It's probably not naive to be surprised that some newspaper opinion pieces might use standards more appropriate for an Internet blog because there was a time not too long ago that most never would have dreamed of doing so because they held themselves up to a higher journalistic standard. And I don't know it the program is available across the entire country, but my local PBS station carries a program entitled Beat The Press (hosted by Emily Rooney, the daughter of the late Andy Rooney), which features a roundtable discussion scrutinizing (and also celebrating) all manner of news media (newspapers, local TV news, cable news, radio news, etc...), and they often take newspapers to task for their reporters behaving more like bloggers than professional journalists who should be holding themselves to a higher standard. But they also concede that in this day and age newspapers are fighting for their lives because of competition from the Internet, so rightly or wrongly, some newspapers which wouldn't have ever gone that route are having certain reporters begin to lower their standards to operate like bloggers in order to attract readership. It's just the new reality in a media fighting for survival.
And as for the "bomb" word being bandied about, well, like I said a few weeks ago, seeing it is really nothing new for fandom because NoDS has been described as a "bomb" more times than I can even begin to remember - yet it was not a bomb because it made money. But once that impression gets out in the world, it takes on a life of its own regardless of whether it's based on real facts or not. Again, just look at how many times The Tourist continues to be described that way, with the latest example being just the other day. Sadly, the people doing the describing don't really even care if it's true or not because, as madscntst pointed out, all they actually care about is making bold statements in the hope of attracting as many people to their writing as possible.
46 days 11 hours 12 minutes 54 seconds since the Depp/Burton Dark Shadows has been in release(ET)!!