Socialmedia. Journalism. Wiki. Millenials. Communitymanager. After the storm. Despite the distresses of the day, I have not lost hope that journalism will return to the importance of editing.
Much of my attention and energy over the past three decades have been devoted to upholding the importance of editing: first in developing my own mastery of the craft, in both micro- and macro-editing; in establishing and upholding high standards for my colleagues as a manager, then in hiring and training promising candidates; in spreading the word about the importance of editing to individual publications through workshops and to the industry at large as a president of the American Copy Editors Society. It was, you may imagine, a sad occasion to post yesterday that much of that effort appears to have been futile.
Editing at newspapers and magazines and publishing houses and Internet sites is much diminished, and the argument for quality has succumbed to the brutal realities of the marketplace. Here is what one reader, “Captain Nemo,” had to say about yesterday’s post: A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority « Clay S. Jack Balkin invited me to be on a panel yesterday at Yale’s Information Society Project conference, Journalism & The New Media Ecology, and I used my remarks to observe that one of the things up for grabs in the current news environment is the nature of authority.
In particular, I noted that people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia (in its ‘breaking news’ mode.) I called this tendency algorithmic authority.