Do We Need Editors in New Media?

All we need is love. The two thoughts are related.

In the last couple of days I familiarized myself with the work of Kevin Kelly, who helped launch Wired in 1993 and authored Out of Control in 1995, and Clay Shirky whose new book Here Comes Everybody is due in stores at the end of the month.

My inquiry originated with the question in the title here - do we need editors in new media? To me the obvious answer is yes. Steve Rubel talked digital curators, online.

Yes because we need to design smart ways to save time navigating a page and a site -- as in the case of the new FastCompany.com. How do I know what is important on that site? Everything looks the same with slightly different naming. Not enough for a time-starved audience.

Yes because although we are smarter than I, the demand for some intelligent guidance and selection is worth a lot. I seek the same experience on the site that I seek in the magazine -- expert advice, guidance, thought provoking questions. Followed up by reactions and discussion.

That is why editors (and digital curators) are important.

In a recent post titled The Bottom is Not Enough, Kelly gets into much more detail about the wisdom of crowds and the need for central design. In his book, Out of Control, he delves more into the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world. Some selected maxims:

The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything.

The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network.

A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. Without the interruptions of hellos from the eye, ear, tongue, nose, and finger, the evolving mind huddles in the corner picking its navel.

We don't have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.

One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom.

A company cannot be a learning company without also being a teaching company.

What's love got to do with it? Everything.

"We have always loved one another. We're human," said Shirky at the recent Supernova conference, "It's something we're good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can get a birthday party together. Add coordinating tools, and you can write an operating system."

"In the past, we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love." Here Comes Everybody is about the power of organizing without organizing.

If print journalism falters as publishing methods are transformed through the Web, the power of collecting, editing, and publishing smart versions of the knowledge and information available is only going to be more critical moving forward.

Editing is hard. It requires a commitment to making choices. It's about what you leave out as much as it is about what you put in. With experience we gain the ability to discern what is core to the central story. In recent years we've invented sidebars, corollary tips, and captions to help tell that story more fully without detracting from the central flow. With the Internet, we've added a third dimension -- depth.

Each link is an opportunity to start a new conversation. In blog posts, we have the ability to place many thoughts from different people in one context. Our readers gather in the comments of a post in direct relation to their interest level and need. Many of the messages that come from these media circulate within the social groups that are most interested in them. Then the thoughts resurface evolved and ready to be polished and represented in a new way -- by an editor.

Are you an editor? Why? Why not? Is there a digital curator job in your future?

Comments

[Yvonne DiVita]

I'm new here. Discovered you via good ole Steve Rubel. This is fascinating and thought provoking. I plan on sharing...

I just wonder - how much should we be editing? Is a conversation that has become abusive and heated, on a blog, something that should be left alone, or edited by a higher power (who is the higher power - the owner of the blog?) or should it be left alone to flow as a conversation would... even if there is name-calling and content very close to libel (again, who decides that?)

[Valeria Maltoni]

I appreciate the detailed response, Lynne. I have found the site overwhelming to date and hard to look at in my spare time, which is very little these days. That was also the reason why I left Facebook. Took much going on and not enough time to make sense of it on someone else's layout.

I am now hoping that LinkedIn doesn't merge individual profiles with the endless updates going on there or I will stop using that, too. Navigability and usability - in ease of use - help me a lot in deciding what is important. I suspect many of us are visual creatures. That's why blogs are so friendly in that respect - one or a couple content owners, the sidebar space and one main post.

The two searches I ran so far on the site did not yield what I was looking for. Google did, outside the site.

Editors are fast becoming some of my favorite people. In more than a couple of occasions per day instead of running a general search on a topic I look for what Scoble said, or what Godin wrote, etc. No time to do otherwise and I've come to trust those brands.

There are editors on Twitter, too. Same principle. What some people share and write tends to be more interesting to the type of content and topics I broach. Although I am noticing that a lot of commercial entities have started adding folks on Twitter and spamming them. If that takes over, goodbye Twitter for me in the same way I abandoned my old email account. I want less junk, not more.

[Lynne d Johnson]

Hello Valeria, because your questions is about editors in New Media and you've mentioned the newly upgraded FastCompany.com, I wanted to comment on the topic. FastCompany.com does have editors/digital curators. We have nine home pages -- one a main home page, and eight others that are category channels: Innovation, Technology, Management, Leadership, Careers, Design, Social Responsibility, Work/Life. Each one of those pages are updated every day (and in some cases many times a day) by editorial selection. Though the wisdom of the crowd is at play all over the site, much of what rises to those nine pages is carefully chosen by editorial review. This also includes the Fast Talk (provocative topical questions raised by editors or suggested by members) that you see throughout the site. And the big idea, that members respond to, is also written by editors (with occasional member suggestion).

The basis of all of those pages though are: 2 Fast Company features (either from the magazine or web), staff blogs, expert blogs, 2 fast talk comments, and one article comment. This same set up appears on all 9 of our home pages and each slot of content is designated by a header/label. So if you're only interested in reading features you can click on features, if you're only interested in reading expert blogs, you can click on expert blogs, and so on. There are numerous means of navigating the site -- by channels, by tags, by content types, by advanced search.

But to answer your question, yes I think editors are needed. I'm all for the wisdom of crowds and smart mobs, but as you suggest we need a guide to get through the clutter (to make sense of the noise). On the other hand though, I use Twitter a great deal, and in that case it's a lot about self editing. You use keywords and people to guide you to the information that you want to read. I believe that's they way a lot of search is beginning to work and a lot of websites.