The future of the editor
A lot of people are constantly discussing whether in a time when everybody can be his or her own publisher, we still need good ol’ editors?
My answer to that question is a big ‘Yes!’. Because never has the need for editing been greater. It’s just a different sort of editing, we now need.
In the good ol’ days an editor was a person who checked the facts of the story, corrected typo’s and perhaps even did some layout. Well, not anymore. Today I see two really important roles for the editor:
First, the editor needs to extend the story and put it into a context. Make sure the correct links are there. Be a customer service agent of sorts, who make sure that an end user really gets the full breadth of the coverage.
But perhaps more importantly, the editor needs to cater to the medias brand profile. The editor needs to be the safekeeper of clear branding and of the media staying within its niche or target demographics.
Why? Because with the ever-increasing explosion of content and media out there, catering to a niche and being the best at it is quite possible the best possible way to secure ongoing relevance and a business justification for what you’re doing, ie a continuing paycheck.
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7 comments
The same story WITH comments:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2008/08/post_95.html
Best, Helle
Same story WITH comments:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2008/08/post_95.html
Best, Helle
Twitter was cramping my style a bit with the 140-character limit, and probably isn’t the channel for real conversation on this subject anyhow, so I actually got out of my virtual comfy chair and shuffled over here
The point i wanted to make with regards to moving the fact-checking from the editor to the creator is basically that the creator simply can’t be trusted with that responsibility.
Leaving the fact-checking to the creator is basically what traditional peer-review is all about. It is theoretically sound (the creator knows he will be held responsible for factual errors by his peers, so he checks them and doesn’t cheat), but in practice, it often fails.
This is because peer review is about acceptability, not validity.
On, say, digg.com, what brings a story to the masses is being popular. Even though there is a peer reputation reward system (which is kind of the point), there is very little fact checking going on. The articles are digged or buried more often based on personal preference or entertainment value than on factual/informational value - simply because the implicit question asked is “Do you like this?”, not “Is this true?”.
The problem of finding the root source of a news story on the internet is a major one as well. A blog post rehashing another blog post about a news story on a user-submitted news site about an abstract of an article in a tech journal may get severely distorted, and very very few of the readers actually get to the root of the story.
I believe that for traditional media houses an important aspect of what they do is the ‘anchoring’ function, their brand lends credibility to the story simply because the brand can’t afford to bring an untrue story.
This is why all media monitor their user-submitted content (comments e.g.) for offensive content, censoring communication that is too divergent to be associated with their brand.
And (finally), that’s why I believe the editor’s role as fact checker is important; Without having correlated the facts, the media may act as anchor for news stories that are distorted or factually wrong, which is bad for rep as well as bad customer service.
Phew, long long comment, that’s what being let out of the 140 letter box does to you, sorry
Oh, and for the record; I agree on the rest of the article wholeheartedly - being very relevant to a very defined group is where it’s at
Hi Johnny,
Thanks for your comments. I really appreciate them.
In regards to embracing user contributions I fully agree with you. Editing is needed to keep some degree of sanity.
What I was shooting for was really the inhouse media processes, where I think that creators meaning journalists, photographers etc should do their own factchecking and leave the editors to spend the bulk of their time doing other stuff as described.
It may be that factchecking on a journalistic story is still needed by the editor, but I just fear that with the current media climate that sort of old fashioned editing of others professional work will be seen as unsupportable in financial terms by the people with the spreadsheets and suits - and that as a consequence editors will disappear totally leaving noone to fact check AND noone to perform the other tasks, I described. And that to me would be shooting one self in the both feet big time.
Oh, I was quite in the citizen journalism mindset, obviously - my bad - even if I think the basic premise still somewhat applies.
Journalists rarely deceive their editors / readers on purpose, but in an online world where the TTM on news has to be more or less in the minutes for them to be relevant at all, they’re very rushed people.
In that light I think your image of the editor as a customer service person is very much relevant - imagine a paid detective-poet who follows stories to the well, verifies sources, finds other angles, background material, critical opinions et cetera, all for my benefit. What a noble call
The challenge in all this is, I think, that the readers might not see the value of that as consumption moves to aggregate contexts such as digg, slashdot et cetera. Where things appear peer reviewed - where the spreadsheet people might want to hire people better at writing sensationalist headlines and bringing in the pageviews instead.
Rule of the mob may be the death of the editor indeed.
I share your sentiment regarding the spreadsheet people. However, it’s ultimately a question about what you believe in.
I don’t believe in an endless race for commodity news. I think it’s one of the biggest misunderstandings today in media. I honestly don’t believe (with one or two exceptions such as a nuclear blast fx) it matters to my mom, whether the news hitting her is 10 seconds old or 10 minutes old. This is a bubble, we in the media have created and that noone has punctured yet.
Further to that, I don’t believe in personal aggregation of content. Yes, there are cool services out there, but will they ever be truly mainstream? I seriously doubt it. Recent surveys suggest that up to 60 % of the Danish adult population is in reality IT illeterate and somehow I don’t see them using Friendfeed, Tumblr et al anytime soon.
But they still need their media. They still need someone to lay it out for them in order to save them from all the fuss and confusion. They need media with an edge. Something that’s relevant and they can identify with.
Creating and curating such media is essentially what I think a great future editor should be doing :-).
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