
The burden then is on the self-styled expert to articulate specifically what is wrong with the content of the article. That is what a proper criticism of an article involves. Ad hominem criticisms against the author or the publication, etc. -- e.g. "controlled by corporations", "uneducated", "spoiled rich kids", etc. -- might be helpful in their proper place. But on their own they are at best unpersuasive, irrelevant, and tiresome -- in a word, useless -- as criticisms of a news article. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
