Just for the record, guys, a skilled writer or editor knows it is not good enough to give the reader what the reader wants. We know we must use our intelligence and experience to give the reader what she needs to know, and to package it in a compelling way. "Reader knows best" is a pathetic ideology, a waste of our talents, and, most important, a surrender of our responsibilities. It's, you know, cheezy.
In the Cheezburger vs. Gene Weingarten "what's journalism" debate, Mr. Weingarten offered the above epistle that resonated significantly with me. At a time when our industry is acting like a chameleon, changing colors at a whim to match with the SEO gods say the people want, it's a critical message. We have a job, as editors, and just giving people what they want isn't doing that job.
Weingarten followed up his comment with this bit: "Steve Jobs, actually, understood this perfectly. His credo was not to give the user what the user says he wants. It's to show the user what he should want. That's our job."
I agree. The challenge, of course, is to figure out a way to do our job and capture new audiences while holding onto the ones we have. But we ought to do that job -- accept that challenge -- rather than just blow with the winds of analytics and SEO.
The web has become too big and noisy. The design community has helped guide us through some of the slush, and search technology has made leaps filtering and personalizing information for us.
But while algorithms once threatened to replace gatekeepers, online media will see a move back to the future: professional, human filters (the artists formerly known as editors) will play an integral role in the next web after all.
This great piece articulates well the value of an editor, and how there's a void now that will be filled by the editors' comeback. I'm a huge fan of aggregation. However, bot-driven aggregation sucks in even the best applications today. Human aggregators [editors] are exactly what digital media needs. Badly. Now!
First and foremost, the concept of an “editor” at TechCrunch is essentially just a title and nothing more. Generally speaking, neither Mike nor Erick (TC’s two “co-editors”) are overlords that dictate what everyone else covers. With a few exceptions (mainly for newer writers), no one person even reads posts by any other author before they are posted.
Traditional journalists may be appalled to learn this. But this is a big key of why TechCrunch kicks their ass in tech coverage. We’re fast and furious in ways they can’t be, because they’re adhering to the old rules. Are there benefits to those old rules? Sure. But in my opinion, the benefits of the way we work far outweighs the benefits of the way they work.
If you want a more objective take, simply look at the number of tech stories we’ve broken over the years versus the number any old school publication has. Our system works.
I put "future" in quotes because, as MG Siegler lays out in his post above, it's the status quo already.
When I was on the Dow Jones Newswires desk in the late '90s, we were always struggling between the need for speed and the need for quality. But that was before the ubiquitous Internet, where the same balance is attempted to be cast on a much smaller budget and with far fewer editors. Not to mention, we really only had a handful of competitors. Not everybody could get a $10/month Web host and go up against us then.
I'm not sure how I feel about this speed, and the fact that one person exclusively sees a piece of copy before it reaches the masses (and that one person is the same who created the copy). At the same time, I'm not sure there's much that can be done to prevent this shift from precision to speed.
