I had dinner last week with President of leading global trade association for business professionals. For nearly two hours, we debated the changing role of editors in today’s digital world and whether in the future, editors will be replaced by user-generated content?
Let me start by saying that years ago, before I started my custom media company, I was a senior executive for a major daily newspaper. Many things troubled me about the newspaper business at that time. One was the dismissive attitude of editors toward this new newspaper start-up called USA Today. Who would ever read this “Mac-lite” newspaper filled with short stories, colorful graphics and reader commentary, and never ending surveys and polls? Surely, it would never last! Yet today, twenty years later, nearly every daily and business newspaper has copied their tactics.
However the most disturbing comment I ever heard at the newspaper was the editor-in-chief ranting on in a meeting that readers didn’t know what they wanted or needed to read, that was the job of the editor, to tell them what they needed to read. It seemed arrogant at the time and today it seems like an absolute indictment of what’s wrong with many newspapers and magazines today. Too much of that attitude is still ingrained in editors today even as a digital tidal wave of user-generated content, opinions and community is sweeping over the world.
The role of editors is changing rapidly and forever, but I’m convinced that editors can still be the heart and soul of any print or digital publication. The difference in the future is that editors must be aggregators of information balancing reader-generated content with expert editorial and providing context and space for both. Reaching out to readers, and more importantly to potential readers, through all available media channels will be a critical skill that every editor will need to master. Listening to readers and participating in online communities will provide insight and content ideas that yesterday’s editors never could have imagined.
I applaud journalism schools like Northwestern and Missouri who have taken bold steps to integrate print, digital and business courses as a mandatory requirement for their degrees in the face of angry traditionalists. The world is changing at incomprehensible speed and the lines of journalism, communication and business are blurring, but editors can and will remain as essential navigators of content in this increasingly digital world.
It seems to me that editors are as critical right now as they have been at any time, but that their role and the scope of their job might have to change in the face of emerging technologies.
I’m not sure I agree that editors need to be aggregators. There are plenty of good tools for that sort of thing. What I see as their critical function is acting as a filter of that information. In essence this is hardly different from the traditional role of an editor and in practice this skill is now more important than ever before.
The internet has opened the flood gates on the amount of information available to readers. It would seem to me that editors are as important as ever, although perhaps the number of editors will decline as online tools are able to replicate cheaply and effectively some of their other traditional duties.