What a difference a week makes, last Friday there were flash floods and today there is nothing but blue skies as we’re treated to a final encore of summer. With the house renovations this year, I’ve been excited to see the garden come together. Gone are the flower beds and fussy fencing to make way for clean crips white rendered walls and artificial grass; the aim was to make the garden part of the house in the sense that it would be used as much as possible.

Boo had her birthday party in the garden, and I can remember that very evening after the mammoth clean up, I settled down on the newly laid lawn and enjoyed a cold beer… I decided to put off buying garden furniture this summer as I wanted to get a sense of how we use the space and I think a cube set would suit our family life. Rattan Direct offer a great selection of rattan ranges; they’ve also produced a survey to try and find out what parents do to unwind around the home.

For me when the weather is good, it’s all about being in the garden, be it catching up on the phone with friends while I sit out and enjoy a glass of wine or sitting with a cuppa enjoying some quiet time with a good book. Fast forward to colder months and you’ll find me enjoying a hot bath and settling down to a film afterwards. With all the chaos of packing boxes and living in a building site last year, I’m really looking forward to enjoying my home this winter and rediscovering the joy of relaxing in your own home.

This is a collaborative post.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook as part of my job so it’s no surprise that I learnt of the impending #Brandgelina divorce on Tuesday afternoon. It didn’t take long for my social media timelines to be flooded with the Jennifer Anniston GIFs; for what it’s worth I find these infantile and really rather unnecessary, this circus like modern day commentary is akin to digital voyeurism. I also find it rather indicative of our perceived priorities as a society that there were more visible posts about the newly filed for divorce than meaningful conversation about the continuing atrocities in Syria.

But this is not what this post is about. The question I am asking is: since when did there become double standards for online publishing as opposed to print publishing? Do they even have to hold themselves to the same standard? What do we expect as both print and digital consumers of information?

This afternoon Refinery29 UK’s Facebook post popped up on my feed about how the New York Post had put a photo of Jennifer Anniston on the cover laughing and how that was ‘not cool’. Whilst I completely agree, it didn’t take much scrolling back through their timeline to find their roundup of all the best Jennifer Anniston reaction GIFs with the quote, “And that, my friend, is what they call closure”. Do Refinery29 UK see no double standards? Is it ok for online information sources to jump on a pop culture moment but not print? And is it ok that they call said print publication out when they have done seemingly the same thing?

The articles were written by two different contributing writers so one could argue that they represent differing opinions that aren’t necessarily contradicting of each other. However print media has many different writers and yet these very quickly set the tone for that particular publication and is often steered… Hello editing.

In a media landscape that is a far cry from what it was five years ago, never mind twenty, and one that will continue to evolve at lightening pace is this to be expected? Or should online publishing be held to the same standard as print? Yes the way we as a world access and consume information is more instantaneous than ever, yet does that mean that editing is null and void and do we even care if it’s contradictory as long as we get our hands on the latest GIFs.

To be regarded the same as print, surely online publishing must operate within the same defining parameters to deliver content to it’s varying audiences, and must hold themselves to the same high standard as which they judge print.